How I Built a Full SEO Insights Chrome Extension in Just 2 Hours Using AI

#ai #vibecoding #programming #programmers

After being told it would take 2 weeks and $25 per hour

For the longest time, building a Chrome extension felt like one of those things I would eventually get to. Something for "later". Something that probably required weeks of work, messy debugging, and a lot of back and forth with developers.

But then a challenge popped into my head.
Can I build something genuinely useful in a very short amount of time?

Not perfect.
Not enterprise level.
Just working, practical, daily-use SEO insights.

I decided to try.

What started as a small experiment became one of my most productive two hours ever.

Here's how I did it.

Studying What Already Works

Before touching any code, I spent some time reviewing two of the most popular SEO extensions:

SEO Pro by Marketing Syrup
Detailed SEO

I checked what they did well, what was missing for my workflow, and what the ideal lightweight SEO insights tool should include.

I created a clean feature list.
Simple. Useful. Actionable.

That list became my blueprint.

Letting AI Become My Engineering Team

Instead of writing everything from scratch, I opened Cursor AI.

I shared:

My feature list
A rough idea of the UI
The workflows I wanted
The structure of each insights tab

Then I asked:

"Help me build this Chrome extension step by step."

Cursor handled:

Manifest setup
Permission settings
HTML for the popup
JS for DOM extraction
UI structure
Link and image audits
Schema detection
Status code tracking
Styling

I tested.
Fixed what broke.
Tweaked the UI.
Iterated in fast loops.

Two hours later, I had a fully working SEO Insights Chrome extension.

A Developer’s Estimate

Out of curiosity, I asked a developer how long it would take to build a similar extension.

The answer:

"About a week. Rate is $25 an hour."

One week.
$25 per hour.
Nearly $1000 in dev time.

And I had already built it myself in a single sitting with AI assistance.

That moment genuinely shifted my mindset.
AI is not here to replace people.
AI is here to empower builders who are willing to try.

⚡ Introducing My SEO Insights Chrome Extension

Here are the core features I built into the extension.
-On-page content and heading analysis
-Robots.txt and sitemap discovery
-Technical SEO checks (meta tags, canonical, indexability)
-Link and image audits
-Structured data (schema) viewer