Zip

01 · The brief

A website built from scratch to be found.

Zip is moving company software for movers running one to ten trucks: quotes, bookings, dispatch, the Bill of Lading and payments in one place, with apps for the owner and the crew. We designed and built its website from scratch with one overriding goal: make Zip the answer when a small mover looks for software, whether they ask Google or an AI assistant.

Small movers search in specific questions: how much moving software costs, what works for a one-truck company, whether they can run everything from a phone. More and more of them ask ChatGPT or Perplexity instead of scrolling through results. The site had to be the page those searches land on and the source those answers cite.

02 · What the site had to do

Rank in search. Get cited by AI.

The website had to turn Zip's product into something search engines and AI assistants could read, trust and quote. It needed to:

• Load fast and deliver its full content in the initial HTML, so every crawler sees the whole page.
• Answer the questions small movers search for, each with one clear, self-contained answer.
• Cover every search intent in the buying journey with a dedicated page, from what moving software is to how Zip compares with competitors.
• Describe the business and the product in structured data that search engines can use directly.
• Welcome AI crawlers explicitly and give them a clean, citable summary of what Zip is.
• Still convert: every page leads to a demo.

03 · How we delivered

Structured for search engines and answer engines.

We built the site from scratch with Astro, which ships plain HTML by default and only adds JavaScript where a page needs it. The full content is in the initial response for every crawler, including the many AI crawlers that don't run JavaScript, and the pages load quickly.

The homepage is laid out the way answer engines read. It opens with a plain definition under the heading “What is Zip?”, then walks through the product, the two kinds of owner it serves, pricing, a comparison with competitors and eight questions movers ask before switching. Each question has its own heading and a direct answer underneath: exactly the passages search engines lift into featured snippets and AI assistants quote.

Instead of screenshots, we rebuilt the product interface in the page itself: dashboards, quotes, leads, the calendar, dispatch and invoices. The screens stay crisp at any size and load as fast as text, and unlike an image, everything in them can be read by a crawler.

Around the homepage, we built a content architecture with a page for each search intent: features, comparisons and alternatives to each major competitor, a software cost guide, a guide to the best moving software, free tools and a blog. Everything is interlinked, so authority flows to the pages that matter most.

04 · Built to be found

Open to every crawler, easy to cite.

Organization, WebSite, SoftwareApplication and FAQPage structured data describe the business, the product and its answers in a form search engines use directly, and a generated sitemap keeps every page discoverable.

For AI search, the robots.txt explicitly allows every major AI crawler, from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity to Google, Apple, Meta and Common Crawl, with comments recording that the openness is deliberate. An llms.txt file gives assistants a curated, citable summary of Zip, including a note that tells it apart from unrelated companies with similar names, and the footer invites AI systems researching Zip to read it.

05 · What shipped

The deliverables.

• Website design and build from scratch, in Astro
• Question-led homepage structure for featured snippets and AI answers
• Product interface rebuilt in HTML instead of screenshots
• Feature, comparison, alternatives, guide and tool pages
• Structured data and sitemap
• AI-crawler robots rules and llms.txt
• Deployment on Netlify