We just acquired a company.
What do we do with their website?

The lawyers have signed off. The deal is announced. The champagne is flat. And somewhere in a meeting room, a marketing manager raises their hand and asks the question that nobody in the acquisition playbook thought to answer: what do we do with their website?

It sounds like a small question. It isn't. The acquired company's website is carrying domain authority built over years, backlink equity that Google values, GEO optimisation, customer journeys mid-flow, and potentially thousands of indexed pages that people are actively finding. Get this wrong  (and most organisations do) and you can destroy real commercial value in the time it takes to flip a redirect. This article is the guide your legal and finance teams will never write for you.

First: resist the urge to act immediately

The instinct before an acquisition is to change the brand quickly and make the new ownership visible. A rebrand goes up. The acquired company's homepage gets a banner. Sometimes someone flips a redirect from the purchased company to the purchaser, before anyone has audited what they'd be redirecting. This is one of the most common and most costly mistakes we see.

The first 30 days should be diagnostic, not decisive. Before touching a single URL, you need to understand what you're actually dealing with, and the website audit you need is not the same as the one your IT team will run.

Worth knowing: the liquidation misconception

When a familiar brand suddenly disappears from the internet (its website redirecting somewhere unfamiliar, its contact details changed, its emails bouncing) a significant proportion of its customers will assume it has gone into administration. The signals of liquidation and the signals of a poorly managed acquisition look identical from the outside. Communication must run ahead of any digital change, not behind it. Before any redirect goes live, the acquired company’s customers need to know the business they trusted is continuing under new ownership.

The audit nobody tells you to do:

Most acquisition checklists cover IT infrastructure, data migration, and brand compliance. Almost none of them cover the digital audit that actually protects commercial value. Before any decision is made about the acquired site, you need to establish:

1. SEO equity: what does this domain actually own?

Domain authority is not an abstract number. It represents years of backlinks, content indexing, and trust signals that Google has accumulated against a specific domain. The acquired company may have stronger organic search positions than your own site in certain categories, and you will not know this unless you check. Tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush can surface this quickly, but someone needs to know to look.

• Domain authority score: How does it compare to your primary domain?
• Traffic-driving pages: Which pages are generating organic traffic that would be lost in a redirect?
• Backlink profile: Who is linking to the acquired domain? High-authority backlinks pointing to a redirected domain may not transfer.
• Ranking gaps: Are there content pages ranking for terms you currently don’t rank for? This is an asset, not a liability.

2. CMS compatibility: what are you actually inheriting?

The acquired company's website is almost certainly built on a different CMS than yours. This matters more than it might seem because whoever ends up owning the website post-acquisition (usually marketing) will need to edit, update, or eventually migrate it. The CMS question is rarely asked in due diligence and almost always causes friction within 90 days.

• CMS version and state: An outdated install with accumulated plugins is a security liability from day one of ownership.
• Who manages it: Is that person staying post-acquisition, or do you inherit a platform with no institutional knowledge?
• Active licence fees: Are there CMS or hosting contracts now sitting on your balance sheet?
• Architecture: Is the site headless, composable, or monolithic, and does your team have the capability to manage it?

03. Content and data: what does this site hold?

The acquired company's website is a data asset in ways that aren't immediately obvious. It may hold:

• A blog archive with significant indexed content. Destroying this destroys the traffic it generates.
• Customer-facing portals, login areas, or gated content with active users who expect continued access.
• Forms capturing live enquiries or leads. Redirecting the site mid-campaign kills active pipelines.
• GDPR consent records tied to the domain. Migrating contact data requires understanding how consent was collected and whether it transfers legally to the new entity.

4. Geographic footprint: where does this brand actually live?

If the acquired company operates across multiple regions, the audit must extend beyond the homepage. Location-specific contact details, regional phone numbers, and geo-targeted pages may have been indexed by Google for those markets for years. 

When those pages disappear or redirect without warning, customers in those regions lose their local touchpoint, and many will draw the wrong conclusion.

Google Business Profile listings tied to the acquired brand’s regional locations do not update automatically in an acquisition. Left unmanaged, they continue surfacing in local search with old contact details, old branding, and no indication of any change. A customer who calls a number from a GBP listing and hears a disconnected tone will find an alternative, not dig further.

The three paths and how to choose

Once you have completed the diagnostic phase, you will typically be looking at one of three strategic paths. The right answer depends on what the audit reveals, not on how quickly the business wants the acquisition to feel "complete."

PATH A
Redirect and absorb
Migrate key content to your main domain, implement 301 redirects at page level, and retire the acquired domain on a defined timeline.

Best when: The acquired site has low domain authority, minimal organic traffic, and no content that outperforms your own. Brand consolidation is the priority.

PATH B (often optimal)
Run in parallel
Maintain both sites independently for a defined period, preserving SEO equity while a content migration and brand integration strategy is developed properly.

Best when: The acquired domain has strong organic positions, an active audience, or content that would take months to recreate. Buys time to migrate without destroying value.

PATH C (the one we most commonly suggest)
REPLATFORM
Use the acquisition as the trigger for a broader replatforming exercise. Migrating both sites to a unified CMS and consolidating digital infrastructure.

Best when: Either or both sites are on legacy platforms, CMS incompatibility creates ongoing management overhead, or the acquisition signals a strategic shift in digital capability.

The Kayo perspective

In our experience, the most common mistake is choosing Path A when most acquisition situations at bare minimum call for Path B. 

The pressure to make the acquisition look unified (from the board, from brand teams, from communications leads) creates a bias towards immediate consolidation that ignores SEO and content value. The redirect feels tidy but the traffic loss shows up six months later, often attributed to "market conditions."

Talk to Kayo about your aquisition, we’d be glad to help.