I Can't Really Code. I Built an Indexing Monitor With Claude Anyway.

Three weeks ago a page that had been pulling steady search traffic for over a year disappeared from Google. Not deranked, just gone. I only noticed by accident, about ten days later, while poking around Search Console for something unrelated. Ten days of a page earning nothing because nobody, including me, was watching. Some background: I'm a marketer. I run a small agency, I publish a lot of pages across a few sites, and my technical ceiling for the last decade has been editing HTML that someone else wrote. Our actual developers are busy with actual work, and "can you build me a thing that watches Google" is exactly the kind of request that dies in a backlog. Search Console does show you indexing problems. It shows them to people who log in and go looking. I have around 400 URLs I care about across three properties, and I was never going to check them by hand on any schedule more honest than "when something feels off." I'd been reading Claude Code posts on here for months as a spectator. The genre is usually a developer using it to move faster. I wanted to know what happens when someone who can't write the code at all uses it to start from zero. So I paid for a month and typed what I wanted in plain English. Version one lasted twenty minutes My first prompt was something like: check if these URLs are indexed in Google and tell me when one falls out. Claude cheerfully produced a script that ran a site: search for every URL and scraped the results page. It worked. For about twenty minutes. Then Google decided I was a robot, which was technically correct, and started serving captchas. Nobody warned me about this part of vibe coding: the model will build exactly what you asked for, including when what you asked for is against the rules and dies on contact with reality. It only mentioned that scraping Google results is a bad idea after I pasted the captcha error and asked why everything was broken. Then it apologized and told me what it could have said at the start: the