Site Migration Checklist: Protecting the Pages AI Engines Already Cite

Migration plans usually protect organic search rankings, and rightly so. They rarely protect AI citations, because most teams do not know which pages have them. That gap is how a redesign quietly deletes the pages ChatGPT or Perplexity relied on, and nobody connects the later drop to the launch.

This checklist adds the AI layer to a standard migration.

Before: find the pages worth protecting

You cannot protect what you have not listed. Build an inventory of pages that earn AI citations.

Export cited URLs from your tracking. Promptwatch's citation analytics report page-level citations, and Citation Trends shows for each page when it was first cited, its peak rate and decay half-life.
Rank them by citation frequency and by commercial value.
Add pages that drive AI-referred visits and conversions, from visitor analytics.
Add pages that bots fetch heavily, from crawler logs, even if citations are low today.

Mark the top 50 as protected. Those get special handling in every later step.

Before: record a baseline

Capture the numbers you will compare against after launch:

Visibility Score and Share of Voice for the main prompt panel.
Citation rate by protected page.
Crawler fetches by agent, for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot.
AI-referred visits and conversions.
Search clicks and impressions from Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster data.

Write the date on it. Without a dated baseline, any later disagreement about whether the migration hurt becomes opinion.

During planning: decisions that affect AI

Keep URLs where you can. Every URL change breaks a path an engine already knows. Where changes are unavoidable, map old to new one-to-one with permanent redirects. Avoid mapping many old pages to a single new page, and avoid redirecting everything to the home page.

Keep the content that was cited. A page cited for an answer is cited for its content. If the redesign removes the table, the definitions or the step list the answer drew from, the citation may go with it. Treat protected pages as content freezes, and change layout without changing substance.

Check rendering. A new front end can move content into client-side scripts. If the main text is no longer in the HTML, bots may not see it. Test protected pages with scripts disabled.

Review robots and CDN rules. New hosting often comes with new defaults, including bot challenges. Confirm that the AI agents you want are allowed, and decide each agent separately.

At launch: staging checks

Before cutting over, on staging:

Fetch every protected URL and confirm a clean 200 or a single clean redirect.
Verify titles, headings and primary content match the old versions.
Confirm canonical tags point to the right final URLs.
Check that sitemaps list the new URLs and exclude the old ones.
Check internal links point to final URLs and not through redirects.

A site audit helps here. Promptwatch's weekly Site Health audit has 21 checks and shows what changed since the last run, which is close to what you want during a migration. The import tools can load your sitemap and Search Console URLs so the protected list is the audit scope.

Right after launch: the first 72 hours

Watch the bots. Connect crawler logs ahead of the cutover so you have the old environment's baseline and the new one's behavior on the same chart. Promptwatch supports Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, Akamai, Google Cloud CDN, custom HTTP and the WordPress plugin as log sources, and the logs are IP-verified, so spoofed user agents do not pollute the picture.

What to look for:

Spikes in 404s or 5xx for protected URLs.
A drop in fetches from any one agent. That usually points to a blocking rule.
Redirect chains showing up as repeated hits.
Bots fetching old URLs that you thought were gone.

Fix errors in hours, not days. Agent Analytics reports error tracking with failure explanations, which saves detective work.

The next 4 to 8 weeks

Citations do not recover or fall instantly. Engines recrawl and re-weigh on their own schedule. Keep the same prompt panel, and compare against the baseline weekly. Expect some movement. Look for sustained decline on protected pages, not single-day noise.

If a protected page loses citations, work through the usual causes in order: access, content changes, redirect handling, then competition. The Page Tracker lets you follow a specific URL, and a competitor's, to see who took the slot.

What to avoid

Launching on a Friday, with nobody watching logs over the weekend.
Changing the prompt panel at the same time. It destroys comparability.
Shipping redesign and content rewrites together. Separate them so you can attribute effects.
Treating the migration as done at launch. The first month is part of the project.

Plan notes

Crawler logs are included from the Professional plan ($245 a month) and on every agency plan. Business ($579) raises the log allowance to 100M. If a migration is imminent and you are on Essential, consider whether a monthly Professional plan for the migration window is worth it, as the 7-day trial covers monthly billing only. Agencies handling many migrations get crawler logs on every plan.

The recommendation

Treat AI citations as an asset with an inventory. List the protected pages, record a dated baseline, keep their URLs and substance stable, and watch bot logs from the day of launch. Promptwatch provides the inventory (citation analytics and Citation Trends), the audit (Site Health) and the bot-side view (Agent Analytics) in one place. Connect it before the migration, not after. Start at promptwatch.com.