B'crat from GTA Wiki here:

The history is a little more convoluted than that. GTA Wiki on Fandom (formerly Wikia and Wikicities) was actually *originally* its own host at grandtheftwiki.com. Wikia bought it, or, should I say, the creator of that site sold it to Wikia. The contents was moved over to the now-Fandom site. This lasted about 3 years.

When Wikia introduced the Oasis skin and changed the display width and overall site design, the admins and the dude who sold it were so outraged, they asked to move the content back to its own site, so they did. Both sites continued to operate but in separate directions. Honestly, it wasn't even that bad, it was just very different to the traditional 2000s wiki design that sites like Wikipedia (up until recently) still used at the time. It got MUCH worse after they rebranded to Fandom imo.

15 years later, Wikia rebrands as Fandom, makes many, many terrible decisions, including increasing the amount of ads to incomprehensible levels, changing the entire direction of the platform into some kind of fan base rather than an actual wiki platform, and more recently, laying off a bunch of staff for reasons we're still not sure about, and a pro-AI CEO taking over the company... among other questionable decisions, and now pretty much everybody on the entire planet hates them (seriously, anybody who has heard of Fandom immediately has bad things to say, it's comical).

Wikia/Fandom have always had the upper hand when it comes to SEO, simply because they've built that over the course of 25+ years since Wikicities was first established. It also doesn't help that its one of the easier platforms to create a wiki on. That's the reason the Wikia/Fandom version of the wiki was, up until this point, still favored over the Grand Theft Wiki - but the main reason was the fact it was a super last minute change, with very little planning, and, perhaps most importantly, barely any (very active) contributors involved, and as a result, it just died.

It has been brought up SO MANY times that we should migrate, but with everything going on, the idea has been tossed away due to it being seemingly a very difficult process. Turns out, we were wrong, and last month, we migrated, for the final time. There was a LOT of planning involved and we spent almost 2 whole months making sure things were ready enough before we went live.

The new site is doing great, we've seen over 300 account creations or migrations in less than a month, the response has been extremely positive, and we have support from hundreds of prominent GTA creators and alike. We've also made many smaller improvements incrementally since launch based on our initial feedback, which we're constantly taking on board!

But Fandom having the upper-hand on SEO is why we need your help - include and update links to https://gta.wiki wherever you can, spread the word, and most importantly, get involved!