Domain Migration Case Study: greeto.me to greeto.studio, 90 Days of Search Console Data

On June 29, 2026 we moved our studio site from greeto.me to greeto.studio: one domain-level 308 redirect and one line of config. Ninety days later, this is what Google Search Console shows.

• Brand search held. The query "greeto" got 19 clicks at average position 5.3 in the 90 days before the move. In the 90 days after, it got 18 clicks across both domains, at position 5.5 on the new one.
• The old domain drained fast. greeto.me went from 365 impressions in the last 28 days before the move to 32 in the latest 28 days.
• Indexing caught up, except one new post. 76 of the 77 URLs in our sitemap are indexed on greeto.studio. The one that isn't, a post from September 1, still hasn't been crawled.
• Totals went up, but not because of the move. Impressions went from 1,612 to 4,685 and clicks from 25 to 64. Most of that came from pages we added or rewrote the same week.
• Three things are still open. We haven't filed a Change of Address, www.greeto.me still answers with a temporary 307, and Google hasn't re-read our sitemap.xml since July 9.

The redirect did its job. Our biggest mistake was changing a lot of other things the same evening, which means we can't credit the growth to the move. This is our own domain move, not a client project, and it's the easy kind: same paths, same hosting, new hostname. The post started as a week-one log, and that original data is kept at the bottom.

How we measured

• Before: March 31 to June 28, 2026 (90 days), from the old https://greeto.me/ property.
• After: June 30 to September 27, 2026 (90 days), from the new sc-domain:greeto.studio property plus whatever the old property still recorded.
• Pulled from the Search Console API on October 1, 2026. Search Console days run on Pacific Time. The old property's data starts on February 28, 2026.
• Page-level numbers add up slightly higher than site totals, because Search Console counts them differently.
• Average position is a weak signal for this move, for reasons we explain below. We lean on clicks, the brand query and the pages that existed before.

What we did

The redirect

Both domains stay attached to the same Vercel project. greeto.studio became the primary domain, and greeto.me answers every request with a 308 permanent redirect to the same path on greeto.studio, query string included. Pointing the new domain at Vercel was a standard DNS cutover.

One line of code

Our site config has a single siteConfig.domain value. Every canonical URL, Open Graph URL, sitemap entry, robots.txt line, llms.txt link and schema URL is built from it, so changing that one line moved all of them at once. If your domain is hardcoded in forty places, this is where moves quietly go wrong. A canonical that still points at the old domain tells Google to ignore your redirect.

Before the switch

We verified both Search Console properties first: the old greeto.me URL-prefix property and a new domain property for greeto.studio. Without both you're blind on the days you most need data. greeto.me stays registered, and we plan to keep the redirect for good. Google's site move guide asks for at least a year.

What the redirects do today

On October 1 we tested, with curl, every greeto.me URL that Search Console has recorded for us since February 28. There are 42.

• All 42 return a 308 to the exact same path on greeto.studio. None get dumped on the homepage.
• 28 land on a live page in one hop.
• 7 take extra hops through redirects inside the new site: 4 old service URLs we moved on July 3, 2 trailing-slash versions, and 1 old tool URL that takes 3 hops.
• 7 end in a 404, because we deleted that section (/answers) the same evening.
• http://greeto.me adds one hop, HTTP to HTTPS first. www.greeto.me answers with a 307, which is a temporary redirect. More on that below.

308 or 301?

For SEO there's no difference. Google's redirects documentation treats a 308 and a 301 redirect the same way: both mean the page moved permanently. A 308 also guarantees a POST stays a POST, which matters for APIs, not content pages. Our greeto.me domain redirect in Vercel is set to 308. What you should check is that the redirect is permanent, takes one hop and keeps the path.

What else changed the same week

This is the part we'd do differently. The same evening as the domain switch, we deployed a large content release:

• 13 existing blog posts rewritten, with new titles, and re-dated to June 29
• the 24-page /answers section deleted (7 of those pages had appeared in Google)
• 3 new posts, 3 guides and 23 glossary entries added

The next day we added a Next.js cluster: 2 posts, a guide and 6 glossary entries. On July 3 we moved our 4 service pages from /blog/service-* to /services/*.

Google's site move guide says to "change only one thing at a time." We didn't. The domain move still went through cleanly, but every growth number below mixes the move with the rewrite.

What the data shows at 90 days

Whole site, before and after

Two things explain most of the jump:

• New pages. 47 of the 63 pages seen on greeto.studio had no impressions on greeto.me before. Together they brought 1,999 impressions and 24 clicks.
• Rewritten pages. Our two HubSpot forms posts went from 36 impressions and 0 clicks to 958 impressions and 10 clicks after the June 29 rewrite.

Before the move, every click went to the homepage (23) or the privacy page (2). After it, 27 clicks went to articles, guides and glossary pages. That's real progress, and it came from content, not from the domain.

Average position got worse on paper, from 6.9 to 20.2. Most of that is a change in page mix. The brand query and the homepage moved by half a place or less; two rewritten posts did drop (see below). The old site was seen almost only for its own name. The new one also shows up for dozens of non-brand searches at positions 20 to 70, and those pull the average down. There's a second effect we can't explain yet: from September 1, Search Console recorded far fewer impressions for our pages ranking beyond position 20 (617 in August, 133 in September), while impressions at position 20 or better doubled (913 to 1,844). We don't know if that's a reporting change or real ranking movement, so we don't read much into September's better average.

The 30, 60 and 90-day checkpoints

We promised updates at 30, 60 and 90 days. Here they are in one table.

Clicks dipped in the second month. Homepage clicks went from 11 to 3, and we don't have a clear cause. They came back in month three.

Like for like: what carried over

The cleanest test of a domain move is what happens to searches and pages that existed before it. We barely touched two of them (the homepage kept its title, description and main copy; it gained client logos, work-gallery labels and some performance work), and both held.

Clicks held and positions moved by half a place or less. Impressions dipped 7% on the homepage and 15% on the brand query. "Greeto" is a shared name (greeting cards, apps, a waterfall in Scotland), so not all of that demand is ours, and we can't pin the dip on the move.

Pages we changed while moving tell a messier story:

Two posts lost almost all their visibility. The rewrite, overlap with the new guide, and the move are all possible causes, and we can't separate them. That's the cost of changing everything at once.

The best new page

/glossary/dns-cutover went live the same evening as the switch. From June 30 to September 27 it got 167 impressions and 7 clicks at an average position of 4.4. It's our best non-brand page. In week one we wrote that its ranking "transferred essentially intact." That was wrong: greeto.me never recorded an impression for it. It was a new page, and it ranked fresh on the new domain.

How fast the old domain drained

greeto.me impressions by week: 103 in the switch week, 25 the week after, 4 the week after that, then mostly single digits. Its last click came on August 21. It still logs about one impression a day (32 from September 3 to 30), mostly a few glossary pages and the privacy page.

The new domain passed the old domain's average weekly level from the 90 days before the move (about 125 impressions) in its second week, with 290. About 40% of that week's impressions went to pages that never existed on greeto.me, so it shows how quickly Google switched over, not that the move added traffic. Google's guide says a medium site can take a few weeks or more to switch over. Ours, a small site, did most of it in about three weeks.

Indexing and crawling

URL Inspection on October 1: 76 of 77 sitemap URLs are "Submitted and indexed" on greeto.studio, and 42 of them were crawled on or after September 1. The one not indexed is a post we published on September 1. Google has found it but never crawled it ("Discovered - currently not indexed").

AI answers

Week one asked whether AI engines would cite greeto.studio and drop greeto.me. On October 1 we checked a fixed set of prompts in Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT and Bing Copilot Search. These were single runs from Israel, and AI answers change from run to run, so read them as a direction. Every time an engine cited our site, it used a greeto.studio URL. Perplexity cited our DNS cutover glossary page for "what is a DNS cutover", and ChatGPT cited this post when asked what Greeto is. The only greeto.me link we saw sat on a third-party page.

Search Console's Generative AI features report (beta) shows 226 impressions across 17 greeto.studio pages in the 3 months to September 28. Our DNS cutover page accounts for 20 of them.

What went wrong or lagged

1. We changed too much at once. Covered above. It's the main lesson.
2. We never filed a Change of Address. As of October 1 the greeto.me property shows no move in progress. Google's Change of Address tool forwards signals to the new site and tells Google to prefer it when picking canonical URLs, for 180 days. The move went through without it, but it's a cheap signal we skipped.
3. www.greeto.me is a 307. That's a temporary redirect. Google follows it but doesn't use it as a signal that the new URL should be canonical. Our canonical URLs never used www, so the cost is probably small, and the fix is one setting in Vercel's domain panel.
4. Google hasn't re-read sitemap.xml since July 9. Search Console lists our last submission as July 8, nine days after the switch. Google read it the next day and hasn't since: it read 75 URLs, and we now have 77. It still reads our second sitemap (last on September 25). Older pages are indexed fine, but a post we published on September 1 still hasn't been crawled a month later. We can't say the stale sitemap caused that. A monthly look at "Last read", plus a resubmit whenever we add pages, would have caught the sitemap problem.
5. We deleted pages instead of redirecting them. The /answers pages had 37 impressions in the 90 days before. At least 4 had a close match on the new site we could have redirected to.
6. Our profiles still point at greeto.me. Our LinkedIn company page, Clutch profile, Facebook page and an agency directory listing all link to the old domain (checked October 1). Our week-one log said to fix these in week one. We didn't. The 308 still sends visitors through, but a direct link is cleaner.
7. Two rewritten posts lost their rankings. See the table above. The cause is unproven.

What we'd do differently

• Move the domain on its own. Freeze content for two weeks on either side, then ship the rewrite.
• File the Change of Address the same day, for every host variant (www and non-www).
• Test every host variant with curl, not just the main one. We tested greeto.me and missed that www was a 307.
• Redirect deleted pages to their closest match before the switch, or decide on purpose to let them 404.
• Submit the sitemap in the new property, resubmit it whenever we add pages, and check its "Last read" date every month.
• Update every link we control in week one: social profiles, directories, email signatures.
• Pick the like-for-like measures up front: the brand query and the pages that existed before. Totals and average position mislead as soon as you add pages.

Domain migration checklist

Copy this. It's the list we'd follow for our next domain move.

Before the switch

1. Export every old URL Search Console has recorded (Performance, then Pages, longest date range) plus your sitemap. This is your test list.
2. Verify the old and new Search Console properties with the same Google account.
3. Build every absolute URL (canonical, og:url, sitemap, robots.txt, schema) from one config value.
4. Freeze content and URL changes for two weeks before and after.
5. Map every page you're removing to its closest match, or mark it as an intentional 404.

On the day

6. Set permanent redirects (301 or 308) for the main domain, www and http. Keep the path and query string.
7. Run the test list through curl: permanent status code, one hop, same path, 200 at the end.
8. File a Change of Address in the old property, for www and non-www.
9. Submit the sitemap in the new property.

First two weeks

10. Check the sitemap's "Last read" date. Resubmit if it hasn't moved.
11. Run URL Inspection on your top pages and confirm the new URLs are indexed.
12. Update the links you control: LinkedIn, directories, email signatures, partner pages.

At 30, 60 and 90 days

13. Compare the brand query and pre-existing pages in matching date windows.
14. Watch the old property drain toward zero.
15. Check the sitemap's "Last read" date again, and resubmit after adding pages.
16. Keep the old domain and its redirects for at least a year. We're keeping ours for good.

This was a hostname-only move, so one wildcard redirect covered every URL. A platform move that changes paths too, like WordPress to Next.js, needs a redirect map built URL by URL. Our WordPress to Next.js migration guide covers that process.

Week one, as first reported (July 3)

We're keeping the original week-one numbers as history, condensed, with corrections below.

Why we moved: brand clarity, not rankings. The business is Greeto Studio, and greeto.me never matched the name. We expected no ranking gain from the new domain. The goal was to keep what we had.

Day by day on the new domain: the cutover day 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: 1. Early rankings on the new domain: /glossary/dns-cutover at position ~3 to 5, /guides/nextjs-for-marketing-sites at ~19, and our AEO playbook post at ~11.

Corrections, added October 1:

• "Same paths, same content, same host." Paths and hosting, yes. Content, no: we rewrote 13 posts that evening.
• "Our best ranking, transferred essentially intact." It didn't transfer. /glossary/dns-cutover was a new page that never ranked on greeto.me. The guide was new too (June 30), and the AEO post had no greeto.me impressions in the 90 days before.
• "The www variants redirect too." They do, but with a 307, not a 308.
• The baseline. Re-pulled for February 28 to June 29, the old domain shows 2,123 impressions and 40 clicks, not 44.

FAQ

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

For us: first impressions the day after the switch, most old-domain impressions gone within about three weeks, and 76 of 77 URLs indexed at 90 days. We're a small site with a clean 308 and matching canonicals. Bigger sites, redirect chains or mismatched canonicals take longer.

Do rankings carry over when you change domains?

Ours did where we left pages alone. The brand query "greeto" went from position 5.3 to 5.5 and the homepage from 5.2 to 5.7, with clicks flat. Pages we rewrote the same day moved in both directions, so we can't credit those changes to the move.

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

Yes. Google treats both as permanent. Check that the redirect is permanent, resolves in one hop and keeps the full path and query string. Check the www and http versions too. Ours had a 307 on www.

Should you keep the old domain after migrating?

Yes. Google asks for at least a year of redirects. We're keeping greeto.me for good, because old links, bookmarks and AI citations will point at it for years, and they only keep working while we own it.

Do you need Google's Change of Address tool if the redirects work?

Google followed our redirects without it. But the tool takes a few minutes, tells Google directly to prefer the new site, and lasts 180 days. File it the same day. We didn't, and it's still on our list.

Should you update content during a domain migration?

No. Google's advice is to change one thing at a time. We rewrote 13 posts the same evening, and now we can't tell which gains and losses came from the move.

Planning a migration?

If you're planning a migration, this is the process we run for clients: Next.js migration. If your URLs change too, not just the domain, start with the WordPress to Next.js redirect map.