The problem this solves
The redirect map is the least glamorous artifact in a site migration and the one that determines whether years of accumulated search equity survive the move. Every old URL that dies without a redirect takes its rankings, its backlinks, and its bookmarked visitors with it. Teams know this, and the map still gets built in the migration's final week, by whoever is least busy, from a URL list nobody is sure is complete.
Completeness is the first trap: the CMS export misses the campaign pages, the old blog's pagination, the PDFs someone uploaded in 2019, and every URL that exists only because something links to it. The second trap is mapping quality under deadline, when one-to-one intent degrades into everything-to-homepage, which search engines treat as a soft deletion of the equity the redirect was meant to preserve. Both traps are functions of doing careful inventory work at the moment of least available care.
A migration map worth trusting starts from a real crawl rather than an export, proposes a genuine one-to-one target for every URL, is honest about the pages that deserve consolidation or retirement instead of forcing a mapping, and lands in a format the whole migration team can review, amend, and sign off. That is a spreadsheet with evidence, produced before the deadline crush rather than during it.
How the mission runs
- Crawl the complete old-site inventory. Site Audit crawls oldsite.com exhaustively: every reachable page, asset, and path, including the pagination, parameters, and forgotten sections that CMS exports miss. The inventory records each URL's role and internal linking, because that context is what makes good target proposals possible.
- Propose one-to-one targets. Each old URL is matched to its best equivalent on newsite.com by content correspondence: the page that serves the same intent, at the same specificity. One-to-one is the standard throughout, since blanket redirects to the homepage or a section root quietly discard the equity the map exists to preserve.
- Flag consolidation candidates. Pages whose content overlaps heavily, or whose role the new site intentionally retires, are flagged for consolidation rather than force-mapped: several old URLs proposed into one stronger target, with the reasoning stated. The migration becomes a chance to fix sprawl instead of faithfully reproducing it.
- Mark the genuinely unmappable. URLs with no reasonable new-site equivalent are listed with a recommended disposition instead of a forced target. An honest gone-page decision, made deliberately, beats a misleading redirect, and having these cases surfaced explicitly is what lets the team make that call page by page.
- Deliver the map in Google Sheets. The full map lands in Google Sheets: old URL, proposed target, mapping confidence, consolidation flags, and the unmappable list, filterable and ready for row-by-row review. Built as the sign-off document, it goes from spreadsheet to redirect configuration once the team has approved it.
The prompt
This is the exact objective the agent receives. Swap the obvious placeholders for your own domain, segment or channel and run it as-is from the console, Slack, or the API.
What comes back
A Google Sheets workbook holding the complete migration map: every crawled old URL with a proposed one-to-one target and a confidence level, consolidation candidates grouped with their reasoning, and the genuinely unmappable pages listed with recommended dispositions. The inventory comes from a real crawl rather than an export, so the map covers what actually exists, and the sheet is structured for the row-by-row review a migration deserves before anything goes live.
Make it yours
- Prioritize the review by adding traffic and backlink weight per old URL, so human attention goes first to the rows where a mapping mistake would cost the most.
- Run a post-launch verification pass: re-crawl the old inventory after cutover to confirm every mapped URL actually redirects where the sheet says it should.
- Use the consolidation flags as a content-pruning plan in their own right, turning the migration into the cleanup the old site never scheduled.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know the inventory is complete?
It comes from an exhaustive crawl of the live old site rather than a CMS export, which is what catches pagination, parameter variants, uploaded files, and orphaned-but-linked pages. The sheet includes the crawl scope, so anything deliberately excluded is visible as a decision rather than a gap.
Are the proposed targets final?
They are proposals with stated confidence, built for review. High-confidence rows can be approved in bulk; lower-confidence rows and consolidation groups are exactly where human judgment should spend its time. The map becomes final when your team signs off, and only then does it become configuration.
When in the migration should this run?
As soon as the new site's structure is stable enough to map against, which is usually weeks before cutover. Early mapping leaves time for the row-by-row review and for the new site to add pages the map reveals as missing, and a re-run near cutover catches anything that changed in between.