We kicked off in March, paused through autumn while you needed us to, and restarted in June with a sharper brief: Dunedin and Otago decision-stage searchers rather than broad global terms. The strategy layer you approved on 26 June came from triangulating 116 keywords across four markets and three data sources, landing on 96 approved keywords (57 focus), a cluster strategy, an AI prompt library, the full page plan and on-page spec, and a 50-question FAQ bank. All of it lives in your Master Sheet, now filed in your Drive folder. It became the reference build for the whole method we run, so the thinking that went into your account ran deeper than the brief.
Worth remembering, because it is the line everything is measured against. The July baseline is held on its own tab, frozen exactly as measured on 27 July: an AI-readiness score of 30/100, domain authority of 18 against Elm's 30 and The Opera's 46, your site cited in just 2 of the 49 AI answers we measured while Elm appeared in 9, and search clicks that had slid from 333 in February to 159 by July. The old homepage had no H1 and no structured data at all. The rebuild and the new answer-focused pages were the response to that picture.
Your new website went live on 27 August. A migration is the single riskiest event in search, because if the old addresses do not point cleanly at the new ones, years of Google history can disappear overnight.
Yours came through clean. We tested every mapped redirect ourselves rather than taking a checklist's word for it: 14 of 14 pass, every one a single hop to a live page. The domain settles correctly, genuine missing pages return the right code, and the catch-all for the old tour URLs works. Two weeks of data now sit behind that verdict, not the four days we had at first, and it still holds.
The impression jump is the one to hold onto. Impressions are the leading indicator: Google is putting the new site in front of far more people, and over eleven days that lift has grown, not faded. Clicks follow impressions, with a lag.
This was the real risk, and it is the part most rebuilds get wrong. All eight of the new answer-focused pages shipped with their planned titles, the wildlife hub is set up correctly so the individual species pages carry the weight, and 17 of the 18 pages in the plan are live. The structure we built the strategy around came through the rebuild intact, which is why the new pages could start earning impressions within days.
Two things we are keeping honest with you on. First, searches for your own brand name have not fully settled since the cutover: the clicks coming through on your own name are a little softer than before, and a brand term is the one query you never want to slip on, so we are watching it closely. A live check still returns you at the top on the related tour terms, which is why we read this as transitional rather than a real loss. Second, clicks have risen too since launch, up roughly a third a day, but not as fast as impressions, so more people are seeing you than are clicking through yet. That gap is the normal pattern early in a migration, as new pages gather views before they gather clicks. Neither is a red flag on two weeks of data, and both are exactly what the next update will confirm or correct.
Google now shows an AI answer on 25 of your 55 tracked searches, nearly half. For a tourism business where people research heavily before booking, that is the shift that matters most, and your ChatGPT referrals sitting at 40 for August, the strongest month on record, says the new content is already being read that way.
The biggest prizes are now clear. Some of the highest-volume searches in your whole set are the species terms, yellow eyed penguin and hoiho chief among them, and you sit outside the top slots on them today. The new species pages that just started pulling hundreds of impressions each are exactly the vehicles to climb them, and that is where the blog programme, the content half of the plan, aims next. That half has not started yet, and it is the next thing to move.