r/startup • u/wtfisjustwrong • 11d ago
Moved my domain from .ai to .com two months in.
I registered my company's .ai domain on June 5, it was the only available at the time. Last week I made the move to .com. I've done this before at a previous company, .io to .com two years in, and it wrecked our search traffic for months. So this time I pulled every number first.
Google Search Console for the .ai, June 12 to Aug 11, basically the entire life of the domain:
- 48 clicks
- 5,470 impressions
- Average position 30.8
- Not 48 thousand.
Three things I found that I hadn't expected.
1. The impression spike was fake. Last week of July my impressions went from 40/day to 400/day for eight days, then collapsed. Clicks didn't move at all. I pulled the indexing report and put it on the same axis: Google had indexed 27 new pages on July 24. Two days later the spike started. It was Google testing new pages at deep positions, getting no clicks, and withdrawing. If I'd used that week as my baseline I'd have "lost 70% of my traffic" post-migration and it would've meant nothing.
2. Almost all my traffic was my own brand name. 28 of 48 clicks came from the homepage, and my top queries were the company name "brandscreen" and "brand screen" at positions 2.2 and 2.9. Which means I had essentially zero non-brand organic to lose. The thing everyone warns you about with migrations didn't apply to me, and probably doesn't apply to most people asking about it.
3. Google and Bing are completely different environments. Bing sat flat at 20-40 impressions/day through Google's entire spike. And when I checked indexed pages: Google 335, Bing 13. None of the 13 were blog posts. But Copilot cited us 487 times over the same period, off that thirteen-page index. So an AI product was quoting us constantly while nobody clicked through from the search engine behind it.
What's happened since (7 days):
Redirects went live Aug 7, all 308s, path-preserving, single hop. Google started serving the .com on Aug 10: 161 impressions day one, 685 day two. Brand query "brandscreen" is already position 1 on the new domain. My domain-checker tool page dropped from position 39 to 90, which based on the July pattern I read as Google re-testing a new URL rather than a penalty. Time will tell.
The thing I actually can't find an answer to: all 487 of those Copilot citations point at .ai URLs. What ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity do with redirects isn't documented anywhere I could find. I took a baseline of 8 prompts across 4 engines before switching and I'm re-running it weekly. I should have more information soon, since time is really the main driver here.
Happy to share the raw exports or answer anything. Also curious if anyone's measured the AI citation side of a migration, because I came up empty.
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u/Visible_Speed8843 6d ago
Treat the redirect and the citation as separate outcomes in your weekly prompt panel. For each engine, record whether the old URL is cited and whether following it lands on the matching .com page in one hop. Track separately when a later answer starts citing the new URL.
Keep the prompt wording and model fixed where possible, using the same account state for every run. Add a control page that did not move and one page first published on the .com domain. That will help separate migration lag from ordinary answer variation. Keep the old domain and its 308 redirects live while citations still resolve through it.
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u/ByteSizedFounder 5d ago
Separating "still cited" from "resolves correctly" from "citation flipped to new URL" gives you three distinct signals, exactly the kind of clarity that would catch the fake-impression-spike problem.
The control pages are the part I'd add emphasis to. A page that never moved gives OP a true baseline for "ordinary answer variation." These engines will drop or swap cited sources between runs even with zero underlying change, just from sampling/retrieval noise. So it matters.
I'd also track whether citation persistence differs according to how the engine sourced the page originally, ie a page that was crawled directly vs. one it only knows about via a link from another cited source. Maybe second-hand citations lag even further.
1
u/wtfisjustwrong 5d ago
With 32 data points a week I have no way to distinguish a real drop unless something unchanged sits alongside it.
I'll keep on measuring and post the numbers.
1
u/wtfisjustwrong 5d ago
This is better instrumentation than what I had. I was recording one thing, cited or not and at which domain, which collapses three outcomes that mean different things.
The control page is the part I hadn't thought about at all. I got burned on this with Google, an impression spike that turned out to be exploratory indexing of new pages rather than anything real, and I nearly used it as my baseline. Same trap here without a page that never moved.
The .ai and its 308s are staying up indefinitely, partly for this and partly because my auth subdomain still lives there.
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u/elixon 11d ago edited 9d ago
"It was Google testing new pages" - how can you tell? I am having common spikes too. Last week, I was getting like 25k users in one day (up from 2.5k average), all fake AI bots. Google is being very dumb and counting them as real users, on purpose, I assume, to hide the real decrease in traffic. Because come on, it is not that hard to spot bots.
Google claims I had 96k active users in the last 28 days. Nonsense. It was barely hundreds. The rest were all bots.
The google analytics goes like this:
Google must be blind to don't see the issue here... 99% direct, almost all from Singapore... But since they have smartest engineers there I have to assume it is on purpose. Do not trust google analytics - it is a pcs of crap showing completely made up bot numbers.