A huge, interesting and complex e-commerce migration resulted in an initial net-loss. The change from subdomain to directory, likely to be driven by high-level changes in the company, was complex and Google took the usual three months to rediscover and rank the new directory. As of 18th November 2025 the directory had fully recovered.
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22 August 2025 – Subdomain to directory migration starts
Asda, a winner in our recent Retail Grocery analysis, is one of the top supermarkets in the UK and was the 62nd biggest domain by Google search visibility, its highest position in over 7 years. One week after a migration from sub-domain to sub-directory, it was 12% down on visibility and had given up over 20 VI points to competitors.
This is a huge, complex and critical e-commerce operation and is probably the result of a change in IT systems. In these cases there’s often little chance to execute the perfect SEO migration. In this case it’s a complex one for Google to understand.
The migration removed the previous structure which included aisles, categories, dept, product and shelf architecture. The new structure is cleaner and includes more readable URLs. Over time, this may prove to be a good platform for growth.
New categories, 404 and miss-match
Loss was initially coming from the mismatch of new sub-category directories and old directories that were ranking well. It appears that some of them resulted in a 404 which doesn’t help Google understand the change.
The very successful URL (and parent directory) https://groceries.asda.com/shelf/home-entertainment/kitchen/ is still a 404, for example:
The category pages under that directory have been redirected and rankings might be recovered over time but it will take Google a while, months, to work through that. In the meantime the lost visibility will have gone to competitors.
Some category pages appear to have a 1:1 redirect and are continuing to work:
Data from the SISTRIX archive shows that there were 6605 URLs ranking under 9 top-level directories at groceries.asda.com before the migration.
On Nov 18th at www.asda.com/groceries/ there are 18457 URLs ranking under 67 top-level directories which shows the scale of the new content structure.
This migration is interesting because it includes sub-domains and sub-directories, an architecture change and is a large brand in a competitive ecommerce market. It’s successful and has, given the scale and the missing redirects, potential to grow further. Marks and Spencer’s new /food project has competition!
18th November 2025- Visibility recovered after three months
The period it takes for Google to re-discover a new directory from scratch has, for many years, been three months. That hasn’t changed, as we can see below.
The lost area in those three months represents millions of potential clicks lost from organic search but results in a cleaner information architecture, which might have been the main aim of the migration in the first place.
Here’s a closer, daily look at the loss and growth over those three months.
More retail grocery data from SISTRIX
The retail grocery sector is covered regularly in our SectorWatch and Visibility Leaders projects. View all the related information, data, trackers and analysis here.
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