Open Search Console before you call anyone. Two free reports answer most of this. The Performance report shows which pages lost clicks, and the page indexing report shows whether Google can even see the new pages. Everything past those two is guessing.
Start with the chart, not the panic
Google Search Central publishes a page called Debugging drops in Google Search traffic. It was last updated December 10, 2025. It names six causes of a traffic drop, and site moves and migrations is only one of them. The others are algorithm updates, technical issues, security issues, spam issues, and plain seasonality.
Keep that last one in view. If your HVAC site went live in April and the calls thinned out, part of that is the heating season ending. A rebuild is easy to blame. It is the thing that just changed.
Search Console Help says the Performance report by default “shows click and impression data for your site in Google Search results for the past three months.” That page carries no update date. Three months is enough to put your launch week next to the weeks before it.
The debugging page tells you which buttons to press: “Choose the Date filter on top of the chart, select the Compare tab, and then Compare last 3 months to previous period or Compare last 3 months year over year.”
One warning from that Performance report Help page. “The newest data can be preliminary, meaning it’s still being collected and might change in the next few hours.” It adds that preliminary data is marked by a dotted line on the graph. Do not read a cliff off the last two days.
Clicks, impressions and position say different things
The chart has four numbers you can switch on: clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position. Switch all four on. They point at different problems.
- Impressions flat, clicks down. Google is still showing your pages about as often. Fewer people are picking them. The new page titles are the first thing to read, and an AI answer sitting above them is the second.
- Impressions down as well. Google is showing your pages less often, or showing fewer of them at all.
- Average position sliding. That is ranking movement, and it is the slowest of the three to read honestly.
A one man shop with 300 clicks a month will see wild looking swings from very little. Ten clicks either way is noise at that size.
Switch the report from Queries to Pages
Under the chart is a row of tabs. Queries is the default. Click Pages.
Now sort by the change between the two periods. You are hunting two shapes.
Old addresses still picking up impressions weeks after launch. That means Google is still holding the old page, and the note pointing at the new one is missing or wrong.
New addresses sitting at zero. That means Google has not taken them yet.
If the loss lands on a handful of pages you can name, you have a fixable list. If it is spread thin across everything, read the waiting section below first. Old addresses that are still pulling impressions are a redirect question, and how long you keep those redirects is answered on its own page.
Then check that Google can index the new pages
Open the page indexing report. It splits your addresses into indexed and not indexed, and for the not indexed ones it prints a reason. That page carries no update date.
The reasons are specific, and Google names more than a dozen of them. “URL marked ‘noindex’”. “URL blocked by robots.txt”. “Server error (5xx)”. “Not found (404)”. “Redirect error”. “Page with redirect”. “Crawled - currently not indexed”. “Discovered - currently not indexed”.
The first two are the ones that bite after a launch. A site is usually built on a staging address with a tag telling Google to stay away. If that tag ships with the live site, the pages are invisible, and nothing else on this list matters.
Google Search Central has a second page, How to move a site, last updated June 17, 2026. It names the common mistakes: blocks left on by noindex or robots.txt, redirects pointing at the wrong place, other crawl errors climbing, not enough server capacity for the extra crawling, and sitemaps still listing the old addresses.
Not every 404 in that report deserves your afternoon. Which ones actually matter is a separate question with a separate answer.
Some of this is just the wait
Google is plain about it. From the debugging page: “If you change the URLs of existing pages on your site, you may experience ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reindexes your site.” And: “As a general rule, a medium-sized website can take a few weeks for Google to notice the change; larger sites can take longer.”
A few weeks. Not a few days.
Here is the limit in that quote. Google never says what medium-sized means on that page. A 20 page plumbing site and a 2,000 page supplier both look small next to what Google crawls. So “a few weeks” is a shape, not a date you can write in the calendar.
The same page also says this: “Small fluctuations in position can happen at any time (including moving back up in position, without you needing to do anything).”
Read that twice before you hire anybody. If your drop is two weeks old, the new pages are indexed, and no old addresses are stuck, the honest answer is watch it and wait. Nobody can tell you the week it comes back, and nobody should promise you that it will. Search Console shows you what changed. It does not show you why.
What to do this week
- Open the Performance report. Compare the last 3 months to the previous period. Write down clicks before and after.
- Switch on all four numbers. Note which one actually moved.
- Click the Pages tab and list the addresses that lost the most.
- Open the page indexing report. Look for “URL marked ‘noindex’” and “URL blocked by robots.txt” before anything else.
- Take your top ten old addresses, paste each into a browser, and confirm each one lands on the right new page in one step.
- Submit the new sitemap if that has not been done.
- Leave it alone for two weeks, then look again.
If the pages are indexed, the old addresses land where they should, and the numbers are still down a month later, the move is not what is holding you back. At that point it is what the new pages say and who points at them, which is a job for ongoing search checks rather than a launch fix.