The six-point preservation checklist: migrate to AEO-ready without losing your rankings

Every professional firm we work with asks the same question in the first Discovery call: if we rebuild, will we lose our Google rankings? The honest answer is that a bad migration will cost you 15–40% of organic traffic for a full quarter. A properly scoped migration — run against the checklist below — typically holds steady or improves rankings within 30 days, because the new site closes AEO and GEO gaps the old site never addressed.

This is the checklist Aday Interactive, Inc. runs on every migration. It applies whether the firm is moving from WordPress to modern PHP, WordPress to Next.js, or an older PHP/HTML build to any modern stack. It is agnostic to the destination platform because AI-search performance is driven by the JSON-LD graph and entity clarity of the emitted HTML, not by the framework rendering it.

1. Full URL inventory before the crawl

The first mistake most migrations make is trusting the site nav as the URL inventory. It is not. A five-year-old law firm site typically has 60–120 URLs that no longer appear in the nav but still earn ranking equity from external backlinks, historical Google Search Console impressions, or citations in bar-directory listings.

We pull three sources: (1) a full crawl of the live site starting from the homepage with `--follow-external=false`; (2) the Google Search Console URL history for the last 24 months, filtered to URLs with at least one impression; (3) the Ahrefs or SEMrush inbound-link inventory, filtered to URLs with at least one dofollow inbound link. The union of those three sources is the URL inventory. Every URL in that inventory must have a mapped 301 destination on the new stack.

2. The 301 map is scoped by URL role, not by URL shape

A common failure mode is a lazy 301 map that sends every legacy URL to the homepage. This is worse than no redirect at all — Google reads it as a soft 404 and drops the URL from the index within two weeks.

Each legacy URL gets a mapped destination based on its role:

• Attorney bio URLs map to the equivalent attorney bio on the new stack — same firstname-lastname slug, same practice-area cross-references.
• Practice-area URLs map to the equivalent service-line page — not to the general "services" index.
• Blog post URLs map to the equivalent blog post on the new stack — keeping the slug, updating the URL prefix if it changes (e.g. `/blog/2023/03/my-post` → `/blog/my-post`).
• Case-result URLs map to the equivalent case study — or if the case is no longer promoted, to the practice-area page for that case type.
• Location-page URLs map to the equivalent location page — not to the homepage.

One of the fastest wins we ship post-migration is when the old site had a dozen "attorney1", "attorney2", "attorney3" URLs from a plugin-driven bio wall and the new site emits proper `/team/firstname-lastname` structure with Attorney JSON-LD schema. Same content, better citation surface.

3. Schema parity check — every type, every URL depth

Before we cut the old site down, we inventory every JSON-LD block it emits. Organization, LocalBusiness, Person, Attorney, Physician, RealEstateAgent, FAQPage, Service, Article, BlogPosting. Which pages carry which types. What `@id`s they use. Which `sameAs` links resolve where.

The new site must emit the same schema types at the same URL depth, with entity `@id`s that resolve to the same firm entity graph. If the old site had `Attorney` schema on each partner bio with `sameAs` pointing to Avvo and the Florida Bar directory, the new site emits Attorney schema on each partner bio with `sameAs` pointing to Avvo and the Florida Bar directory. Continuity is the point.

The upgrade opportunity: pages the old site had no schema on. Most WordPress builds emit Organization and BreadcrumbList and nothing else. Adding FAQPage, Service, LegalService, MedicalBusiness, RealEstateAgent, and Person schemas to the appropriate pages is the AEO/GEO layer that moves AI citation performance — and it happens in the migration, not as a follow-up.

4. Entity clarity across the five citation surfaces

Five surfaces on every professional-firm page carry the firm entity: the `