Q: What do I do with my sitemaps during a migration?

Q: What do I do with my sitemaps during a migration?

This one's underrated — sitemaps are how you tell Google to recrawl fast. Use them deliberately.

Short answer: ship a new sitemap of new URLs, and briefly keep one of old URLs to speed up redirect discovery.

Long answer:
— Generate a fresh sitemap containing only the new, final, 200-status URLs. No redirects, no 404s inside it.
— Submit it in the new GSC property right after launch.
— Optional but powerful: temporarily submit a sitemap of the OLD URLs too. Google crawls them, hits the 301s, and discovers the new ones faster.
— After 4 to 6 weeks, once old URLs are deindexed, remove that old sitemap.
— Update the sitemap reference in robots.txt to the new file.

Next step: check GSC sitemap report weekly — 'discovered' rising and 'errors' near zero means it's working.