Q: Three weeks post-migration — should I watch Search Console or Analytics to judge recovery?

Q: Three weeks post-migration — should I watch Search Console or Analytics to judge recovery?

This worries everyone at week three. Both help, but they answer different questions.

Short answer: Search Console tells you if Google is reprocessing correctly; Analytics tells you if humans are arriving.

Long answer:
GSC is your migration cockpit. Watch the Pages report (are old URLs dropping out and new ones indexing?), Crawl Stats (is Google recrawling?), and Performance by page (are rankings re-stabilizing?). This is leading data — it moves first.

Analytics shows the business outcome — sessions, conversions — but it lags and mixes in seasonality, campaigns, and direct traffic, so it's noisier for diagnosing a migration.

At three weeks, fluctuation is normal. Judge health by GSC indexing and crawl trends, not a single day's session count.

Next step: check GSC Pages and Crawl Stats now; give Analytics organic-traffic comparisons a 6–8 week window before drawing conclusions.