Keep the rankings, the backlinks and the AI citations.
On Medium, Substack or a platform subdomain, every link you earn builds their domain authority — not yours.
Zero-click searches rose from 56% to 69% after AI Overviews launched. When an AI cites a Substack post, the credit goes to Substack.
Salesforce roughly doubled organic traffic moving to a subdirectory. Monster.co.uk gained 116%. The reverse move cost 47%.
Export every post and inventory every URL, title and backlink in one sheet. You can't preserve what you never measured.
Republish each post to yourdomain.com/blog. Clean slugs, matching metadata, canonicals pointing at the new URL.
301 every old URL to its closest new match. Never blanket-redirect to the homepage — Google reads that as a soft 404.
Submit a fresh sitemap, add the new property in Search Console, and check nothing in robots.txt blocks /blog/.
A short dip during recrawl is normal. Keep the old redirects live for at least a year so external links catch up.
Every step, the redirect patterns and the mistakes that tank traffic.