Attorneys and law firms understand how important web search is for attracting business, but AI has changed how web search works. Where search engine optimization (SEO) used to be the gold standard strategy for boosting web sites to the top of search results pages, now it’s AEO, “answer engine optimization,” and it’s a new frontier.
Attorneys want to be at the top of results when potential clients search “divorce attorney Memphis” (insert your practice area and location). They write articles to get to the top of searches for legal questions, too, such as, “How to file a divorce in Tennessee.” But now, people are turning to generative AI chatbots for answers, making it harder to get in front of the user.
The AI assistant field is becoming crowded and growing ever-more competitive among OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, X’s Grok, and others.
While these chatbots all link sources when they provide gen-AI answers, Google continues to dominate the web search market, taking 90% market share in 2025, according to GlobalStats. In mid-2024, Google introduced AI Overview to search results, which is an AI-generated summary answering the search query. Google’s AI Overview does often include source links that users can follow to learn more or check sources, creating a strategic opportunity for attorneys who can leverage their knowledge and experience into a decent article. This opportunity to attract more visibility, link a law firm’s blog, and drive readers to a firm’s website in Google AI Overview is our focus in this article.
Opportunities and Challenges with AI Overview Search
For an attorney, it works like this: A potential client types a legal question. The AI summary will give them an answer (and hopefully a disclaimer about Google searches not substituting for professional legal advice). And the sources are linked by a little icon. Be the answer, attract the traffic.
Unfortunately, AI summaries have changed the way many users interact with Google search. According to Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely now to click on result links when a search results in an AI-generated summary. That caveat notwithstanding, if someone is actively searching for an attorney and a lawyer or law firm’s links are included in the AI summary for a legal question, there is an opportunity to win a click to the article and the firm’s website from a warm lead.
Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines determine what content gets cited in AI Overview. A source’s credibility score is determined by EEAT: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Your law firm’s website possesses these factors, making its web pages, client alerts and blogs the best place to post content with a high EEAT ranking to potentially get noticed and linked by AI Overview. You have the answers that people need, and your firm’s blog is a channel where you can provide them.
Coming Up with a Topic
Mine your experiences to think about your client’s goals and problems, and translate them into narrow questions that they may type into a search bar that can bring your website into the results.
Keep your questions as specific as possible, and keep your blog article focused on that question.
According to Google AI Overview, the top legal questions searched for are in these areas of law:
- Family Law: Questions about child custody, filing for divorce, and modifying child support.
- Employment Law: Concerns regarding wrongful termination, workplace harassment, and wage disputes.
- Real Estate Law: Inquiries about foreclosure rights, needing a lawyer for property transactions, and boundary disputes.
- Criminal Law: Questions about DUI charges, expunging criminal records, and rights during arrest.
- Intellectual Property: Searches related to copyright, trademark registration, and patenting inventions.
For family law, the questions could be, “How is child custody determined in New Jersey?” For employment, it could be, “Can I sue my employer for wrongful termination?” For real estate law, it could be, “How can I prevent foreclosure?”
Commercially focused attorneys who don’t cater to consumers shouldn’t assume that their clients don’t use Google for legal questions. Small and middle-market businesses, family offices, investors, bankers, and other professionals may not have general counsel — yet — and could turn to Google when they begin investigating a legal question.
How do I incorporate a business in Delaware? What insurance coverage do I need for a commercial property in Chicago? How long does a patent stay in force? What is the minimum transaction size for antitrust disclosure?
Think about the questions that clients ask you, write the answers on your firm’s blog, and with these following tips, you’ll have a better chance that AI will pick up your content when it generates answers on AI Overview.
6 Tips for Enhancing Your Article for AI Overview
Full disclosure: We asked Google Gemini for help with this section, and edited its response for clarity and concision. Best to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, right?
Question: “Hey Google, give my readers some points to enhance their articles for answer engine optimization.”
1. Use Definitive Definitions: When defining a term, use the Subject + Verb + Object structure immediately following a heading.
For example, if your topic is, “How do you file an ANDA?” (the legal process of applying to the FDA to market generic medications), your lead sentence would state, “An ANDA stands for an Abbreviated New Drug Application, and it is the legal process by which …”
Why: This creates a clear “snippet” the AI can grab. If your definition is the most concise and accurate, you win the citation.
2. Use the “According to…” Sentence Structure: Write sentences that are ready-made for citation. Instead of generic text, write: “Our 2024 internal study shows that 60% of users prefer…”
Why: AI models look for specific claims to back up their summaries. If you explicitly state, “We found X,” the AI is more likely to link to you as the primary source of that finding.
3. Focus on Information Gain: AI Overview consolidates existing knowledge. To get a link, you must provide something that doesn’t exist elsewhere. This is where you, as an attorney, have the advantage. You possess rare expertise, and it’s even rarer for lawyers to write about their expertise in a clear and concise way.
Why: If the AI is answering a query based on general consensus, it might cite Wikipedia. If the query requires specific, fresh data, and you are the only one with that data, the AI must link to you.
4. Contrarian or Expert Commentary: Again, as an attorney you provide a “human expert” angle that contradicts or adds nuance to the generic AI answer.
Why: Your law firm’s website possesses qualities that Google prioritizes: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Also, AI Overview often includes a “Perspectives” or expert link bubble. You get this by offering a unique viewpoint, not a generic summary.
5. The AI needs to know WHO you are to trust you as a source. Here, being a law firm or lawyer is your advantage.
Why: AEO relies heavily on the Knowledge Graph. If Google understands that you are an entity associated with legal expertise, it is “safer” for the AI to cite you than anyone else.
6. Corroboration: Get cited by other authoritative sites.
Why: If the AI sees that the New York Times or HubSpot cites your data, it assigns your domain a higher “confidence score,” making it more likely to use your content as the root answer.
Traditional SEO wasn’t the easiest marketing endeavor, and gen-AI has created even more challenges by adding opacity to the process of providing legal information by removing the direct connection between the subject matter expert and the searcher. Nonetheless, web search is still king and there remains the opportunity to bring warm leads to your website through well-written content.
Need help ghostwriting articles that are enhanced for AI Overview results, or want to come up with a strategy for publishing articles regularly? Reach out to Ada Kase at ajkase@jaffepr.com.