Cogbird is now in private beta.

Getting started

Four steps, of which two are waiting: for your DNS, then for the first night.

1. Add the site

Sign in and add the domain you want watched. One site is one subscription — a workspace can hold several, and each is watched, billed and measured on its own.

Use the domain as it actually serves: if your canonical pages are on www.example.com, add that. Adding the wrong host is not fatal — nothing is collected until ownership passes — but the Search Console property has to match, and Google treats those two as different properties.

2. Prove you own it

Nothing is crawled until this passes, and nothing about your site is read before it. There are four ways, and the first is by far the easiest:

  • Connect Search Console. Google has already verified the domain, so there is nothing to copy and nothing to wait for. This also does step 3.
  • A DNS TXT record on the domain or on _cogbird. in front of it. Propagation can take an hour, and re-checking early is free.
  • A file served at /.well-known/cogbird-site-verification.txt.
  • A meta tag named cogbird-site-verification in the <head> of your homepage. It has to be in the HTML the server sends — a tag added by JavaScript is never seen.

The site settings page shows the exact value for each and a button to re-check. A failed check says what it found, which is usually the answer.

3. Connect Search Console

This is the one connection Cogbird cannot work without. It is a read-only Google grant, issued per site, and you can withdraw it from your Google account at any time.

The import runs immediately and pulls as much history as Google will give — up to 16 months. That history is what everything else is measured against, so the first import is also the last time the engine is short of data.

4. Wait one night

The engine runs on a nightly pass, scheduled in your own small hours. The first one crawls the site, matches pages to the search data, and forms the first findings. Before it has run, the dashboard is honestly empty rather than filled with placeholders.

The trial is 3 days and starts when the first site is verified and connected — not when you sign up. Nothing is burning while you find a DNS record.

What to do the morning after

  1. Read the inbox. It holds at most a few items, on purpose.
  2. Tell the engine what it cannot measure — what this business sells, which pages matter, who you consider a competitor. Rankings are weighted by that, and the default is a guess.
  3. Ship one thing and report it, so the measurement loop has something to learn from.
Next: Your data