We Migrated greeto.me → greeto.studio. Here's the Week-One Data.

On June 29, 2026 we switched our primary domain from greeto.me to greeto.studio with a domain-level 308 redirect on Vercel and a one-line code change. The new domain showed its first Google impressions within about a day, our best-ranking page held position ~3–5 on the new domain within days, and the first five days brought roughly 50 impressions and 3 clicks. Rankings transferred fast; total volume is still ramping. Five days proves nothing — this post is the live log.

This is week one of an experiment we'll keep updating with 30-, 60-, and 90-day data. Everything below is real Google Search Console data from our own migration, published while it's still uncomfortable to share.

Why did we migrate at all?

Brand clarity, not rankings. The entity is Greeto Studio — that's the name in our schema, our copy, and how clients say it out loud. The old domain, greeto.me, was leftover naming from an earlier phase, and it meant the brand name and the domain never quite matched. When Google and AI engines try to consolidate an entity, you want one name showing up everywhere: the site, the schema, the mentions, the domain. .studio closes that loop; .me fought it.

We had no expectation that the TLD swap itself would improve rankings — there's no good evidence a domain change earns you anything. The realistic goal of a domain migration is to keep what you have, and the whole game is minimizing how much you lose in the transition. That framing shaped every decision below.

What exactly did we change?

Surprisingly little, and that was the point. Two changes did all the work:

1. A Vercel domain-level redirect. Both domains stay attached to the same Vercel project. greeto.studio became the primary domain, and greeto.me now returns a 308 permanent redirect to the same path on the new domain — path and query string preserved, single hop. The www variants redirect too. We verified it the only way that counts, with curl: greeto.me/blog → 308 → greeto.studio/blog → 200. One hop, right destination, done. Pointing greeto.studio's DNS at Vercel was a standard DNS cutover — nothing exotic.

2. One line of code. Our site config has a single siteConfig.domain value that everything else derives from. Changing that one line updated every canonical URL, every Open Graph URL, the sitemap, robots.txt, llms.txt, and every schema URL at once. If your URLs are hardcoded in forty places, this is where domain migrations quietly go wrong — a canonical still pointing at the old domain tells Google to ignore your redirect.

We also made sure both Search Console properties were verified before cutover: the old greeto.me URL-prefix property and a new sc-domain:greeto.studio domain property. Without both, you're flying blind on exactly the days you most need data. And greeto.me stays registered indefinitely — the redirect only works as long as we own the domain it redirects from.

Worth saying plainly: this is the easy kind of migration. Same paths, same content, same host — only the hostname changed, so one wildcard redirect covers every URL. A platform move that changes paths too, like WordPress to Next.js, needs a full redirect map built URL by URL — we covered that whole process in the WordPress to Next.js migration guide.

What does a 308 redirect do differently from a 301?

For SEO: nothing meaningful. A 308 and a 301 redirect are both permanent redirects, both pass authority to the new URL, and Google treats them the same way. The technical difference is that a 308 guarantees the HTTP method is preserved (a POST stays a POST), while a 301 historically allowed clients to change it to GET. Vercel's domain-level redirects issue 308s, and that's fine.

What actually matters isn't 301 versus 308 — it's the three properties we verified with curl: the redirect is permanent (not a 302), it's a single hop (no chains eating crawl budget), and it preserves the path and query (every old URL lands on its exact new counterpart, not the homepage). Get those three right and the status code debate is a footnote.

What happened to rankings in week one?

The headline: greeto.studio appeared in Google's index within about a day of cutover, and individual rankings moved to the new domain faster than total volume did.

First, the baseline versus week one, side by side:

Day by day on the new domain: the cutover day itself showed nothing. June 30 brought 4 impressions and our first click. July 1: 26 impressions. July 2: 19 impressions and 2 clicks. July 3, a partial day at time of writing: 1. That's roughly 50 impressions and 3 clicks in five days — about 10 per day, sitting at the bottom of the old domain's 10–25/day range.

The more interesting signal is which rankings carried over, and how fast:

• /glossary/dns-cutover was holding position ~3–5 on the new domain within days, for "dns cutover" queries — our best ranking, transferred essentially intact.
• /guides/nextjs-for-marketing-sites was appearing at position ~19.
• Our AEO playbook post was showing at position ~11.

Meanwhile the old greeto.me property still shows residual impressions. That's expected — Google swaps URLs in its index gradually, not in one pass, so both properties report traffic during the transition and the totals only make sense read together.

The honest read: we are not claiming traffic recovered. The early signal is that key rankings transferred fast — position ~3–5 within days is genuinely encouraging — while total impression volume is still ramping back toward baseline. Whether it gets all the way back is exactly what the 30- and 60-day updates are for.

What we'd do differently

Submit Google's Change of Address tool at cutover time. We haven't run it yet, and it's the one step still open on our list. The redirects do the heavy lifting, but Change of Address is an explicit signal to Google that the move is deliberate and permanent, and it's worth submitting for a clean migration. If you're planning your own move, do it the same day you flip the domain rather than treating it as a later cleanup task.

Chase the highest-value external links at the source. A 308 passes the signal, but a link that points directly at greeto.studio is cleaner than one that bounces through greeto.me forever. Updating the profiles and links you control — and asking for updates on the ones you don't — belongs in week one, not month three.

Neither of these is a crisis. But a migration log that only lists the things that went well isn't a log, it's marketing.

What happens next

We'll update this post at 30, 60, and 90 days. The questions we're watching:

• Does daily impression volume climb back through the old 10–25/day range and past it?
• Do the residual greeto.me impressions drain to zero, and how long does that take?
• Does the aggregate average position re-form near the old 8.2, or land somewhere new?
• Do AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews — start citing greeto.studio URLs, and how quickly do old greeto.me citations follow the redirect?

Five days in, the only defensible claims are: the mechanics worked (verified 308, single hop, canonicals flipped in one line), Google noticed within a day, and the best rankings moved fast. Everything beyond that is a prediction, and we'd rather show you the data than make one.

FAQ

How long does it take Google to index a new domain after a migration?

In our case, about one day to the first impressions on the new domain. That's one data point, not a promise — we're a small site with a clean single-hop 308, matching canonicals, and both Search Console properties verified before cutover. Larger sites, redirect chains, or mismatched canonicals can stretch this to weeks.

Do rankings transfer immediately when you change domains?

Some can move within days: our best page held position ~3–5 on the new domain almost immediately, while two others appeared at roughly their old neighborhoods (~11 and ~19). Total impression volume lagged behind individual rankings — five days in, we're at the bottom of our old daily range. Rankings transferring fast and traffic fully recovering are two different milestones.

Is a 308 redirect as good as a 301 for a domain migration?

Yes. Both are permanent redirects and Google treats them equivalently for passing signals to the new URL. The 308 additionally preserves the HTTP method, which matters for APIs more than for content pages. What you should actually verify is that the redirect is permanent (not a 302), resolves in one hop, and preserves the full path and query string.

Should you keep the old domain after migrating?

Yes, indefinitely. We're keeping greeto.me registered with the redirect in place permanently. Old backlinks, bookmarks, and citations baked into AI training data will point at the old domain for years, and every one of them only keeps working — and keeps passing signal — while you own it. Letting the old domain lapse hands all of that to whoever registers it next.

Do you still need Google's Change of Address tool if redirects are in place?

The redirects do most of the work, and our data shows Google processing the move without it. But the tool is an explicit, unambiguous signal that the migration is intentional, and it's worth submitting for a clean migration — it's the one step we hadn't completed in week one, which is why it leads our "what we'd do differently" list.

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This is a living post: we'll keep updating it as the 30-, 60-, and 90-day Search Console data lands.