What should you do with your website after an acquisition, when the company you bought has a site of its own? Leave its site up, take control of its domain and accounts, and put a short note on both sites saying who bought whom. Then decide whether to fold it into your site, keep it as a section of yours, or keep it separate. The business usually settles the brand first. What the acquired company's buyers search for, link to and have printed on their paperwork decides how fast you move and what has to carry over.
What should you do with the website in the first week after an acquisition?
Take control of the accounts. That means the domain registrar, DNS, hosting, the content management system, analytics, Search Console and the Google Business Profile. Write down who holds each login, then move each to an account your company owns. Check the domain first, because it's sometimes registered to a former employee or an old web developer, the problem covered in whose name is on your domain registration. A registrant change can lock the domain against moving to another registrar for 60 days, so if you plan to move registrars, ask the current registrar what order to do it in before changing anything. Controlling the domain and DNS is also what gets you the evidence below. Check what else runs on it before anyone touches DNS: the acquired team's email probably does, and moving DNS without its mail records stops that email arriving.
Don't redirect or take anything down yet. Until you've read the evidence below, you can't know which pages carry work. A redirect added to tidy things up can cut off a page that a regular customer still sends colleagues to.
Say what happened, on both sites. Key accounts and distributors should hear it from their contact first, and the site note goes up on the deal's announcement schedule, not ahead of it. Put it near the top of each homepage: who acquired whom, from what date, and what a customer should expect. Customers tend to ask first whether their contact is staying, whether quotes and orders go to the same place, and whether pricing or lead times change. Answer what you can, and say when you'll answer the rest.
How do the acquired company's buyers find it?
This evidence tests the plan, and most of it sits in Search Console. With the DNS in your hands, verify the domain yourself: a Domain property using Google's DNS record, then URL-prefix properties for the forms its address has taken, such as with and without www. Google starts collecting data when anyone first adds a property, so if the old team or its agency ever added one, up to 16 months of history comes with it. Read it in whichever property existed before.
- Searches for its name. In the Performance report, filter to queries containing the company's name. That's people already looking for it. Judge on clicks: Google lists an impressions logging error from May 13, 2025 to April 27, 2026 that left clicks alone. If those clicks hold steady or carry a large share of the site's total, the name is still doing work.
- Searches for what it does. Drop the name filter and read what's left. Pages found for a specific process, material, part family or industry are the ones whose content has to survive any move in full, because a summary paragraph on your site usually won't be found for the same searches.
- Who links to it. The Links report lists the sites that link to it most.
- Where its address is printed. Quotes, packing slips, labels, spec sheets and manuals in customers' files, distributors' line cards and years of email signatures all keep sending people to the old address.
- Where its quote requests come from. If it recorded each request's source, a year of them shows which pages produce work. If not, ask its sales team which pages customers mention.
Only a property that was never added before starts from today. For that case, use GA4's landing page report if analytics was installed, a backlink tool, the Wayback Machine's copies of many old pages, and the sales team.
Should you fold it in, keep it as a section, or keep it separate?
- Fold it into your site. Its pages move to yours, every old address redirects to its closest new page, and the old name appears in the text. The evidence points here when few people search its name, its products overlap with yours, and one sales team sells both.
- A section of your site. Its own name, marked as part of your company, with its own capability and product pages. If the section lives on your domain, its old addresses still need the same one-to-one redirects. This fits when its name is still searched and linked, it sells a distinct line, and its customers deal with its own people.
- Keep it separate. Its own site, with the ownership stated on both sites and links both ways. This fits when it serves different buyers through different channels, such as its own distributors or reps, and one site would have to hold two unrelated offers.
Folding in too early costs you the pages and specifics that never got a home on your site. Leaving everything as it was costs you more quietly: two sites that disagree about what the combined company can do, and a site of your own that never mentions the capability you just paid for.
If you fold it in, what has to move with it?
- Every page that's found or linked. Each one gets a home on your site with the same specifics it had, and its old address redirects there with a permanent 301, one page to one page, never everything to your homepage. The full procedure is in the website migration checklist.
- Documents and logins. Spec sheets, manuals, safety data sheets, CAD files and certificates are often the addresses distributors link to, so each file needs its own one-to-one redirect too. Distributor or customer portal logins need a working home before the old one closes.
- The name. Keep the acquired company's name in the text of the pages its old addresses land on, in a line like "formerly" or "now part of". A buyer who searched that name and doesn't see it can fairly wonder if they're in the right place.
- The domain. Keep renewing it, with the redirects running, for as long as anything points at it, because a lapsed domain can be registered by anyone.
- Search Console. Moving a whole domain counts as a site move to Google, with its own tool and steps, but only once the old site redirects page to page, not while both sites run or if you keep it separate. Why rankings drop after a redesign walks through the checks, including the Change of Address tool.
- The quote path. Old forms, inboxes and phone numbers have to reach someone who'll answer. Before switching any off, send a test request through each and confirm who receives it.
How long should both sites run side by side?
There's no standard number, and the evidence changes as customers hear the news. Look again a quarter out and read the same things: whether clicks from searches for the old name are falling or holding, and which site the quote requests arrive through. That settles whether a section is enough or a full fold-in is due. If the combined company needs a new site anyway, it's the same job as a B2B website redesign, with a second site's pages and addresses in the inventory.
