Search Recon

Find out what's actually broken about your search presence. Then we'll tell you which three things to fix.

Most SEO work fails the same way. An agency hands you a hundred-item backlog and bills against it for a year. By month nine you have shipped half of it. None of the high-impact moves were obvious from the list because no one ranked them honestly.

Search Recon is the other direction. We scout the terrain first. We figure out where you actually stand on traditional search, on AI answers, and against the competitors who are eating your category. Then we hand you actionable insights with the noise already tuned out.

Want to start before booking?

Free industry SEO cheat sheets. Browse the index →

One page per line of work. Keywords with search volumes, title tag examples, meta descriptions, H1 patterns, and the moves that compound. Useful before a recon engagement, or instead of one if you want to DIY.

Why most teams need this

The flat handle of search work has gotten longer.

Google's SERP keeps shrinking the organic real estate. AI answers grab more queries every quarter. The old playbooks still kind of work, but the payoff window is wider and the signal is noisier. If you can't tell where the bend is, you spend a year doing motion that does not move the line.

You're probably here if

  • You can't tell if your traffic dip is a Google update, a content problem, or a technical regression.
  • An agency built you a roadmap. You can't tell if any of it actually matters.
  • Your competitors keep showing up in AI answers. You don't.
  • You're paying for content that isn't ranking and you don't know why.

What recon covers

Six lenses. Whatever your shape, the work fits somewhere here.

We weigh each lens against your business model. A local service shop and a national e-commerce brand do not get the same recon. Same framework, different priorities.

Technical foundations

Crawl health, index coverage, schema, core web vitals, redirect chains. The unglamorous stuff that quietly caps your ceiling.

Search intent fit

Whether the pages you have answer the queries people actually type. Most underperforming sites lose here, not on technicals.

AI answer surfaces

What ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews say about you and your competitors when buyers ask. The new home page.

Competitive gap

Who is ranking for the terms that should be yours, what they do differently, and which of those moves you can actually copy this quarter.

Content economics

Which pages earn their keep, which ones drift, and which deserve consolidation, rewrite, or quiet retirement.

Authority signals

Backlink profile, brand mentions, citations. We tell you which gaps are real moats and which are vanity.

What you walk away with

A short list. Ranked. With the cuts made.

Not a hundred-item backlog. Not a slide deck. A focused recommendation you can take to your team this week, with the reasoning attached so people can argue with it.

  • A short list of fixes that move the line, in priority order.
  • A short list of things to stop doing.
  • A keyword map tied to revenue, not impressions.
  • An AI-search snapshot so you know what buyers see when they ask a model about you.
  • A named owner and a realistic timeline for each move.
If you're not on page one, you're invisible. If you're not in the AI answer, you don't exist.
The bar has moved twice in two years. Recon is how you stop guessing where it is.

Ready for the scout

Thirty minutes. We'll tell you what we see.

Bring a URL. We'll walk through what's ranking, what's being eaten by AI answers, who is winning the competitive set, and where the highest-impact move probably lives. No deck. No commitment.

Free Coaching Call