SEO Checklist for Your Vibe-Coded Website
Vibe-coded sites ship fast but quietly skip SEO basics. A practical checklist: titles, meta descriptions, headings, sitemap, alt text, and OG tags.
An AI agent will hand you a complete-looking website in an afternoon — pages, navigation, forms, styling. What it usually won't do, unless you ask, is any of the unglamorous work that makes a site findable: unique titles, meta descriptions, a sitemap, alt text, Open Graph tags. None of it is hard. All of it is invisible, which is exactly why vibe-coded sites tend to launch looking finished and rank like they don't exist. This is the checklist to walk before you call a build done.
Unique title and meta description on every page
The most common miss by far. Agents love generating one <title> and reusing it across pages, or leaving template placeholder text sitting in place. Every page should have its own title tag — roughly the page's main promise plus your site name — and its own meta description written like a one-sentence answer to why click this. Titles carry real weight with search engines; descriptions don't directly affect ranking, but they're what shows under your link in results, and a generic one costs clicks. The fastest audit: ask the agent to list every page's current title and description side by side. Duplicates become obvious immediately.
Connect the Claude or Codex you already pay for — the rest runs on workers that cost a fraction.
Download meshcode →One H1 and a sane heading hierarchy
Each page gets exactly one <h1> — the page's subject — with <h2>s for major sections and <h3>s beneath those. AI-generated markup frequently skips levels or uses heading tags purely for their visual size, which scrambles the outline search engines and screen readers both rely on. The fix is framing, not fiddling: tell the agent that headings describe document structure, not font sizes, and that sizing belongs in CSS.
sitemap.xml and robots.txt
Two tiny files, both routinely absent. A sitemap.xml lists every indexable URL so crawlers don't have to guess at your structure; robots.txt tells crawlers what to skip. Neither takes long to generate, and if you've followed the usual path — build the site, connect a custom domain, then deploy it — the URLs going into the sitemap are already settled. One detail worth checking: the sitemap must use the final production domain, not the local address you developed against.
Image alt text
Alt text exists for people using screen readers first and image search second. The vibe-coded failure mode is decorative filler like alt="image", or nothing at all, because the agent never had anything to say about your photos. Write them as short, plain descriptions of what's actually in the picture — skip the phrase "image of," and leave genuinely decorative images empty rather than describing nothing.
Open Graph tags so shared links preview properly
Paste your URL into a chat or social feed, and what appears is decided by Open Graph tags: og:title, og:description, and og:image. Without them you get whatever the platform's crawler manages to scrape — often a bare link or the wrong crop of the page. Arguably this matters more than most classic SEO work for a brand-new site, because shares are how early traffic arrives at all. Ask for the three basics on every page plus a properly sized og:image, then test it by pasting your own URL somewhere before your audience does it for you.
Submit the site to Google Search Console
Nothing above matters until Google knows the site exists — organic discovery alone can take weeks. Verify ownership of your domain in Google Search Console, submit your sitemap, and request indexing for your key pages directly. You also gain the feedback loop that matters afterward: which queries surface your pages and which crawl errors appear. It's the closest thing SEO has to a test suite, and it's free.
Page speed basics
You don't need a performance project; you need the obvious wins. Compress images before they ship — an oversized hero image is the single most common self-inflicted wound on AI-built sites. Don't load five font families when one works. Question whether every script the agent included is pulling its weight. Run the site through any standard speed checker, fix what it flags at the top of the report, and stop there.
The meshcode angle
Every item here is one prompt away, but walking the checklist across many pages is a multi-page chore worth fanning out. meshcode is a native desktop app for macOS and Windows where each pane runs its own agent session, so one pane can audit titles and meta descriptions while another fixes alt text and generates the sitemap — all against the same repo. Drive the Claude Code or Codex CLI subscription you already have, or start with meshcode's own metered models, billed pay-as-you-go with no monthly fee.
👉 Download meshcode — Mac, Windows