Bree Sharp on technical SEO, AI search and the human check
Bree Sharp is a founder, web developer and technical SEO consultant who builds websites, web apps and tools, and improves search visibility for small and growing businesses. In this conversation, Sharp explains how AI supports client research, why project management stayed human-led, and how AI is changing the way prospects compare service providers.
Use AI for work it can reliably speed up, such as research and comparison analysis, but keep human review where context and accuracy matter. For AI search visibility, start with a fast, indexable site, accurate business information and clear answers to customer questions.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I grew up in sales. My dad was the top Kirby salesman in the country for nearly 30 years, and I started selling door to door at 16 and was managing teams by 18. After that I spent close to a decade as a freelance writer and SEO strategist, then launched Bree Sharp in January 2024 so I could build the websites and fix the technical SEO underneath them myself.
What sets me apart is that one person handles both the code and the search side, and I look at both the way a salesperson would: where does a visitor lose interest, what’s broken, and what gets them to pick up the phone. My audits come as a short, prioritized fix list written in plain English, and the person who writes the audit is the same person who fixes it.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Almost all of my new work comes from referrals and inbound. I virtually never do outbound anymore. Referrals are great because the trust is already there, but they depend on someone else remembering to mention me.
I’d like more of it to come from form fills by people who find me on their own: in Google, in other search engines, and in AI answers. That’s the same thing I build for clients, so I hold my own site to it. When someone searches for help with a slow or invisible website and my name comes up in the answer, they reach out already knowing what I do.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
I’ve fully handed research and comparison data analysis over to AI for client work. It pulls the data, lines up the comparisons, and drafts the findings. I still review and approve every final version, because AI sometimes can’t bridge the gap between what a data comparison says and how a person will actually read it. That last step of translating the numbers for a business owner stays with me.
I took project management back. In 2026 I tried several frontier models on completions, task status updates, and other project management work in tools like Asana. Revising what the AI wrote and correcting the statuses it set ended up more frustrating and time-consuming than doing that piece myself, so I went back to handling it by hand.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Yes, though it shows up later in the process than people expect. No client has told me they found me through ChatGPT or another assistant from scratch. What I’m hearing more often is that a prospect already had my name, typed it into an AI assistant next to a few competitors, and asked it to compare us. Several have told me the AI favored me, and that’s part of why they reached out.
So AI is acting as the final reference check before someone fills out a form. People arrive having already read a summary of who I am and what I do, and the first call starts further along. For a small business, that means what AI says about you when someone asks for a comparison matters as much as whether it recommends you on its own.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do this: get your technical foundation right before you chase AI search. Make sure your site loads fast, your important pages can be indexed, your business name, address, and phone match everywhere they appear, and your structured data tells search engines and AI assistants exactly who you are and what you do. Then write pages that answer the specific questions your customers ask, in plain language an assistant can quote. If you bring AI into your own operations, write down what it’s allowed to do on its own and put a human review step before anything goes public.
Ignore anyone selling set-it-and-forget-it AI, guaranteed ChatGPT rankings, or a new acronym every month. The fundamentals that get you found on Google are the same ones that get you cited by AI, so spend there first.
Thank you to Bree Sharp and the team at Bree Sharp for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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