Hub Dashboard 4 — The Migration
The biggest marketing story in Indian lending wasn't an ad campaign — it was a DNS change
In August 2025, the RBI mandated that all regulated banks migrate customer-facing properties to a new dedicated
.bank.in TLD. Within eight months, Indian banking's digital map was completely redrawn. This dashboard zooms out
on what happened — because the insurance vertical didn't face it, but every loan category did.
The migration, visualized
The .bank.in TLD grew from zero to 19.6 million monthly visits in eight months.
Jul 2025
110
Pre-migration baseline
Aug 2025
327K
Mandate takes effect; first bank moves
Oct 2025
6.1M
Major banks complete migration wave 1
Dec 2025
17.4M
Migration largely complete
Apr 2026
19.6M
Steady state; ranking signals maturing
The .com collapse
What each bank lost on its legacy domain
hdfcbank.com
HDFC Bank
−96%
8.9M → 394K organic visits. Traffic migrated to hdfc.bank.in (50.7M).
icicibank.com
ICICI Bank
−95%
4.5M → 210K. Now on icici.bank.in (15.2M).
axisbank.com
Axis Bank
−98%
2.4M → 36K. Steepest decline. Now on axis.bank.in (11.2M).
sbi.co.in
SBI
Migrated
Now on sbi.bank.in with 34.1M organic visits — India's #2 banking site.
Where the traffic went — April 2026 rankings
The four major bank subdomains on the new TLD, by monthly organic visits
HDFC Bankhdfc.bank.in
50,700,000
SBIsbi.bank.in
34,100,000
ICICI Bankicici.bank.in
15,200,000
Axis Bankaxis.bank.in
11,200,000
Cross-category implication
Home Loan, Personal Loan, and Credit Card all lost 95%+ of legacy bank traffic — and all gained it back on .bank.in
Because each bank carries all loan products on one domain, the migration hit every loan category simultaneously.
HDFC's home loan pages, personal loan pages, and credit card pages all moved. For Google ranking signals,
this was the single largest domain migration in Indian financial services history. Six months into it,
ranking authority on .bank.in is catching up fast but still lags legacy .com rankings in some long-tail queries.
For content marketers at banks: the migration is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to rebuild URL architecture
cleanly and earn fresh backlinks. For competitors: it's a six-month window where bank SERP presence is
measurably weaker than it will be by Q4 2026.
Two things this means going forward
The migration rewrites the playbook for every lender
Implication #1
NBFCs now have cleaner competitive positioning
Bajaj Finserv and Aditya Birla don't compete on .bank.in — they're on regular .com domains.
While banks rebuild ranking authority on new subdomains, NBFCs retain their full legacy SEO authority.
That's why Bajaj's 43.9M organic visits didn't dip at all during the migration.
Implication #2
Aggregators pick up overflow traffic temporarily
BankBazaar, Paisabazaar, and CardInsider all gained share in late 2025 as bank rankings were in flux.
By Apr 2026, banks are regaining, but aggregators used the window to deepen content on branded comparison
queries — a defensible moat they'll hold into 2027.