Best SEO migration services compared, and the AI citations a replatform quietly drops

SEO migration services are bought as a fixed scope project, not a retainer, and the deliverable that decides whether you got value is a redirect map with one row per old URL, signed off before anything is deployed. If a supplier's proposal does not name that artefact, the quote is for supervision rather than for the work. This page covers who sells migrations, what each kind of supplier is good at, how to scope the engagement so you can check the bill, and what to export before launch day that almost nobody exports.

If you are running the migration yourself and want the sequence rather than the supplier, the full before, during and after order of operations is in our SEO migration checklist. This page is the buying decision that sits in front of it.

Four kinds of supplier answer this enquiry, and they are not interchangeable

Supplier	What you actually get	Best when	The risk to price in
Specialist migration consultant	One experienced person who builds the map, writes the acceptance criteria and sits on launch calls. Your developers implement.	The build team is competent and the risk is in the plan, not the hands	No capacity to execute. If your developers slip, the consultant bills for waiting
Technical SEO agency with a migration practice	The map, the crawls, the QA, the post launch monitoring, and often someone to push changes	A large site, a tight date, or a team that needs the work taken off them entirely	Priced on site size, so get the URL count agreed in writing before the quote
Your web build agency, adding SEO to the statement of work	Migration handled inside the build, by the people making the URL decisions	The site is being rebuilt anyway and the architecture is still changeable	They are marking their own homework. Buy an independent pre launch audit even if they do the work
Your existing SEO retainer, scoped up for the project	Migration run by people who already know which pages earn the traffic	You have a retainer and the agency has done migrations on your platform	A migration inside a retainer competes with the retainer's other work. Pay for it separately or it gets the leftover hours

One shape to refuse outright: a package priced per redirect. Redirect count is a function of your old site, not of the skill involved, and pricing on it rewards a supplier for mapping lazily to the homepage. Google treats a mass redirect to an irrelevant page as a soft 404, so volume priced mapping destroys exactly the value you are paying to protect.

The criterion to rank suppliers on, applied to everybody including us

The criterion a buyer can actually check is this: will the supplier commit, in writing and before work starts, to the acceptance tests that define a successful launch, and to re running them after launch? Not an outcome, which nobody can promise. Tests. A migration either passes a defined set of checks or it does not, and a supplier who will write them down is a supplier who has done this before.

On that criterion the specialist consultant and the technical agency usually rank first, the retainer third and the build agency last, for one structural reason: the build agency's tests would be checking its own URL decisions. That is not a judgement about anybody's competence, it is about who is holding the pen.

What belongs in the scope so the invoice is checkable

• The baseline, exported and dated. A full crawl, the Search Console page indexing report, sixteen months of query and page data, twelve months of analytics landing pages, server log URLs, rank positions for tracked terms, and the backlink profile. Search Console keeps a rolling window, so an export taken before launch is the only record you will ever have of what the old site earned.
• The redirect map as a file you keep. One row per old URL, mapped to the closest equivalent rather than the homepage, one hop only, with retirements deliberately marked as 410 or 404 rather than left as accidents.
• Named acceptance criteria. Status codes, titles, canonicals, index directives, structured data and internal links checked template by template against the baseline, as a pass or fail list rather than a report.
• A launch day runbook with an order of operations, including who re checks robots.txt and the index directives on the live domain within minutes of deploy. A stray noindex left in a template is the most expensive single mistake available on launch day, and it is caught by a two minute check.
• Thirty days of post launch monitoring, with a named cadence and a named person, because the first two weeks is when a mapping gap shows up as a 404 in the logs.
• Who holds the old server, and for how long. Redirects only work while something serves them. Twelve months minimum, written down.

Two platform details worth knowing before you accept a quote, because they move the price. Wix publishes a URL redirect manager that bulk imports up to 500 URLs, read on wix.com/seo on 21 October 2026, so a small Wix migration is genuinely a short job and should be priced like one. A large catalogue on an enterprise platform is a different trade entirely, and the governance side of that is covered in prioritising across thousands of pages.

Four questions that sort a migration shortlist in one meeting

• Show me a redirect map you built for somebody else, redacted. The format tells you more than the proposal does. Look for one row per URL and a column explaining the retirements.
• Tell me about a migration where traffic dropped and what the cause turned out to be. Everyone who has done ten has had one. The quality of this answer is the main signal in the meeting.
• What will you need from us, and what happens if we are late? Migrations slip on client side approvals more than on supplier capacity, and a good supplier says so and prices the waiting.
• Who presses deploy, and who is on the call? If the answer is that the developers deploy and the SEO supplier reads the results the next morning, you are buying a report, not a migration.

The export almost nobody takes, and it only matters now

Every item on the baseline list above is a record of how Google saw the old site. There is a second audience that also had a view of it, and it leaves no report in Search Console: the assistants. When somebody asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google's AI Overviews a question in your category, the answer is assembled from specific pages, and the sources it leans on are often not the pages that rank. A guide buried three levels down, a glossary entry, a comparison table nobody optimised. Those are exactly the URLs a replatform retires as thin, because nothing in a standard crawl says they were carrying anything.

The practical step is small and it has to happen before launch rather than after: record which of your URLs are being cited in AI answers for the questions your buyers ask, then check the same questions again thirty days post launch. A redirect that preserved a ranking can still have moved a cited page to a URL the engines have not re read. AI Knows Us reads those five surfaces and reports which pages the answers drew on, and the free scan on your own domain needs no account, which makes a pre launch reading cheap to take. On the published plans, Growth at 299 dollars a month is the cheapest tier that reads all five surfaces. Where a rival is stronger for this particular job: Ahrefs Brand Radar publishes market scale prompt data we do not, quoting "493 million+ search-backed prompts" on ahrefs.com/brand-radar read 21 October 2026, which is a different and useful lens on a category. Two readings on that same page disagree about Claude, with its FAQ and visibility list naming "AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot" and no Claude, while its pricing section says "All platforms (Claude available)" and "Claude consumes 8 checks per update". We are reporting both rather than the tidier one.

Questions buyers ask about paying for an SEO migration

Should a migration be a project or part of a retainer?

A project, with its own scope and its own acceptance tests, even when your existing agency does it. Work folded into a retainer competes with the retainer's other deliverables and tends to get the hours left over.

When should we bring a migration supplier in?

While the URL structure is still an open question. Once the new URLs are built, you are paying somebody to map damage rather than to prevent it, and the architecture is the expensive thing to change afterwards.

Is a redesign plus a URL change at the same time a mistake?

It is harder to diagnose, because when something drops you cannot tell which change caused it. If both have to happen, deploy them in two stages with a few weeks between, and keep the baseline crawl from before the first one.

What should a migration cost?

It is quoted on URL count, template count and whether the supplier implements or advises, so ask for the quote broken into those three. A figure that does not move when you tell them the site has 200,000 URLs rather than 2,000 was not priced on your site.

When can we judge whether the migration worked?

The crawl and status code checks answer on day one. Indexing is read in Search Console's page indexing report, and Google's recrawl guidance says "Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks." After that the honest review point for traffic is six to eight weeks, compared against the dated baseline rather than against the previous month.

Who owns the redirect map afterwards?

You do, and get it as a file rather than as a configuration inside somebody's tool. It is the document you will need at the next replatform, and the next one is usually run by different people.