Google Search Relations team members John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed vibe coding websites on a recent episode of Search Off The Record . Both found that AI coding tools could produce functional sites quickly. But getting SEO right still required specific technical direction, the same kind you’d give a human developer. Telling AI To ‘Add Some SEO’ Mueller compared the experience of vibe coding to working with a developer who doesn’t specialize in search. Mueller said on the podcast: “You can always tell the AI system, now add some SEO to it. But how that works out is if you go to a developer and add some SEO and it’s like, what do you mean. Sprinkle some meta tags and add some structured data.” Vague instructions produce vague results, whether the builder is human or AI. Mueller said he got better outcomes by telling the system what he wanted from the start. That included the domain name, canonical setup, sitemap files, and a robots.txt.…