The days of law firms and lawyers chasing search engine rankings from legal publishing and measuring such success via analytics may be coming to an end.
Isabella Simonetti and Katherine Blunt of The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday,
Chatbots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting.
Traffic from organic search to HuffPost’s desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washington Post, according to digital market data firm Similarweb.
Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, told his publishing team earlier this year that “[T]he publication should assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero and the company needed to evolve its business model.”
Thompson said ““Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine. We have to develop new strategies.”
Further evidence of Google’s shift from a search engine came came with announcements on Tuesday that Google extended voluntary buyout offers to U.S. employees, particularly targeting search, a cost-cutting measure to help fund billions in AI spending—including its efforts to be an answer engine.
What’s it mean for lawyers and law firms?
For those lawyers who have published in an engaging and authoritative fashion to cover niche areas of the law so as to establish thought leader status—whether in a small law firm or a large firm and whether publishing on consumer or business matters—they may be fine.
Such lawyer publishers have established followings and regularly are cited by other publishers and the media. Signals of authority already resulting in their insight, with the appropriate source citation to their publishing, in the “answer engines.”
For law firms who have put a lot of their chips in search engine success by coaching lawyers on SEO tactics and website placement to achieve search performance, all signals of content marketing versus legal publishing, there could be significant problems.
Authority is going to be needed, and is going to be difficult to achieve this authority overnight.
For those lawyers who bought content written by marketing professionals to achieve search rankings for their websites or “blogs,” which never really were law blogs, I’m not sure how AI sees any signals of authority from such content.
As major publishers adjust to life after search traffic and Google shifts resources from search to AI, law firms may soon face the same reality: Google search traffic could drop to zero. It’s time to rethink strategy—and reallocate resources accordingly.