Why switch from Terakeet
Enterprise owned-asset programmes are multi-year strategies, and judging one at month nine is unfair to the model. This guide is for teams that have concluded the horizon no longer matches the business, or that need measurable movement inside a quarter.
Arise GEO vs Terakeet
Side-by-side table on scope, model, pricing shape and guarantees — including where Terakeet is the better buy. Read the comparison →
If the owned-asset strategy is mid-build and the properties are gaining authority on schedule, abandoning it wastes the compounding you have already paid for. Reassess at the natural contract boundary rather than mid-cycle.
Signals it is time to move
- →The board wants quarterly movement and the programme is scoped in years.
- →Owned media properties are performing but the core commercial site is not.
- →Budget is being reallocated and the enterprise commitment no longer fits.
- →AI-answer visibility is unmeasured despite significant organic investment.
The migration, step by step
Roughly six weeks end to end. Steps run in order; the change freeze overlaps the handover deliberately.
- Step 01You / legal · Day 1
Read the exit clause before you say anything
Pull the signed agreement and find three things: notice period, auto-renew date, and the IP/work-product clause. Most agency contracts renew silently 30 days out and treat deliverables as licensed rather than owned. Diarise the notice deadline before you open any conversation — the leverage disappears the day the renewal trips.
- Step 02You / us · Day 1–3
Snapshot the baseline while access is still friendly
Export 16 months of Search Console (queries, pages, countries, devices), GA4 landing-page revenue, current rank-tracking positions, and a full crawl of the live site. This is the before picture that decides whether the switch worked. Do it now — access to shared dashboards and third-party seats tends to evaporate on the termination email.
- Step 03You · Day 2–5
Inventory every asset and login they hold
List Search Console and GA4 property owners, Tag Manager containers, CMS and staging logins, DNS and CDN access, rank tracker seats, link-building accounts, content drafts, schema snippets, redirect maps, and any scripts injected via GTM. Anything owned by their email address is a hostage. Reassign ownership to a company account, not a person.
- Step 04You + legal · Week 1–2
Confirm ownership of every owned-asset property
Owned-asset programmes create domains, sites and social profiles. Check the registrar account, DNS control, hosting, CMS licences and analytics ownership for each. Anything registered under a vendor account needs transferring before notice, and registrar transfers carry a 60-day lock after any recent change — start early.
- Step 05Us · Week 1–2
Run an independent audit in parallel — before you terminate
A diagnosis performed while the incumbent is still working is worth more than one performed after. You get an uncontaminated read on what has actually been shipped versus reported, and if the audit says the programme is sound, you have saved yourself a switch. We scope this in 24 hours and it stands alone as a deliverable.
- Step 06You + both vendors · Week 2–6
Freeze structural changes during the handover window
No template changes, no bulk redirects, no canonical edits, no robots.txt or noindex changes, and no theme upgrades for the 30 days spanning the transition. Overlapping change sets are the single most common cause of a post-switch traffic drop, and they make attribution impossible for both sides.
- Step 07You · Week 3–4
Take the handover in writing, not on a call
Request the current roadmap, unshipped recommendations, the redirect map, every custom schema template, link placements and their contacts, content calendar, and the reason each open item is still open. Ask for it as files in a shared drive. A 45-minute goodbye call transfers almost nothing that survives the week.
- Step 08Us + you · Week 4–6
Rebaseline and start the 90-day plan
We re-run the crawl, reconcile it against index coverage, re-probe your AI citation set across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, then agree the metrics the engagement is judged on. Those agreed metrics are what the 180-day money-back guarantee is written against — nothing gets measured against a moving target.
What to keep, not bin
Risks and how we contain them
| Risk | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| Traffic dips in the first 30 days and everyone blames the switch | Freeze structural changes across the handover window and keep a dated change log. A dip during a freeze is seasonality or an algorithm update, not the migration — and the log is what proves it. |
| Losing link placements or content the outgoing team controlled | Request the placement list with publisher contacts and confirm nothing sits on domains the agency owns. Guest posts on an agency's own network can be removed on exit; know which of your links are rented before you leave. |
| Analytics history breaks and the before/after becomes unarguable | Transfer property ownership to a company-controlled account rather than deleting and recreating, and export raw Search Console data first. Recreated properties start their 16-month history from zero. |
| Owned properties go dark and their equity is lost | Transfer domains and hosting first, then decide whether to maintain, consolidate or redirect each property into the core site. |
Frequently asked
What do I do with the owned media properties?+
Audit each on its own merits. Properties with real authority and traffic are worth maintaining or, in some cases, consolidating into the core domain with careful redirects. Dormant ones are a maintenance liability. Do not redirect anything until the crawl and link profile of each has been reviewed.
Can you handle a site with millions of URLs?+
Yes. Catalogue-scale crawl, log-file analysis and index reconciliation are core work for us. What we do not replicate is the brand, PR and owned-media breadth of an enterprise programme — that is a different operating model, and we will say so up front.
How fast can an enterprise site see results?+
Template-level technical fixes reach index at scale within four to eight weeks of deployment, and on large catalogues that is usually the biggest single movement. Authority-driven head-term gains still take quarters regardless of vendor.
