How do you use AirTags to track a move?

Put tags in several separate boxes rather than one, and connect a location history tool before the truck arrives. Find My keeps only the latest pin, so anything not recorded as it happens is gone. After that you get a location whenever a passing iPhone hears your tag, which is often on the road and rarely in a warehouse.

How many AirTags do you need for a move?

More than one, and probably more than you first think. A single tag tells you where one box is. It cannot tell you whether the rest of the load went with it, and that is the question that actually comes up when a delivery is short.

The useful number is however many separate things could plausibly get separated. A shipment that travels as one crate needs two or three. A shipment that gets split across a warehouse, a second truck, and a container needs one per part you would hate to lose.

• Two tags in the same crate is not redundancy, it is one data point recorded twice.
• Two tags in two crates tells you the moment the crates part company.
• Tag the thing you would file a claim about, not the thing that is easiest to open.
• There is no per-tag cost on AirTag History, so the limit is how many AirTags you own.

Which boxes should get a tag?

Pick by consequence, not by value. A box of books is replaceable at a known price. The box holding the tools that let you assemble everything else is not, and neither is the one with documents in it.

• One in the box you would notice missing on day one: bedding, kettle, chargers, the shower curtain.
• One in something bulky and slow, such as the bike, the piano crate or the wardrobe box, because bulky items get left behind more often than small ones.
• One in the car, if a car is being shipped, plus one on the keys if the keys travel separately.
• One somewhere in the middle of the load, so you learn something even if the door-side boxes come off early.

Put the tag inside the box, taped to the inside of a wall rather than buried under books. Loose in the bottom of a carton is fine mechanically and bad practically: it ends up under everything, which is where the signal has the least chance of getting out.

When do you have to connect, before or after pickup?

Before. This is the one instruction on this page that cannot be fixed later. History starts when you connect, because Find My overwrites the previous location every time a new report arrives and Apple keeps nothing readable on its servers to hand back.

1. Buy and pair the tags a week early, not the night before.
2. Connect the Apple ID those tags are on, so recording is already running.
3. Check the map once while everything is still in your house. That is your baseline, and it proves the tag was working before it left.
4. Pack the tags, hand over the goods, and stop touching it.

Connecting on the day the shipment goes missing produces a map that starts at the warehouse it is already sitting in. It answers the one question nobody is asking.

What will you actually see once the truck leaves?

A line of dots with timestamps, dense in some places and thin in others. AirTag History polls the Find My network every 5 minutes, but a poll only returns something new if some passing iPhone has heard your tag since the last one.

• On a motorway with traffic around it, updates land often enough to draw a recognisable route.
• In a town, at a fuel stop, or outside a depot with people around, it keeps up.
• Parked overnight in a fenced yard, it can go hours with nothing.
• Inside a sealed container at sea, nothing at all, sometimes for weeks.

The gaps are shown as gaps rather than smoothed into a line, because an invented curve between two real points is the part an insurer or a mover would be right to throw out.

What AirTags will not do on a move

• They are not GPS. A tag alone reports nothing; it is heard by other people's iPhones, or it is silent.
• They do not report from inside a metal container with no Apple devices near it.
• They do not tell you what is inside the box, whether it is upright, or whether it is intact.
• AirTag History has no alerts and no mobile app. You open the map and look, nothing pushes at you.

None of that makes the record useless. It makes it a record of where your goods were seen, which is exactly the thing you cannot get any other way once the truck has gone.

What if the movers find the tag?

It happens, and you should plan for it. An AirTag travelling with someone who does not own it will eventually trigger an unknown-tracker alert on their iPhone or Android phone. A driver who gets that alert may go looking, and may take the tag out.

That is the strongest argument for spreading tags across several boxes. One tag found and set down at a truck stop looks identical, on a map, to a box that was stolen. A second tag still moving with the load tells you which of the two happened.

Those alerts exist to stop people being followed, and we support them. This is for boxes, not for the person driving them: tracking a person is against our acceptable-use policy regardless of who owns the tag.