Stop Putting AI Gradients on Every Feature - George Little, BrandZap

"Stop putting AI gradients on every feature you have," says George Little, who runs BrandZap, a consultancy that builds brands and websites for B2B companies, mostly in SaaS. His point: say what the AI actually does for your users, or you sound like every other tool built on the same API.

George came into marketing from architecture, moved into business-to-business graphic design, and now positions BrandZap between the freelancer you know and the big agency. On this episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview, he and Jeremy Rivera talk about writing for one buyer inside a buying committee, how he uses AI in three buckets, and why he runs open-source models on Mac minis he bought on eBay. Read the full recap for the quotes and frameworks.

In this episode

• Write for one person. George writes his copy for product marketers and marketing managers, because they are the ones who reach out. Then he arms them to make the case to the CFO.
• Three buckets for AI. Things he has no base knowledge of, like a contract. His own workflows, so he becomes the reviewer. And tools that keep clients executing on the brand standards he built.
• No more hiding it. "I built these 10 pages with AI, but they're all based on my standards." When a client built a deck in Claude from his brand presentation, he gave Claude better instructions instead of fighting it.
• Is anyone even Googling this? An earlier version of his company sold a "fractional creative director." Nobody searched for it, so "fractional" now only describes the relationship.
• Humans vs. bots. Jeremy's human-bot sandwich, and George's answer: the LLM might do the searching, but a human still signs the contract. More on that theme in the Brand, Entity and Visibility hub.
• Self-hosted models. Why a downloaded model running in Open Web UI gives more consistent output for repetitive work like meta descriptions than a hosted chatbot that keeps changing.
• Privacy and what you feed AI. Jeremy brings in Malith Gamage's privacy-first approach to reporting data. George's advice: obfuscate company names when you use a chatbot casually, and scrub data and store keys properly once you build automation.
• Tools vs. output makers. George built his own Loom replacement with Codex. Products with team muscle memory, like Notion and Monday, are the ones he expects to survive.
• Where is the next free channel? LinkedIn is now business TikTok and paid search is priced out. They land on Slack communities as the closest current answer.
• Industry under fire and the .xyz domain. George answers a question from Marc Pitts: follow your audience into adjacent offers. Then why he chose .xyz over a five-figure .com.

Also mentioned

Jeremy references his conversation with Ernesto Ortiz, who calls AI in SEO table stakes.

Find George at brandzap.xyz or on LinkedIn. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More episodes at Unscripted SEO.