What is URL inventory?

A URL inventory is a single list that gathers every address of a site that search engines know — current pages, address variants and old addresses; in a site redesign or migration, the redirect map is derived from this list.

Google’s site move documentation puts a mapping from old addresses to new addresses at the center of a migration. The left column of that mapping is the URL inventory: the complete list of what is to be moved. If the inventory is incomplete, so is the map, and every address left out comes back after launch as a 404 or a wrong redirect.

An inventory cannot be pulled from a single source, because each source knows something different. The sitemap knows what the site itself says. Search Console knows what Google has actually seen — including old, forgotten and mistyped addresses. The site’s own crawl knows everything reachable through links today. The three are combined, duplicates are removed, and two pieces of information are added to each row: does this address get traffic, and does it get links from other sites? The highest-value rows are the ones decided most carefully in the map.

• Sitemap: the addresses the site says it publishes.
• Search Console: addresses in the index, outside the index, and those receiving impressions in the performance report.
• Crawl: every address reachable through links, including images and documents.
• For each row: traffic, external links, the counterpart on the new site and the decision (301 · 404 · 410).

This site’s own inventory shows why the job does not start from a page list. On 22 August 2026 the site had 58 pages; Search Console, however, knew 93 addresses. The difference was not missing pages but versions of the same pages without www, on http, without a trailing slash and ending in /index.html. A map starting from the page list would not have seen any of these 35 addresses. A month later, on 18 September, Search Console showed 70 addresses as 404 in the list outside the index; every sample we tested on the live site was left over from the domain’s previous site and appeared in none of this site’s page lists. The number of addresses Google knows is always greater than the number the site itself knows.

The inventory’s place in a migration is the first item of the migration checklist; the decision for rows without an equivalent is in the 404 error guide, and the permanent redirect itself in the 301 redirect guide. Pulling the inventory and writing the map line by line is the first step of website redesign and migration work.

If you don’t want to lose traffic while relaunching your site, website redesign and migration inventories the old addresses, builds a chain-free 301 map and monitors the site for 90 days after the move.