After fifteen years, Disability Insurance Agency is now Seaworthy Insurance. The reason is less about marketing than about which audience matters now.
Same team. Same work. New name. Why would we walk away from a name we spent fifteen years building? Artificial intelligence turned our old name into a liability, and changing it was the rational move.
The problem with a name that is also a category
When someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, the model must decide what it can confidently recognize as actual entities prior to attaching its answer to one. That recognition step quietly decides who gets named and who gets left out.
Our old name worked against that step every time. "Disability insurance agency" is not a brand. It is the category, written out in three ordinary words. A model trying to work out whether that phrase points to us specifically or to the general idea of any agency that sells disability insurance has a genuinely hard time telling the difference, because the words describe the whole field and not one company inside it.
For most of our history this literalness was an asset. The name told a human exactly what we did the moment they read it, and a descriptive name helped when search was a matter of matching words on a page. The thing that made us easy to find in 2012 is the same thing that makes us easy to overlook in 2026. A generic phrase blends into the category it describes, while a distinct name reads as a company you could select.
Finding a name in 2026 is harder than it looks
Once we accepted that the name had to change, the search for a new one turned out to be incredibly difficult. The criteria stacked up fast. We wanted a one-word domain after living with the eye-wateringly long disabilityinsuranceagency domain for so many years. It had to be relatively unique, not already in use by another firm, acceptable to insurance regulators (every name a licensed agency operates under must clear the state Department of Insurance), and with a clean enough history to trademark. Each of those filters is reasonable on its own, and together they eliminate almost everything.
The one-word .com is effectively gone. The good single words were claimed decades ago and now sit in the aftermarket at prices that make no sense for a four-person firm. The fallbacks people reach for, .io and .co and .ai, have climbed the same curve, pushed up by tech startups and AI companies competing for the same short, memorable words we were. And we refused to do that modern made-up word thing, where you mash two or three words together into something that sounds "cool."
So most candidates died on at least one criterion. A word we liked was already a registered insurance mark somewhere. A domain we could afford would not survive a trademark search. A name that cleared trademark sounded like nothing and meant nothing. This went on for months. In the event you have not tried to come up with a name for a company in a regulated industry lately, rest assured the scarcity is worse than you would guess.
Why Seaworthy
Seaworthy survived all of it, and it earned the spot on more than availability. The word has a quiet confidence to it. It's the opposite of sleek or luxurious. It suggests something that's been proven, or at least built with the assumption that it will be tested. There's an implied adversary: the sea. A seaworthy vessel isn't just well-made, it's well-made against something. It's a compliment you'd give to something you'd bet your life on.
The logic of disability insurance is the same logic. Your ability to earn is the asset. A serious illness or injury is the storm that can take it out from under you. The coverage is what keeps you afloat through a stretch you did not choose and cannot control. A physician, a dentist, a CRNA, a solutions engineer: each one has built an income that most of their financial life now depends on, and most of them have insured the house and the car far more carefully than the engine that pays for both.
Seaworthy says that in one word. It is distinctive inside this category, it cleared both trademark and the regulators, and it means something true about the work instead of merely describing it. That combination is rarer than it sounds, which is exactly why the search took as long as it did.
What this says about how people will find you
A fifteen-year-old firm does not change its name on a whim, and I would not have done it for a logo refresh or a fresh coat of paint. I did it because the way people find a specialist is shifting under all of us.
For most of the internet era, a name had two audiences: the human who had to remember it and the search engine that had to match it. Both rewarded a descriptive name. Now there is a third audience, the model that sits between a person and the shortlist they end up with. When a physician asks an assistant who to talk to about own-occupation coverage, the assistant runs a recognition check before it answers, and a name that reads as a category struggles to clear it.
I believe this will reshape naming across professional services well beyond insurance. Firms that read as distinct entities will get named in the answer. Firms whose names read as the category will get folded into the summary above the answer, mentioned as a type rather than a choice. Given which of those two outcomes sends a client to your door, I would rather operate a name than a description.
Toby Lason is Managing Partner of Seaworthy Insurance (formerly Disability Insurance Agency), a brokerage specializing in disability and income protection for high-income professionals.