Case study one
Zossoz ran its own playbook on itself.
Before Zossoz sold anyone a rebuild, it needed one. In August 2026 the studio tore down its own site, zossoz.com, the same way the free teardown tears down yours, then rebuilt it with the same process it uses for client sites.
Every claim that follows can be checked from your own browser, most of them in under a minute.
The before
First, we ran the teardown on ourselves.
Every Zossoz engagement opens with a teardown of the client’s site. Ours opened the same way, except the client was us. Some of what it found, written down before the rebuild began:
The old site ran on Duda. The free offer was an automated tool called the Website Visibility Scan, gated behind a five-field form that asked for a phone number. Fifty-two blog posts sat behind it.
The glossary’s own H1 read “Glossary Overview: Navigate Essential Branding and Web Terms with Ease,” precisely the kind of SEO-stuffed heading a Zossoz teardown flags on someone else’s site. The privacy policy described data the site never collected: Social Security numbers, payment cards, rental applications.
The old form’s address, /free-website-visibility-scan, still resolves. It lands somewhere else now.
- PLATFORM
- Duda
- OFFER
- automated scan, 5 fields, phone required
- BLOG
- 52 posts
- PRIVACY POLICY
- described data never collected
- SUBJECT
- zossoz.com (that’s us)
The decisions
What actually changed, in order.
Eighteen days from the first change to the last, all of it in August 2026.
- Aug 9
Off Duda, onto a system
zossoz.com was rebuilt as a Next.js visibility system on Vercel, under a design direction named Ocean Drive Noir. The same day, the free offer changed: the automated scan became a free human teardown, the form dropped from five fields, phone included, to three, and real client testimonials, collected through SocialJuice, went live sitewide.
- Aug 13
Consent that can be taken back
Session recording became opt-in everywhere, not only where regulation requires it. Analytics went consent-gated in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland. Every choice stayed withdrawable from the footer, and the privacy policy was rewritten against what the codebase actually does.
- Aug 15
Mail that doesn't leak
TLS became required on outbound SMTP, and form delivery got hardened, so a teardown request has fewer ways to go missing between a visitor's browser and a human's inbox.
- Aug 19
Fewer identical pages
A honeypot field, timing checks, rate limits, and content heuristics went in against form spam. The same pass ran an editorial variation across the /for and /vs page fleets, so sibling industry and comparison pages stopped reading like one template with the names swapped.
- Aug 27
Content off the deploy pipeline
Every post, and the entire content-ideas backlog, moved into a headless system. A post published there now goes live in about five minutes, with no deploy required.
Verify it yourself
Four things you can check before you finish this page.
Right now, on this page
Structured data you can read yourself.
This page ships breadcrumb schema. Sitewide, the same system adds ProfessionalService with a real name, address, and phone, FAQPage wherever a page carries FAQs, and Review markup built from actual client quotes.
Check it: View source, search for application/ld+json.
161
pages in the sitemap
Every service, industry, comparison, location, glossary term, and blog post gets its own URL. The count is computed from the same list that builds the sitemap, so when the site grows, this number follows.
Check it: Open /sitemap.xml and count them.
Bottom of every page
No cookie banner, because nothing needs one.
Nothing records sessions. Google Analytics never loads in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland. Everywhere else, one click in the footer switches it off in that browser, and a Global Privacy Control signal does the same without the click.
Check it: Footer of any page, Analytics opt-out.
3fields on the form
No phone number, no sales sequence.
The old scan form asked for five pieces of information, phone number included. The teardown form asks for a website address, a name, and an email, because that is all a human review needs.
Check it: Count the fields in the teardown form on /websites.
The honest part
What this case study doesn’t show.
There is no before-and-after traffic chart here and no ranking graph. The rebuild shipped in August 2026. Organic traffic, keyword position, and AI citations are the numbers worth watching, and each of them takes quarters to mean anything. A chart built from three weeks of data would be noise dressed up as proof.
Most of the client proof on this site, the /work testimonials included, comes from property management and real estate, the industries Zossoz has gone deepest in. The teardown, blueprint, rebuild, care system runs the same in any industry; the receipts so far come from where the studio started.
Two more case studies are on the way, each with a client’s real numbers, published once the client says so.
Next step
Want the same teardown pointed at your site?
The free teardown is where this rebuild started: a human review, delivered async, no sales call. If you already know you want a rebuild, send a quote request and AJ replies by email with questions and a quote before anything gets built.
No commitment, no pitch. The same four steps, run on your site instead of ours.