I was talking to a lawyer last week who has made her name through real and authentic publishing over the last two decades.
She now wants to show lawyers how to build a real name for themselves. Not with SEO but by publishing to build authority. Sharing authentic insight on legal matters they know best.
What makes her timing so powerful is the rise of AI. She sees potential clients already using tools such as ChatGPT to understand the law and decide who to trust when it comes to choosing a lawyer.
These tools don’t surface keyword tricks and content marketing, they surface genuine authority. That’s why she believes lawyers who publish with care and consistency will be the ones found, cited, and trusted.
She then got to talking about how SEO authorities would likely spin things their way in order to protect their interests. I shared I had seen just that in an article on a newsletter curating “helpful” articles for solo and small firm lawyers.
With traffic from search going through the floor as a result of AI and LLM’s, the article in Search Engine Journal says in the days of AI the same type of SEO fundamentals still apply, The fundamentals sold by SEO agencies for years.
The article makes apparent SEO experts’ efforts to supplant “real authority” with tactics similar to those tactics used for years in SEO. Just make visibility on AI as complicated as SEO and make a business out of it.
“AI systems are far less forgiving than Google’s crawlers… Your content must be immediately visible in raw HTML.”
Another warning followed:
“Server-side rendering becomes absolutely critical since AI agents won’t execute JavaScript or wait for client-side rendering.”
And for content strategy:
“AI systems don’t retrieve entire pages; they break content into passages… each section of your content should work as a standalone snippet.”
It’s that simple, they tell us. Just swap SEO for AI. Hire someone to tweak the code, restructure the markup, and build “AI-friendly” pillar pages. Voilà, authority achieved.
Really? Yesterday it was keyword density. Today it’s AI optimization. Different jargon, same promise: a technical shortcut to credibility.
But authority doesn’t come from code. It comes from lawyers publishing with care, in their own voice, on the issues they know best. That’s what AI surfaces, not markup tricks.
SEO work done for lawyers by historically trusted authorities doesn’t come cheap. Some lawyers are spending North of $30,000 a month, with the lower range running around $5,000 per month.
That’s fine if it works garnering clients. Years ago, lawyers paid the yellow page people just as much, even more in some cases. But lawyers moved on from the Yellow Pages when clients moved on. The Internet became the new way clients found lawyers.
Now, AI is changing the game again. This time, it doesn’t necessarily reward sophisticated SEO tactics. What it rewards is something much simpler, and much harder to fake: real, authentic publishing by lawyers themselves. Especially in a niche.
Lawyers need to start asking hard questions of those in SEO saying nothing has changed as far as need ‘tech markup.’ AI has changed how the best lawyers and their publishing get found. It’s not about complicated formulas. It’s about publishing with authority and authenticity.
As the lawyer I was talking to put it: It’s going to be something when lawyers realize that ChatGPT highlights published work and that the lawyers publishing authentically, especially on blogs, are the ones showing up.
She’s right, it will.