GEO courseModule 3 of 10: Can AI Reach You?Lesson 3.5
Redesigns and Changing Website Provider
A relaunch, a new domain or a move to different property software rebuilds pages that search engines and AI tools already know. Done carelessly, the new site loses what the old one had, and nobody notices because it still looks fine to people.
Why it matters
Relaunches are when most accidental blocks happen: a test site's "keep out" sign goes live, and old pages vanish with no forwarding address.
The evidence
Evidence: Common sense
General SEO practice. We found no study of relaunches and AI answers specifically.
Do this first
Before any relaunch, save a list of every current page address and run the light baseline from lesson 2.3.
01What it is
Your shop moves to a new street. If nobody tells the post office or the guidebook, customers still go to the old address and find an empty plot.
02Why it matters
To the people searching
People follow old links from emails, portals and AI answers. If those land on error pages, buyers think the property's gone and sellers think you're careless.
buyers
Hit error pages when old listing links lead nowhere.
tenants
Lose saved searches and links to rentals.
sellers
Lose the fees and valuation pages they read before calling.
landlords
Lose the landlord guides they bookmarked.
To Google, Bing and AI
Evidence: Common senseGoogle and Bing have to re-crawl the new pages, and redirects tell them the old and new pages are the same. Google's AI features rely on normal Search, and Copilot on Bing, so anything that breaks indexing breaks AI visibility too. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity use their own crawlers and may keep requesting old addresses for a while.
An agent example
A two-branch agency relaunches over a weekend. The developer's staging file, which told every crawler to keep out, goes live, and the old fees page is renamed with no redirect. Two months later the branch is missing from AI answers. The agency removes the block, adds the redirects, and writes a go-live checklist for next time.
03Your turn
Check yours, then fix it
- 1Open yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt and look for "Disallow: /" under a star.
- 2View page source on the homepage, fees page and a listing, and search for noindex.
- 3Check the key prices and fees appear in the source (lesson 3.3).
- 4Check your CDN or firewall settings didn't change with the new host (lesson 3.1).
- 1Take 20 old page addresses from your saved list, or from Search Console's Performance report, or the Wayback Machine.
- 2Paste them into httpstatus.io.
- 3A 301 to the matching new page is right. A 404, or everything sent to the homepage, is a problem.
Here are my old page addresses and my new ones. Match each old address to the best new page, and list any old address with no good match.
- 1Crawl the site and save every address. Map each old address to its new one.
- 2Run and save the light baseline (lesson 2.3) and export your Search Console data.
- 3Save your robots.txt and structured data.
- 1Keep the test site behind a password, not just a noindex.
- 2Build a one-to-one 301 redirect from every old page to its true match. Use a 404 only where nothing replaces it.
- 1Re-check crawler access and indexing in Search Console and Bing.
- 2Re-run the baseline prompts at about four and eight weeks.
- 3Update your Business Profile, review links, portal profiles and directories with any new addresses.
- 1Will every old address get a one-to-one 301?
- 2Who removes the test site's noindex and robots.txt block at go-live?
- 3Will key facts be in the page code?
- 4Which crawlers will the firewall allow?
- 5Will we own the domain, hosting and Search Console?
Then: Make sure the agency owns the domain, hosting and Search Console before you change provider. Moving is much harder if someone else holds the keys.
04Keep it up
Only when you relaunch, change domain, or change website or property software provider.
That's lesson 3.5
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