A clean migration scored worse before it scored better
When we cut Custom Crafted Homes over to its new website, the first technical audit came back lower than the site we had just replaced. That was the plan.
Custom Crafted Homes is a second-generation custom home builder in Dennis, Massachusetts, working across Cape Cod. They came to us on an inherited template site - the kind a national website vendor stamps out by the thousand. On paper it looked healthy. Semrush gave that old site a 93 Site Health score.
The problem was what the 93 was sitting on. The template site carried more than ninety near-duplicate "doorway" pages - thin location pages built to chase search rankings, each with duplicate meta data and a single inbound link. The markup was valid. The structure was rot. That combination - clean code propping up pages that should not exist - is exactly what Google's helpful-content systems and AI answer engines quietly discount.
A health score measures whether the markup is clean. It does not measure whether the pages deserve to exist.
The honest dip
We rebuilt the site from the ground up: real service pages, real Cape Cod location pages, a clean architecture with no doorway tier. Then we flipped the domain to the new build. The first Semrush crawl on launch day read 85 - eight points below the template site we had retired.
That is normal, and we expected it. A fresh migration carries a launch-day backlog that has nothing to do with the quality of the work:
- Images that did not transfer cleanly from the old environment to the new one.
- Internal links still pointing at old URLs while the new structure settles.
- A handful of 4xx errors in the window before every redirect is mapped and verified.
- A sitemap that needs a flush or two after the new permalinks go live.
None of those are design flaws. They are crawl-error deductions, and they clear with a sweep. The discipline is not panicking at the day-one number. A migration's launch score is a to-do list, not a verdict.
The sweep
Over the next several days we worked the list: restored the images that did not carry over, fixed the broken internal links, settled and verified the redirect map, and re-validated the sitemap. Within a week the score climbed to 93 - back to where the old site read, and into the top tier of Semrush's benchmark.
But this 93 is not the old 93. The old number was carried by ninety-plus doorway pages. The new number sits on a focused set of genuine service and location pages - each one a real page a person, or a machine, can actually read and cite. Same score. Opposite meaning.
Why the score was never the point
The headline result of this migration is not "93." It is that every page on the new site is a real page: a crawlable service page, a named Cape Cod town, a clear statement of who the work is for and where it happens.
That is the proof architecture AI search actually runs on. We wrote recently about why AI search needs local proof rather than marketing claims, and Custom Crafted is that argument in practice. We did not add doorway pages to look bigger to a crawler. We removed them and replaced them with pages worth indexing - the kind ChatGPT, Google, and Gemini can use to justify a recommendation.
You can see the rebuilt site at customcraftedcc.com. The number to watch from here is not Site Health - it held the line at 93. It is what those real pages do over the next ninety days in the map pack and in AI answers, which is exactly what our Rank Scoreboard tracks month over month.
If your website looks fine but you suspect the structure underneath is templated filler, that gap is precisely what we surface first. Get the Authority Assessment to see what the machines can actually read on your site. And if you want the phone answered while you fix the search layer, call Iris at (617) 812-4881 and hear the AI voice agent live.
- Kyle Tysvaer, Founder, Insightful Eye Marketing