Most business names are made up. Mine wasn’t.
Deep Recon is named for a person: Robert E. Conway. My father. Twenty years on U.S. Navy diesel submarines. A man who navigated in the dark, under pressure, by instruments, long before that was a metaphor anyone used in startup pitches.
He passed in 2006. The business came later. But the name was never in question.
Who He Was
My father started a tractor dealership when I was about seven years old. Nothing fancy. It started with a single tractor parked next to Highway 101. He built a sign with a scrollsaw, painstakingly cutting out each letter and painting them by hand. We mounted it to a trailer that we pulled behind that tractor. Simple, just the way Dad liked it.
The tractor business took us to auctions where we found all kinds of things. Sometimes boats and RVs. Dad loved to be on the water, so boats often caught his eye. What we lacked in wealth we made up for with ingenuity. He didn’t like to see things discarded due to neglect when they could easily be repaired. And he didn’t just fix the damage. He would take time to improve whatever he worked on so the problem wouldn’t happen again. He was a machinist. We could make anything.
As I worked alongside him every day, I learned the gaps in his knowledge, and I became the tool to fill them. He never asked me to. I just did it. To be efficient. To make things better.
That instinct has never left me.
The Ocean Always Comes Back Around
There’s a thing that happens when you grow up with the sea in your family’s story. You don’t always notice it at first. But the ocean keeps showing up: in what draws your attention, in what feels urgent, in what you can’t stop reading about.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, surrounded by old-growth forests and pristine coastlines, wildlife was everywhere. In elementary school they would take us to Salt Creek, where we would spend the day in awe of the myriad of life forms in the tide pools. Then one year, as if someone forgot to pay the bill, the pools were lifeless. Just empty water and remnants.
When we returned the next year, it was still lifeless. The year after that, more of the same.
I was about eleven years old when I first understood that something was wrong. Not just here. Everywhere.
The science is not abstract. Mangrove forests store carbon at rates that dwarf terrestrial forests. They protect coastlines. They are nurseries for marine life. And they are disappearing fast. Half the world’s mangroves have been lost in the last fifty years. The ocean my father served beneath is not the same ocean it was in 1973.
That’s not a metaphor. It’s a fact. And it made the direction of this business obvious.
Why Technology, Why Now
I’ve been a self-taught technologist since I was a kid. That part of me didn’t start with Deep Recon. It’s just how I think.
When I search for something and find the results dominated by ads from faceless corporations, it frustrates me. The organizations that could benefit most from better visibility in search are often the least equipped to do anything about it. They don’t have SEO teams or growth budgets. They have good work and not enough time.
That dynamic got sharper when AI search arrived. Small business owners are not losing to bigger competitors in AI-generated results. They’re losing to ghosts: companies that figured out how to be legible to these systems earlier. That gap is closeable. But only if someone explains it plainly and helps them fix it.
That’s the AI Discoverability Audit. It’s grounded in Generative Engine Optimization, the practice of making your business visible to AI-powered search.
The Business-to-Mission Connection
Here’s the part I want to be transparent about, because I think it matters.
Deep Recon is not a nonprofit. It’s not a charity project I run on the side. It’s a real business with a real product, and a deliberate, explicit connection between revenue and mission.
Every AI Discoverability Audit we complete moves money toward the vessel fund. The goal is a PSV-style workboat: a platform supply vessel configured for oceanographic research, ocean cleanup, and mangrove restoration. Not a fantasy. An actual vessel, with actual capabilities, doing actual work in the water.
The vessel will be named Deep Recon. It represents a dream and a promise kept. I envision days onboard tending sea grass beds, applying ocean alkalinity enhancers to protect reefs from bleaching, and building barrier islands anchored by mangrove forests.
That’s what we’re building toward. One audit at a time.
What “Deep Recon” Actually Means
The name carries more than one meaning, and that’s intentional.
Recon, as in reconnaissance. As in: go look at the situation before you act on it. That’s what the AI Discoverability Audit is. It’s reconnaissance for your business’s position in the new search landscape, a clear-eyed look at what AI engines see, what they miss, and what it takes to change the picture.
Deep, as in submarines. As in my father. As in the ocean we’re working to protect and the effort that has been, and will continue to be, invested in that work.
R.E.C.: Robert E. Conway. The initials are in the name. They’ll be on the boat.
A Note Before You Go
For the first time, I’ve aligned my tech ambitions with my lifelong conservation goals. I think that matters now more than ever, because truth and trust are increasingly rare in the age of AI. But I believe the effort is still worthwhile.
There is a real person behind this website and a real person orchestrating the processes behind every audit we perform. I look forward to helping you make your organization visible, findable, and shareable in AI search.