🔥 SEOs Diners Club #201: From Strategist to Developer with Vibe Coding

Hello everyone,

The unstoppable rise of artificial intelligence is reshaping the digital marketing and SEO world every single day. The rules, strategies, and tools we've memorized for years are giving way to more dynamic, smarter, and more personal methods.

This change isn't just affecting the tools we use. It's fundamentally impacting how we think, develop strategies, and even our career paths. As we approach the end of 2025, we're seeing this transformation accelerate, and 2026 promises even more dramatic developments. We're no longer condemned to weeks-long development processes and large budgets to bring an idea to life.

Frankly, I can say this is the most exciting period in my 15-year career. For years, I waited through months-long technical processes to bring ideas to life. Now, I can start using a tool that came to me during a coffee break by that same afternoon. This isn't just a productivity increase, it's the removal of one of creativity's biggest barriers. Technology is democratizing, and this means power is shifting into the hands of strategists. Where we used to say "I need a development team to do this," we're now thinking "How should I explain this to AI?" And I'm eager to share this power with you. We've entered the Vibe Coding era, a time when anyone who understands strategy can build their own tools.

This week, with the first video of a new series I launched on my YouTube channel, "Build Your Own SEO Tool with Vibe Coding," and the detailed Stradiji blog post deconstructing this video, we're examining this revolution under the microscope. My goal isn't just to inform you, but to encourage you to develop your own tools and quickly bring your ideas to life. In 2026, we'll share even more videos like this and harness this power together.

🎯 This Week's In-Depth Analysis: From Strategist to Developer with Vibe Coding

Traditional software development processes required complex code structures and technical knowledge. You'd explain your idea to a developer, document it, and wait for results. Vibe Coding completely changes this equation.

This new philosophy allows you to develop applications without knowing how to code—simply by explaining your intent, workflow, and desired outcome to AI in natural language. It's like giving a master chef your ingredients and describing what flavor you're imagining. You describe the essence of the dish, the "vibe," and they use their culinary knowledge to turn that dream into reality. AI is now taking on this master chef role for us.

Recently, we needed a tool for an e-commerce client that required analyzing complex data. The old way would have meant a software project lasting weeks. With the new method, I explained exactly what I wanted to Google AI Studio, and a prototype was ready in a few hours. I can't describe the client's amazement and the speed we gained. This isn't just a tool—it's a mindset revolution.

This approach is also recognized by Search Engine Land as a development that's "changing search marketing workflows." As the article notes, Google's AI Overviews delivering answers directly means fewer clicks to brand websites. In this "zero-click" environment, we must offer users more than generic information to draw them into our ecosystem.

The ability to create our own unique and useful tools—calculators, analyzers—is becoming our most practical and powerful response in this new world. For example, a "shipping time calculator" for an e-commerce site, a "mortgage interest comparison tool" for a real estate site, or a "calorie tracking tool" for a health site—these ensure users spend more time on your site and trust you. And you no longer need a software team to create them.

Practical Tip: Start your first experiment today using Google AI Studio and Gemini 3 Pro's advantages like free access and massive context window. Begin by uploading a YouTube video transcript or long blog post and asking it to generate content in different formats (LinkedIn post, Twitter thread, etc.). This is the most concrete way to reduce hours of work to 25 seconds. To go further, you can provide a group of keywords and ask it to create blog post drafts using those words in a specific tone and format. Remember, the goal isn't just to produce content, but to develop content strategy. Another example: For competitive analysis, you can give AI data collected from competitor websites to analyze their strengths and weaknesses, keywords they use, and content strategies. The old way would have taken days. Now you get actionable insights in minutes.

🔍 Algorithm & Search Engine Updates

The search world was quite active this week. I've analyzed the key headlines more deeply for you.

1. Google Now Ranks Entities, Not Websites:

We're taking one step further the new Google reality and rules fundamentally changing SEO that we covered in detail in last week's newsletter. The basic unit is no longer a URL, but your digital identity—the "Entity." The clearest indicator that Google has high confidence in an entity is the Knowledge Panel.

As Search Engine Land's comprehensive guide notes, triggering a Knowledge Panel comes down to being a "known entity" in Google's eyes. This requires creating a consistent, authoritative, and interconnected digital footprint. I personally experienced how arduous but valuable the process of creating a Knowledge Panel for myself was. This is the clearest way to tell Google 'I'm here and I'm serious.' How is this done? Just publishing content on your website isn't enough. News articles about you, interviews, consistent information across your social media profiles, your presence on trusted sources like Wikipedia—all of these are pieces of this structure. Google combines these different signals to create an "identity graph" of who you are. The stronger and more consistent you build this graph, the greater your authority in Google's eyes.

2. News Publishers' Decline in Google Traffic:

According to Newzdash's analysis of over 400 news publishers, traffic from Google Web Search has dropped from 51% to 27% over the past two years. Per Search Engine Roundtable's report, publishers now get 67.5% of their traffic from Google Discover—a highly risky and inconsistent source. This situation both worries and motivates me. It worries me because quality content is struggling to get the value it deserves. It motivates me because this situation forces us to be more creative, build our own audience, and not depend on Google. This is the beginning of the golden age of email newsletters, community management, creating a loyal readership, and direct traffic. You must have your own castle that isn't affected by Google's algorithmic fluctuations.

3. Top Searches of 2025 and Multimodal SEO:

Google announced the top trending searches of 2025, and "Gemini" ranks first globally. This shows how central AI has become. Meanwhile, images are now being processed like language. According to Search Engine Land's Image SEO article, we must optimize for "machine vision." This means using alt text as grounding, ensuring at least 30-pixel character height for OCR, and even making our product packaging machine-readable. For instance, having information on your product's packaging in a supermarket shelf appear when a user searches with Google Lens is now an SEO issue. This is "phygital" marketing itself—where physical and digital worlds intertwine.

Amid all these AI and algorithm updates, we can sometimes overlook the most basic but critical topics: Speed! This week, to thoroughly examine this topic, I hosted a very valuable person on my channel, Selim Koç, founder of Globaliser. With Selim, we discussed how a site's loading speed measured in milliseconds affects multi-million dollar revenues, especially his incredible experiences in global markets. If you want to hear firsthand about the power of speed—far more than just a technical metric—on user experience and commercial success, don't miss this enjoyable conversation.

🤖 News from the AI World

Significant developments are happening on the AI front too.

1. OpenAI and Advertising Strategy:

According to reports from The Information and Search Engine Land, OpenAI plans to place ads within or alongside ChatGPT responses. This could create a direct competitor to Google and Meta and open a completely new, contextual channel for advertising. Imagine: When a user asks ChatGPT "best running shoes," they don't just get information—they see an ad from the most relevant brand right at that moment. This offers the opportunity to show ads at the purest moment of search intent and could be far more effective than traditional search engine advertising. Though still in early stages, this development could fundamentally change the future of digital advertising.

2. Prompt Injection Threat:

The more AI develops, the more security risks grow. According to TechCrunch's report, even OpenAI admits that "prompt injection" attacks are a problem that can never be fully solved. These attacks manipulate AI agents to follow hidden and malicious instructions. Think of it like secretly whispering to a waiter in a restaurant, "Add hot pepper to my friend's meal." You've made them do something they wouldn't normally do through a hidden command. This poses a serious risk, especially for high-access AI browsers that read your emails and manage your calendar.

3. Claude Uses Your Computer:

Anthropic has taken AI capabilities one step further. Claude can now use your computer. With the new Chrome extension, Claude can automate tasks in the background while you work, summarize emails, and even fill out forms. For a marketing professional, this could mean automating tasks like sorting and summarizing hundreds of incoming emails by topic, extracting important statistics from market research reports and adding them to presentations, or creating weekly content calendars for social media. This could be the beginning of a new era in productivity.

Wrapping Up 2025: What Changed in Digital Marketing?

As we leave 2025 behind, I want to summarize once more the transformation in digital marketing and SEO. This year, AI moved from being just an auxiliary tool to the center of strategy. Google's widespread adoption of AI Overviews, ChatGPT's development of search engine features, and competitors like Claude gaining radical capabilities like computer control completely changed the game's rules.

At the same time, with Google's December 2025 Core Algorithm Update, the importance it places on content quality and originality increased once again. "Doing SEO" now means much more than just keyword research and backlink building. It requires a much broader skill set including entity optimization, multimodal content strategy, content architecture optimized for AI, and the ability to build your own tools.

Some will get lost in this transformation, but others will see the opportunities. My advice: don't resist this change. Embrace it and keep yourself constantly updated. Every week brings a new tool, a new feature, a new strategy. Following them, testing them, and integrating them into your own workflow will be key to success in 2026. Curiosity, learning, and the courage to experiment will be your most valuable assets in the new era.

Closing & New Year Wishes

That's it for this week and this year! As you can see, technology is just a lever. Your strategy determines where to place that lever and which direction to push it. With developments like Vibe Coding, technical barriers are disappearing, creating an opportunity to focus on pure strategy. Taking your place in this new era comes down to experimenting and building your own tools. Do you have a tool in mind that you want to bring to life with Vibe Coding? A customer segmentation tool, a keyword analyzer, a content performance dashboard, or something completely different? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

2025 was a transformation year for digital marketing. From Google to OpenAI, from Anthropic to Meta, all major players rapidly advanced in the AI race. As marketers and SEO professionals, we made our work faster, smarter, and more effective using the tools this race produced. I believe 2026 will be a year when we put this transformation into action, integrate even more with AI, and accomplish smarter work. I wish you all health, happiness, and a successful new year ahead! We'll continue meeting in this newsletter in the new year. We'll explore more practical tips, more real project stories, and more inspiring developments together.

If you want to prepare your business for this new digital reality and get ahead of your competitors with AI and SEO integration, we at Stradiji would be happy to develop custom strategies for you. Let's have coffee and build the future together. Let's discover together what we can accomplish in 2026.

Wish you a happy and prosperous new year!

Mert Erkal

About Mert Erkal:

Developing strategies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and search engine technologies, Mert Erkal helps brands become more visible and effective in the digital world. He shares his latest analyses and industry insights on his YouTube channel.

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