How Law Firms Can Dominate Search With AI SEO

AI is no longer just a buzzword or fad in the world of SEO and legal marketing. 

It’s something that lawyers really need to take into consideration when determining how they’re being found online and how they can leverage AI tools to improve law firm SEO strategies.

Ready to adapt? I’ll show you how below.

Understanding the Modern AI SEO Landscape for Law Firms

It’s no secret that search engine optimization has dramatically changed over the years. 

Ten years ago SEO was mostly tactical. You could insert the right keywords into your meta tags, sprinkle them throughout your landing pages and blogs, build some backlinks, and watch your rankings climb. Those days are long gone.

Modern search algorithms integrated with AI focus heavily on authority signals over keyword manipulation. 

Google’s E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) has become somewhat of the north star to how content is evaluated. This is especially important in what Google calls “Your Money Your Life” in sectors like law and finance, where bad information could be problematic for readers.

For law firms, this means that you can’t treat SEO like a checklist of technical tasks anymore. You need to be positioning yourself as a recognized authority source through genuine thought leadership, proven experience, and trust signals that extend far beyond your website. 

Your Law Firm Needs to Be Visible Everywhere

Google hasn’t quite been de-throned just yet. So you still need to be focusing on traditional SEO and keeping pace with Google’s standards for ranking.

But you can’t just focus exclusively on Google anymore. 

Prospects are using AI for legal advice. And if your firm isn’t showing up in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI search engines, then you’re losing leads to your competitors. 

AI platforms like ChatGPT also evaluate social media, video platforms, and community forums. They look for “best of” and “top” lists to identify thought leaders across multiple channels. So if you’re able to appear on those, it’s a good thing for AIO.

At a minimum, your law firm needs to have a strong presence on YouTube and LinkedIn. There are major advantages to these two platforms.

Google owns YouTube and tends to favor pages with embedded videos. LinkedIn can help position you as a professional authority, and both serve different search engines where potential clients are actively looking for legal help. 

The key to success here is optimizing each platform as though it were its own search engine (because they are).

How to Improve Law Firm Content Strategy for AI Optimization

AI-powered search engines process and present information differently from traditional search engines. And while the AI is “smart” enough to read your content regardless of how it’s presented, you can make things much easier for those crawlers to favor your content ahead of others in search results.

This applies for ranking in Google’s AI overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI tools.

Here’s what you need to do:

Prioritize Question-Based Content

You need to create content about questions that people actually ask. This is much better than just generic practice area overviews.

• How long do families have to file medical malpractice lawsuits?
• Do you need a lawyer to settle a personal injury claim?
• Can you sue a former employer for an illness you got on the job?
• Do I need a living trust or a will or both when doing estate planning?
• How do insurance companies calculate pain and suffering damages?

You get the idea. This approach aligns with how people actually search (especially for voice searches and AI chats). 

Be direct with your answers. Don’t start with paragraphs of fluff and sections of nonsense just to inflate the length of the page. The answers to these questions should be instantly after the ask.

This is one of the many reasons why I love podcast marketing for lawyers. It’s really easy to answer these questions naturally in your own voice. Then when you publish the transcripts of your episodes on your website, AI search engines can pull from your content and summarize the answers.

Format for AI Readability

Long-form content is still great. But if you’re publishing something that’s 2,000-3,000+ words long, you should add some key takeaways or summary points at the top of the page.

AI systems really favor this structure. And it also improves the user experience for people who want quick answers before jumping into the details.

Make sure your content is scannable with logical headers, bullets, short paragraphs, and logical hierarchies. 

Remember, we still need to create content that favors actual humans. You’re not just writing for Google and AI platforms.

Create Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages

Building comprehensive topic clusters isn’t a new concept for law firm SEO. Though this tactic has definitely matured a bit when optimizing for AI.

Instead of just creating a simple hub-and-spoke model (with a central “pillar” of a practice and supporting content that dives deeper into specific subjects), you can expand spokes with things like case studies, location-specific service pages, attorney bios, and more.

Then make sure you link everything in both directions to signal topical authority.

This approach helps AI models understand who you are, what practice areas you cover, where you’re located, who you help, and what types of results you’ve achieved for your clients. 

Become a Champion of Content Stewardship

This is one of the most overlooked strategies for AI SEO, but definitely one of the most important areas of focus for law firms. 

I consult with firms who have built up hundreds or thousands of pages over the years. But so many of them are outdated, thin, or redundant. This is just clutter that ultimately harms your SEO performance. 

Content stewardship involves deleting and merging old content on your website. I’ve had excellent results for my clients in different legal practices when applying this strategy.

Some of these sites worked with an agency years ago that created lots of really bad articles on their site just for the sake of publishing something every week. Now a decade passes and you have a thousand pages on your site. ChatGPT and Google don’t know where to start because everything is just such a mess.

The solution here is to run a regular content audit. Have a systematic approach of how you’re going to delete content, update older pieces where it makes sense, and merge similar pages to create a more comprehensive resource.

If a page is five years old, isn’t getting traffic, and doesn’t serve any value to your audiences today, stop holding on to it. It’s ok to delete these (as long as you’re handling everything appropriately on the technical side).

Avoid Publishing AI Slop

Generating content with ChatGPT or Claude has become too easy. It’s tempting to just pump out dozens of articles every month for minimal investment.

But this approach will ultimately backfire on you.

Google will end up penalizing your site for thin and generic AI-content at scale. And these penalties typically affect the entire site (not just the pages that were generated with AI). This makes it extremely difficult for you to recover. 

Law firms that were previously seeing positive SEO momentum can have their ranking collapse if low-quality AI content starts getting published on your site.

This doesn’t mean that you should avoid AI tools altogether. They can still help you in research, outlines, drafts, and ideas. But everything you publish on your site needs to have genuine expertise, unique insight, and human judgement. 

Simply telling AI to “write a blog about [legal topic]” and then copying/pasting the results will be the downfall of your site.

Technical Foundations for AI SEO

Your content is useless if you don’t have a strong technical foundation. 

Lots of these elements align with traditional technical SEO for Google. But there are some slight variations and additional considerations when you’re trying to appease AI search engines:

• Page speed is still important.
• You need a clear, logical site structure.
• Eliminate heavy JavaScript that can interfere with AI crawlers.
• Use attorney-specific Schema markup to provide structured data for AI systems.

Adding Schema to your site used to be a pain. But you no longer have to write this stuff by hand anymore.

You can even use ChatGPT and other AI tools to generate the appropriate schema code for your pages. For example, you can add attorney/person schema to lawyer bios, legal service schema to define your practice area services, and FAQ schema to better format your question-and-answer content for AI discoverability. 

I recently recorded a podcast on technical SEO audits for AI where I cover a lot of these concepts in greater detail. Give it a listen for my full breakdown. 

How to Use AI Tools (The Right Way) For Law Firm SEO

In addition to appeasing AI search engines, you can use those same tools to help improve law firm’s AI SEO strategy. 

But you need to be really strategic about how you approach this. Think of AI as an enhancement to your existing human-driven strategies. It’s not a replacement.

Here’s where I’ve had the most success:

Research and Discover

Use AI to scan through platforms like Reddit, Quora, and YouTube for pain points and questions people ask in your practice area. Traditional keyword research tools like Ahrefs and Semrush are still valuable for search volume data, but AI is better at identifying long-tail questions and concerns that people are actually asking.

Perplexity is particularly good at this, especially if you want to add unique parameters (like date ranges) or specific sources.

Competitor Analysis

You can use AI to quickly run a gap analysis between your content and your competition. Just feed it the top ranking pages for your target keywords along with your own URLs, and then ask the AI to identify what your competitors do that you don’t. 

I like using Claude for this type of depth. The analysis can give you missing keywords, structural differences, and other subtle nuances that are overlooked based on the data from an Ahrefs export. 

Applying the CRISPE Framework

The CRISPE framework has become a popular approach for using AI tools. Instead of opening a new ChatGPT window and telling it to “write a blog about medical malpractice,” your prompts should be more detailed to get better results.

Here’s what the CRISPE acronym stands for:

• Context: What is the background and situation?
• Role: Who should the AI act as? (an attorney, an SEO expert, etc.)
• Input: What specific data are you working with?
• Steps: What actions should be taken next?
• Persona: Who is the target audience?
• Examples/Exceptions: What should the output look like?

Even with all of this in place, you shouldn’t be copying/pasting AI results and publishing them on your website. But the quality of those AI outputs will be drastically improved based on the quality of your inputs. 

Take 10 minutes to write your prompts, and a blog post that used to take you five hours to write can now be written in an hour or two because the AI prompt acted as a shortcut.

Finding Quick Wins

Start by using the search console and your existing keyword research tools to identify terms where you’re already ranking. It’s much easier to improve content where you’re already seeing positive results instead of building something new from scratch.

Then use AI to analyze the pages that are underperforming. Ask ChatGPT or Gemini what specifically can be improved about your pages.

It might be a new section, shorter intro, more updated research, or a combination of different factors. But the AI here is a shortcut to uncovering improvement opportunities that would otherwise take a human expert much longer to figure out. 

How to Avoid Penalties and Maintain Quality With AI SEO

There are serious consequences associated with publishing low-quality AI-generated content on your law firm’s website.

Publishing 40 articles per month might seem impressive. But ramping up your volume isn’t the answer. Instead, focus on creating fewer pieces of genuinely valuable content that reflect actual human experience while providing insights that readers can’t find anywhere else. 

You also need to set up human guardrails. 

AI systems are flawed and can hallucinate facts. I’ve seen them create case citations that never existed or reference “laws” that were just proposed bills that never actually passed. 

So you always need to fact-check AI outputs and verify that the information it’s presenting to you is accurate and legitimate. You can use a combination of different AI tools to do this (for example, if ChatGPT cites a case or legislation, ask Perplexity to find the source).

Think of anything produced by AI as draft at best that still needs to be verified with the strictest editorial standards. 

Final Thoughts

There have been more changes in the last year of law firm SEO compared to the last five years combined. 

This is largely due to the rapid advancements in AI for both internal strategy and content production, as well as AI being used for people seeking legal advice. 

It’s something that’s fluid and continuing to evolve. And your law firm needs to keep pace with these trends to avoid being left in the dust.

Clinging to your old SEO tactics from the past won’t work. While some are still relevant, the firms winning today are just adapting faster than their competitors.