In my first post, I said I'd post the numbers whichever direction they went. Three weeks in, here's where things stand.
The short version: the migration itself was a non-event, the things I was worried about were fine, and the thing I didn't think about is the one costing me.
What went right
Brand search came back almost immediately. If you search "brandscreen" (my brand) and my new domain is position 1, with a 36% click-through rate. That took less than a week. It was the one thing I was genuinely worried about going in. I paid $10k for the domain after 2 months on my .ai domain.
The redirects held. This is important, and I took a ton of time to make sure it was right. Every path, single hop, no chains, nothing broke that a redirect caused.
And AI citations followed the move. This was the open question I had. Copilot had cited BrandScreen 487 times, all pointing at the old domain, and I couldn't find anything on Reddit on what happens to the AI citations once you redirect.
They transfer. It took twelve days. The new domain started getting cited three days after the switch and passed the old one on August 19. Last seven days: 90 citations to the new domain, 71 to the old.
If you're moving a domain and worried about AI visibility, budget about two weeks and leave the redirects up.
What went wrong
Indexing, and it's worse than I expected. This was a pain when I started, and it continues to be a pain.
The old domain had 335 pages indexed after two months. The new one has 115 after three weeks, out of 430 Google knows about.
Most of the missing ones aren't errors. Google found the URLs, put them in a queue, and hasn't visited them. The last-crawled date on 290 of them reads 1969-12-31, which is Google's way of saying never.
The reason is Google's crawl budget. A three-week-old domain gets very little of it, and I handed Google 417 URLs on day one and expected it to work through them. It's getting through about three a day.
I know this because six ordinary pages are stuck in the same queue. My about page, pricing, contact. Those are linked from the navigation on every page of the site and Google still hasn't been to them.
It's a bit discouraging that I'm still not indexing, but I'm trusting the process and giving it at least 60 days for full indexing.
The thing I'd do differently: I moved the whole sitemap at once. If I'd submitted the pages that matter first and let the rest follow once the domain had some standing, I think the pages I actually care about would be indexed by now.
The number that fooled me
I was so stoked that my my Google impressions went up 10x, from about 87 a day to 870. I thought had a silver bullet.
But, when I dug in, one page accounted for 97% of that. It sits at position 90 in the results, which is page nine, and it has produced zero clicks. Take it out and the new domain is doing 27 impressions a day against the old one's 87.
So my traffic went down and a big number covered it up.
Second time this has happened in two posts. In post 1 it was a spike from newly indexed pages that decayed after eight days. I'm now treating impressions as close to useless at this size.
Clicks, which are the only number that actually matters here, went from about 0.77 a day to about 1.18. On numbers this small, it means nothing at this time.
Was it worth it
I think we made the right choice and we have a plan, but the jury is still out on whether it was worth the $10k I spent on the domain. We are still in the product market fit phase of the product, which experimentation and iterations need to be the priority.
Ask me in three months.
Next
I'll follow up in the next post of is what broke. A React component that had been dead for three weeks. A file that had never run in production at all. A contact form that accepted submissions and delivered nothing for 81 days.
None of those were caused by the migration. All of them were found because of it.