From an AI-built site to being indexed by search engines

In my first build diary, I wrote about how I built this site from scratch with an AI dual-agent workflow (Hermes × Codex). This one is about the stretch from “it runs” to “it’s officially live and being indexed” — which involved a lot of repeated polish, a few pitfalls, and finally buying a domain, deploying, and getting indexed by both Google and Bing.

Before launch, we changed a lot of details

There’s a big gap between “the site runs” and “the site is presentable”. Before the official release, the bulk of the work was in a few categories of detail polish:

1. Dual skin (dark / light) The site was originally a single dark theme. I reworked the color system into a set of CSS variables driving the skin, added a sun/moon toggle, and made it flash-free — it remembers the theme you last chose and doesn’t flash white-then-dark on load. The light skin uses a clean slate background with white cards; the dark one keeps the original techy mood. I recalibrated button, card and text contrast for both.

2. Bilingual (Chinese / English) I added a complete English version (at /en/) and translated every post. The header language switch maps by the current page’s path rather than just jumping home — from a Chinese page you land on the matching English page and vice versa, with no 404s. For SEO it means every piece of content gets a second English entry point.

3. Branding and visual identity I unified the wordmark into uppercase CYANLABS (tighter letter-spacing with a gradient accent), replaced an early plain “single letter C” version, adopted a branded “prism” mark for the favicon, and added an Open Graph preview image — so when someone shares your link in WeChat, Telegram or X, it shows a branded card with title instead of a bare URL.

4. Responsive navigation Navigation is the biggest headache on mobile. The English nav used to overflow and not center; a Chinese four-character label stuck out too. The fix: mobile collapses into a hamburger menu with a clean vertical list; desktop is horizontally centered with short labels. It now looks decent in both languages and both skins.

5. Consistent pillar naming The four pillars (AI, Photography, Trading, Everyday Saving) got unified across the Chinese pages, English pages, navigation and the homepage cards: Chinese pages use a “Chinese + English” format, English pages keep English only, and the nav shows concise short names.

Each of these changes is small on its own, but together they decide whether the site feels like something done with care. Taste and detail are the most time-consuming part of working with AI.

And this polish wasn’t a one-off — it ran right through launch. A lot of the time it was “finish one thing, then suddenly remember another detail to fix” — letter-spacing, the skin-switch transition, some page’s whitespace. These ideas come up in spare moments. Since I’d hooked the agent up to a chat app, I could ask it to change anything from anywhere: on my way home, before bed — think of something, tell it to fix it. When I counted it up afterwards, fixing all these details actually burned more tokens than building the whole site in the first place. Strange as it sounds, though it was fussy and expensive, watching this site take shape bit by bit gave me a real, tangible sense of achievement — maybe that’s the joy of making something with your own hands.

Launch: buying a domain + deploying

When development was mostly settled, I bought my own domain — the decisive step from “a project” to “a site”. A domain isn’t just a URL; it’s part of identity, and it’s also a prerequisite for SEO (more on why below).

I then deployed the code to a static hosting platform that supports automatic builds: every time you push code, the platform rebuilds and publishes it. The payoff is a “push-to-release” workflow — change content, verify, commit, push, and it’s live within minutes, with no manual uploading.

One honest note: behind this kind of “automatic deploy” there’s a set of conventions I’ve put together for myself (a consistent commit style, updating a handoff document at the end of each session, and so on). But I tend not to publish that kind of backend detail — not out of secrecy for its own sake, but because there’s no reason to expose the inner workings to anyone poking around. A website’s job is to show its content, not its machinery.

Getting indexed: the SEO few tricks

After the code went live, it was not automatically indexed by Google. Search engines don’t discover a new site on their own; you have to ask them. The SEO prep and submission steps I used here are actually copy-pasteable for most people:

1. Let crawlers find you

• Sitemap: a site map listing every page, so engines can grab them all at once. Mine is generated at deploy time and covers every page (including the English ones).
• robots.txt: tells engines “the whole site can be crawled” and points to the sitemap. I wrote this explicitly to avoid any default setting silently blocking crawlers.

2. Make content worth indexing

• Every page has a clear title and description.
• Added canonical URLs to avoid duplicate indexing across language/URL variants.
• An Open Graph share card, so shared links look more attractive and earn more clicks and shares.
• The bilingual /en/ eats into English search — effectively double exposure.

3. Submit to engines proactively

• Google Search Console: verify ownership (I used DNS verification) → submit the sitemap → then “URL Inspection / Request Indexing” to nudge the crawler.
• Bing Webmaster Tools: import it in one click from Google, and the sitemap syncs over automatically, saving a manual config.
• After submitting, Google showed “Success”, but indexing takes time — a new site has a “settling-in” phase, going from 0 to some indexed pages in anywhere from a day to two weeks. That’s normal; just be patient.

A small reflection

The deepest takeaway: AI can build things, but the “presentable launch” and “being found” come down to taste, detail, and a little SEO common sense. What AI produces is a draft; the person turns it into a piece of work.

And: separate openness from security. Show the world your best content, a professional tone, and clear pillars — keep the automation, config, and directory structure in your private domain. A website is there to display you, not to be an exam subject for others.

Now the four pillars are slowly filling up with content. May it be seen by you — and may it be worth staying a little longer.