How I'd grow Cognition

Cognition makes Devin, an AI coding agent, and Devin Desktop, the IDE it called Windsurf until 2 June 2026. It sells plans from free to Enterprise, and its biggest deals are enterprise work such as COBOL and .NET migrations.

On 23 September 2026 Cognition posted an SEO & AEO listing on its jobs board, and it was still open on 6 November 2026. It asks for someone to “build Cognition’s organic demand engine from the ground up… across Devin, Windsurf, and our broader web presence”. This post is what I’d do in that job.

It uses only what anyone can see from outside: public pages, search data, AI answers and Cognition’s own posts.

Key findings:

• Cognition’s search traffic is split across five hosts: about 63,689 estimated Google visits a month between them (Ahrefs, November 2026). Cursor gets about 398,182.
• Those hosts have up to 74,752 linking sites between them, against Cursor’s 62,594. The authority is there; it’s spread thin.
• About 96% of the estimated traffic from Cognition’s top 150 US keywords is brand search (DataForSEO). Devin wasn’t in the top 27 for “ai coding agent” (8,100 US searches a month) in either of two live checks.
• AI answers named Devin in 19 of 30 answers to coding agent questions, and in 0 of 18 answers about COBOL and codebase migrations, the work its enterprise customers buy.
• windsurf.com has redirected to devin.ai since June 2026, but 18 of the 245 pages in its sitemap still answer 200, and every made-up address returns 200 with “This page does not exist”.

Cognition gets 63,689 estimated Google visits a month across five hosts

Cognition’s web presence is cognition.com (the company and research), devin.ai (the product, pricing and blog), docs.devin.ai, app.devin.ai and windsurf.com, which since June 2026 sends most pages to devin.ai.

Cognition publishes no traffic figures I could find, so these are Ahrefs estimates. Read them for their shape and their ratio.

The biggest of the three is windsurf.com, a site Cognition is retiring. Ahrefs estimated it at 229,294 visits in July 2025, the month Cognition bought Windsurf, and 28,537 in November 2026.

Some of that fall is the market, since Cursor fell too, from 715,169 in July 2025 to 398,280 in November 2026 (Ahrefs monthly history). Windsurf fell further: to 12% of its July 2025 estimate, against Cursor’s 56%.

Fewer than 1 in 30 visits reaches a page that sells

Here is where the 63,689 estimated visits land, grouped from each site’s top pages (Ahrefs, 5 November 2026).

That’s normal for a company this well known. People search for Devin, Windsurf and Cognition by name, and Google already treats each one as an entity.

The gap is the people who don’t know the names yet. In DataForSEO’s top 150 US keywords for devin.ai and cognition.com, brand searches bring an estimated 11,131 of 11,547 visits (96%).

Five hosts become two: devin.ai for Devin, cognition.com for the company

The listing asks for a “technical SEO roadmap across site architecture, crawlability, indexing, internal linking, structured data, page performance, redirects, canonicalization”. All of those start with the same decision: which host Google and AI answers should treat as Devin’s, and which as the company’s.

Each host has built its own links, and today most of those links reach Devin through a redirect.

I’d make devin.ai the home of everything Devin: product, pricing, docs, the product blog and every page that sells. It has the highest Domain Rating of the set (84, Domain Rating by Ahrefs), it already holds the pricing page and the 173 moved Windsurf posts, and it’s the name buyers search for (“devin” gets 22,200 US searches a month, DataForSEO). Every Windsurf host folds into it.

cognition.com stays as the company site, the way Anthropic runs anthropic.com next to claude.com. anthropic.com keeps the research and company news, and anthropic.com/pricing redirects to claude.com/pricing (checked 6 November 2026). For Cognition that means research, FrontierCode, careers and company news on cognition.com, and anything a buyer would act on at devin.ai.

The split only works if each launch has one home. Today two blogs announce product launches: Devin Desktop on cognition.com, Devin Review 2.0 on devin.ai. Product launches belong on devin.ai, with a short company post on cognition.com that links to them.

The fix, in order:

1. Build the URL map first: every URL in each old sitemap, every URL Ahrefs shows with links or traffic, and every address in the Wayback Machine, each with one final address on devin.ai or cognition.com.
2. Move the content to its new home and check each page renders with a self canonical.
3. Switch the redirects on, one rule per host, each going straight to its final page in one hop.
4. Update the links Cognition controls: the 598 blog links between its own hosts (172 of them pass through a redirect today and 20 end in a 404), the X and LinkedIn profiles, and the JSON-LD.
5. Submit the new sitemaps and use Search Console’s Change of Address tool for each old domain.

To confirm it worked, crawl the URL map with seo crawl --mode list: every old address should answer with a single 301 to a 200 page.

Cognition has lost “windsurf”, its biggest brand search, to the sport

“windsurf” gets 60,500 US searches a month (DataForSEO), shared with the sport. On 6 November 2026 the sport had the results page to itself: Wikipedia’s windsurfing article, schools, board shops and dictionaries. Cognition’s best result was a docs.devin.ai page on Windsurf plugins, 14th on desktop and 13th on mobile (DataForSEO live checks, US, organic positions counted by hand).

The old Windsurf vs Cursor page on windsurf.com still ranks for the comparison. It was fourth for “cursor vs windsurf” on desktop, in 1 of 2 checks; on mobile it wasn’t in the top 28. Ahrefs still credits it with an estimated 11,480 visits a month, from rankings it recorded before these checks, so read that as past traffic.

The page sells a product that has a new name.

The body says “Download Windsurf” and compares SWE-1.5 with Sonnet 4.5. AI answers repeat that history: Google’s AI Mode and AI Overview named Windsurf but not Devin when asked for the best AI code editor (DataForSEO, 6 November 2026).

The fix: move the page to devin.ai/compare/windsurf-vs-cursor, rewrite it for Devin Desktop with today’s models and prices, and 301 the old address to it. Keep “Windsurf” in the title for as long as people search for it. Then give devin.ai/desktop one line near the top: “Devin Desktop is the IDE formerly called Windsurf.” That line, on a page Google can rank, is how Cognition gets back onto the “windsurf” results page next to the sport.

0 of 18 AI answers about migrations name Devin

Migrations are where Cognition’s enterprise stories are. Its blog has “How Devin Is Modernizing COBOL at Fortune 500 Companies” (8 April 2026), a .NET Framework to .NET Core guide, and a MongoDB partnership. Nubank’s case study describes moving an 8-year-old ETL monolith with millions of lines of code.

The AI answers to the same questions go to IBM and AWS.

Across the 18 answers, IBM was named in 12 and Claude in 9. Devin was named in none. The sources linked most were IBM (11 answers), AWS (8), and YouTube and Reddit (6 each).

AI answers aren’t deterministic. The same question can get a different answer on the next run, so every count in this post is one run on 6 November 2026.

Google already knows Devin has a page on this. Its AI Overview for “cobol modernization” cites the Devin docs page on COBOL (DataForSEO, US, 6 November 2026, desktop and mobile). One of the 18 answers above cites it too, without naming Devin. But the page has nothing an answer can quote about Devin: no customer, no number, no visible date.

What the cited pages have

The IBM page the answers linked most is its watsonx Code Assistant for Z product page, in 5 of the 18. Its explainer, “What Is COBOL Modernization?”, is linked in one. It opens with a one-sentence definition, then sections on methods, tips and “AI for COBOL modernization”, with two named authors and “Published 27 November 2025, Updated 06 April 2026” at the top.

Cognition has better material than that. It’s in a blog post with a story title, and the docs page that Google cites doesn’t link to it.

The fix: one page per migration Devin does (COBOL to Java, .NET Framework to .NET Core, mainframe, monolith to services, Angular), each at devin.ai/use-cases/… with:

• The question as a heading and a two-sentence answer that names Devin, under it.
• Customer numbers with the customer’s name and the date.
• A table comparing Devin with IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z, AWS Transform and Claude Code, honest about where each fits.
• A byline and a visible updated date.

One number needs fixing first. Nubank’s case study gives its result three ways: “8x engineering time efficiency gain” in the header, “12x efficiency improvement” in the body and “8-12x” in the results. An AI answer can quote any of them, so pick one figure and use it everywhere.

To confirm it worked, ask the same six questions after 30 days and count the answers that name or cite Devin.

AI answers name Devin in 19 of 30 coding agent questions

Outside migrations, the brand already works. I asked ten questions a buyer might put to an AI assistant, for Devin and for Cursor (DataForSEO, US, 6 November 2026).

Devin wins the questions about what it does differently: background work, pull requests, parallel cloud agents. It loses “best AI coding agent” and “best for enterprise teams”, which are the two closest to a purchase.

It’s also missing from every answer about AI code review, the day after Devin Review 2.0 launched on 5 November 2026.

Access isn’t the problem. devin.ai serves a Markdown copy of each page to AI crawler user agents, and its robots.txt lets GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest in. Citations are the gap. ChatGPT cited a devin.ai page in 7 of its 10 answers and cursor.com in 8. Google AI Mode and AI Overviews cited neither company in any of their 20 answers. YouTube was linked in 15 of Devin’s 30 answers, Reddit in 13 and GitHub in 12.

8,100 people a month search “ai coding agent”, and Devin’s homepage never says it

Devin’s meta description and JSON-LD call it “an AI coding agent and software engineer”. The page text never says “coding agent”, in the HTML a browser gets or the Markdown copy AI crawlers get. Its heading is “Meet Devin, your team’s autonomous software engineer”.

The category words are what people search for.

The listing names these themes itself: “AI coding agents, agentic engineering, developer productivity”. Augment Code, with a Domain Rating of 76 to Devin’s 84 (Ahrefs), ranks first for two of them, “ai coding assistant” and “ai ide”, with one roundup page. Devin ranks for one: its Coding Agents 101 guide was eighth for “ai coding agents” on desktop.

The fix: say it on the homepage, in the heading or the first line: “Devin is the AI coding agent for engineering teams.” Then publish one guide, “What is an AI coding agent?”, at devin.ai/ai-coding-agent. It answers what an agent does, what it costs, which one to use, and whether ChatGPT has one. The Coding Agents 101 guide that already ranks for “ai coding agents” is a starting point. Cognition has the evidence most roundups don’t: its own benchmark and its customers’ numbers.

Comparison searches add up to 37,270 a month, and Cognition’s only comparison page is from 2025

People compare tools before they pay. These are the comparison and alternative searches for the agents Devin competes with (DataForSEO, US, November 2026).

“devin vs cursor” is the one I’d write first. Someone searching it already knows Devin, and today Google’s AI Overview answers them with a Reddit thread titled “Devin review: is it a better AI coding agent than Cursor?” among its sources.

The comparisons between other agents are worth Cognition’s time too. Devin Desktop runs other agents through the Agent Client Protocol, so Cognition can run the same tasks in Codex, Claude Code and Devin on one repository and publish the results.

Cursor has two switch pages to fix as well. windsurf.com/switch/cursor and devin.ai/switch/cursor both answer 200 with self canonicals, and the windsurf.com copy still says “Switch from Cursor to Windsurf”.

FrontierCode’s launch post got 865,592 views, and the leaderboard isn’t in Google’s top 25

Cognition’s X account (@cognition, 195,702 followers) posted FrontierCode 2.0 on 27 October 2026. It had 865,592 views on 6 November 2026 (FxTwitter), the most of any @cognition post in the two weeks before. SWE-2 Flash on 4 November had 548,231.

Search doesn’t carry that reach. The leaderboard at cognition.com/frontiercode wasn’t in the top 25 organic results for “ai leaderboard” (4,400 US searches) in either of two checks on 6 November 2026. “best llm for coding” gets 1,600 US searches with a difficulty of 4 (DataForSEO), and Cognition wasn’t in the top 29 (DataForSEO live checks, US, counted by hand).

The fix: give the leaderboard a heading and first paragraph that answer “best LLM for coding” with this month’s top model, dated. Then post each model result as a short post on X and LinkedIn that links to it, and put the link in a reply under the launch post. That’s a page journalists can cite, built from data only Cognition has.

Make AI answers repeat one message on every channel

The listing asks the hire to “identify the publications, websites… that influence search visibility and AI-generated answers”. For Cognition’s questions, the answers above linked YouTube in 21 of 48 answers, Reddit in 19 and LinkedIn in 6 (DataForSEO, 6 November 2026). The videos cited most were from other channels.

Cognition’s YouTube channel has 30,600 subscribers. Its 30 latest videos are about product features and events, and none is about a migration. The COBOL videos the answers cite are from other people, such as “Migrating from COBOL with AI: A Moonshot Demo”.

I’d pick three sentences and use them everywhere:

1. “Devin is the AI coding agent that migrates legacy code, from COBOL to .NET.”
2. “Devin Desktop is the IDE formerly called Windsurf.”
3. “Devin Review finds bugs before they reach production.”

Each sentence gets the same five pieces:

• A page on devin.ai with the sentence in its first line and the evidence under it.
• A video titled with the question buyers ask (“How to migrate COBOL to Java with an AI agent”), with chapters, a transcript and the page in the description.
• A LinkedIn post from the company page, with one customer number and the page link. LinkedIn posts show up in Google’s discussions box, as one did for “devin vs cursor” (desktop, 6 November 2026).
• An X post and a reply with the link, the same way FrontierCode was launched.
• A docs page that repeats the sentence, since AI answers already cite docs.devin.ai.

The structured data should say the same thing. Today Cognition’s Organization JSON-LD lists only X and LinkedIn, and Devin Desktop’s SoftwareApplication is named “Devin”.

"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Cognition",
"url": "https://cognition.com",
"sameAs": [
  "https://x.com/cognition",
  "https://www.linkedin.com/company/cognition-ai-labs"
]

"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Cognition",
"url": "https://cognition.com",
"sameAs": [
  "https://x.com/cognition",
  "https://www.linkedin.com/company/cognition-ai-labs",
  "https://www.youtube.com/@cognition-labs",
  "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devin_AI"
],
"brand": [
  { "@type": "Brand", "name": "Devin" },
  { "@type": "Brand", "name": "Devin Desktop",
    "alternateName": "Windsurf" }
]

Four technical fixes, closest to revenue first

1. windsurf.com answers 200 for addresses that don’t exist

Ask windsurf.com for any made-up address and it returns 200 with “This page does not exist”, the title “Page Not Found | Windsurf” and a canonical tag pointing at windsurf.com/not-found.

GET windsurf.com/any-made-up-address
200 OK
<title>Page Not Found | Windsurf</title>
<h1>This page does not exist</h1>
canonical: windsurf.com/not-found

GET windsurf.com/any-made-up-address
301 Moved Permanently
location: https://devin.ai/desktop

GET devin.ai/any-made-up-address
404 Not Found

The fix: once the move is done, 301 every windsurf.com address to its devin.ai match, and any address with no match to devin.ai/desktop. devin.ai and cognition.com already return a 404 for unknown addresses. To confirm it worked, request a made-up windsurf.com address and check for a single 301.

2. The Windsurf docs in other languages are 651 pages nothing redirects

docs.windsurf.com sends its English pages to docs.devin.ai. Its copies in German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian and Chinese (93 pages each) still answer 200. Ahrefs estimates they get 6,233 visits a month, led by the Portuguese getting-started page (2,507).

Their hreflang tags point English readers at addresses that redirect.

docs.windsurf.com/pt-BR/windsurf/getting-started
200 OK, canonical: itself
hreflang en        → docs.windsurf.com/windsurf/getting-started
                      308 → docs.devin.ai/desktop/getting-started
hreflang x-default → the same redirect
hreflang ro        → a copy that exists only here

docs.windsurf.com/pt-BR/windsurf/getting-started
301 → devin.ai/docs/pt-BR/desktop/getting-started

devin.ai/docs/pt-BR/desktop/getting-started
200 OK, canonical: itself
hreflang en, es, ja, zh, fr, de, it, pt-BR, x-default
  → each one a 200 page on devin.ai/docs

The fix: 301 each localized page to its copy under the Devin docs (docs.devin.ai/pt-BR/desktop/getting-started already exists). The Devin docs have Italian and no Romanian, so send the 93 Romanian pages to English. devin.ai has a Japanese section too, and its hreflang is complete, so keep that pattern.

3. The University lessons land on a homepage

All 24 Windsurf University lessons in the old sitemap redirect twice and end on the learndevin.com homepage. learndevin.com returns a 404 for robots.txt, sitemap.xml and llms.txt, and its homepage has no canonical tag.

The fix: move the lessons to devin.ai/university, one page per lesson, and redirect each old lesson to its own page.

4. Sign-in and session pages get search traffic

Ahrefs estimates 12,521 visits a month to sign-in, referral, profile and app pages. One is a shared Devin session on app.devin.ai. app.devin.ai/robots.txt returns the app’s HTML page.

The fix: add noindex to every app and account page, serve a real robots.txt on app.devin.ai, and send the referral and login searches to the pricing page.

Ship it all today, then let it settle

The listing wants someone who’d “use AI aggressively”. Each of these is a separate job with a clear end, so coding agents can run them in parallel, with the team approving each one:

1. 1

   URL map

   Every old URL on docs.devin.ai, windsurf.com, docs.windsurf.com, codeium.com and learndevin.com, with one final devin.ai address, plus the product launch posts on cognition.com.

2. 2

   Two domains

   Move the Windsurf hosts and docs onto devin.ai, switch on one-hop 301s per host, and file Change of Address in Search Console. cognition.com stays the company site.

3. 3

   Windsurf landing

   Windsurf vs Cursor rewritten for Devin Desktop at devin.ai, with Windsurf in the title, and one line on devin.ai/desktop.

4. 4

   Migration pages

   COBOL, .NET, mainframe, monolith and Angular pages, answer first, with customer numbers and a comparison table. Fix the Nubank 8x and 12x figures.

5. 5

   Category guide

   "AI coding agent" on the homepage, and a guide at devin.ai/ai-coding-agent.

6. 6

   Comparison pages

   Devin vs Cursor, Devin vs Claude Code, Codex vs Claude Code and a Cursor alternatives page, with real tasks run in each.

7. 7

   Leaderboard

   FrontierCode retitled for best LLM for coding, with a dated top model.

8. 8

   Technical cleanup

   Real 404s on windsurf.com, the localized docs moved, University lessons moved, noindex on app pages and a real robots.txt.

9. 9

   Structured data

   Every profile in sameAs, and Devin Desktop named as the IDE formerly called Windsurf.

10. 10

    Three messages, five channels

    A page, a video, a LinkedIn post, an X post and a docs page for each of the three sentences.

Then 30 days of checks:

1. Day 0

   Day 0: Ask Google to recrawl

   Submit every new and changed URL, and the old URLs that now redirect, to Index My Site.

2. Day 3

   Day 3: Redirects

   Crawl the URL map with seo crawl --mode list. Every old address should give one 301 to a 200 page.

3. Day 7

   Day 7: Search Console

   Check the Change of Address status and impressions for "windsurf", "ai coding agent" and "devin vs cursor".

4. Day 14

   Day 14: Indexing

   Check the migration and comparison pages are indexed, and the old hosts are dropping out.

5. Day 30

   Day 30: AI answers

   Ask the same 16 questions for Devin and Cursor, and count the answers that name or cite Devin.

6. Day 30

   Day 30: Pipeline

   Compare demo requests and sign-ups from organic search with the month before, as the listing asks: pipeline, not traffic.

Get the changes seen quickly

A move this size depends on Google recrawling the old addresses to find the redirects. Left alone, that takes months for pages it rarely visits, such as the 651 localized docs pages. I’d submit every changed URL, old and new, to Index My Site the day the redirects go live.

Further reading

These are from my own library, and each one fits a part of this plan:

• Chris Long on documentation as an AEO strategy (September 2026): some clients get 40% or more of their AI citations from docs, which is why the Devin docs should carry the migration answers.
• Make each section useful on its own (September 2026): AI answers lift one passage at a time, so put the claim, the number and the source together.
• AI SEO: writing that’s specific may get cited more (Search Engine Journal, July 2026).
• The three lives of schema markup by Suganthan Mohanadasan, on what JSON-LD does for Google and for LLMs.
• Profound’s AEO guide, on choosing the prompts to track.

How I ran this

I build SEO Skill and Index My Site. Everything in this teardown came from SEO Skill, run by an agent, plus the Ahrefs MCP for top pages and traffic history. You can run the same audit on your own site.

1. Connect the hosted MCP server. It’s free, you sign in with Google, and there’s nothing to install. In Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http seoskill https://seoskill.dev/mcp

The MCP guide has the steps for Codex, Cursor and Claude on the web.

2. Add a research key. On your account page, save an Ahrefs or DataForSEO key. It gives your agent search volumes, rankings, results pages and AI answers.

3. Install the CLI for crawling. The crawl runs on your machine:

npm i -g seo
seo login

4. Ask your agent. This is close to the prompt I used:

Audit every host we own, including old and
redirected domains. Follow each redirect and
check what unknown addresses return.
Crawl each host with seo crawl and list the
links between our hosts that redirect or 404.
Use seo_research for the category, comparison
and migration searches our buyers make.
Ask ai_answers 16 buyer questions for us and
for our biggest competitor.
Rank every fix by how close it sits to pipeline.

If you run more than one domain, list every host first and follow every redirect. In this teardown, the biggest fixes were addresses nobody had looked at since the rebrand.

If you’re at Cognition, I’m happy to talk any of this through. And if you’d like the same teardown for your company, SEO Skill will run it for you.