How Query Fan-Out Affects Your Law Firm’s Content (AI SEO)

The term “query fan-out” is relatively new in the SEO world. We heard it for the first time in May 2025 when Google introduced AI Mode.

Understanding how it works is one of the key foundations for success in AI SEO. But so many law firms that I consult with are either misinterpreting it or missing it altogether. 

Let me cut through the noise and explain this in a way that you can easily apply to your firm’s AI SEO strategy. 

How Query Fan Out Works

If you ask Google a complicated question today, it no longer runs a single search. It runs several, simultaneously. 

Google coined this as query-fan out, and it’s clearly described in Google’s documentation on optimizing your website for generative AI features. 

When a user types something into the search bar, Google runs multiple related queries simultaneously to get even more information. Then it displays even more relevant search results to address what the searcher might be looking for.

For example, if someone searches “what happens if someone dies without a will,” Google might fan that out into related searches like:

• Who inherits when there is no will
• Does the estate have to go through probate
• What happens to the person’s house and bank accounts

This person just typed one thing. But the system went looking for dozens of other questions.

And since it’s drawing from a wider set of searches, Google says that query fan-out ultimately surfaces a wider and more diverse set of links compared to a traditional web search.

Transition to Conversational Searches

If fan-out sounds familiar, it should. Because Google has been doing a version of this for years in the form of “People Also Ask,” which has been sitting in the results page for more than a decade.

This did something similar. Google looked at your question, worked out which questions you were likely to ask next, and then put them in front of you.

But this is very different from what’s happening right now for several reasons.

First, it’s about who’s doing the work. People Also Ask surfaced adjacent questions and waited for the user to click. Fan-out runs those searches on the user’s behalf and merges what comes back into a single answer. 

Second is visibility. The additional questions are no longer printed in the search results for you to screenshot, sort, and build pages around. All of the sub-queries inside of a fan-out aren’t actually shown to anyone. 

The last, and probably biggest change here is what happens when the user asks follow-up questions. Previously, each new search was essentially conducted in a vacuum, even if someone clicked a question within People Also Ask. But now searching in AI Mode becomes a full conversation with context from the previous inputs taken into consideration.

Consider the same query from the example from above: what happens when someone dies without a will?

The results may prompt the user to enter more information, so follow-ups might be something like:

• I live in Massachusetts
• I have three siblings
• My father just died but my mother is still alive

Or the conversation can be taken in a different direction entirely:

• My father is dying but doesn’t have a will
• He’s in the hospital and doesn’t have the mental capacity to create one now
• I’m not sure if I can afford a lawyer

Someone can have full-blown conversations with Google AI Mode or any AI search platform, and the mechanics behind the scenes are going to pull relevant, similar searches based on the context. 

Your Legal Content Matters Even More Now

There’s a version of modern AI search advice that suggests content marketing isn’t as important as it used to be. 

But I think it’s clear that query fan-out proves the opposite.

Law firms cutting content production can slip into a dangerous scenario as they may start disappearing from the search results altogether. A drop in organic traffic is normal now with AI searches because informational-only queries don’t necessarily result in page visits. 

And that’s fine. Because most of those searches weren’t from people looking to hire a lawyer. So don’t use slumping traffic as a reason to cut your content production, especially when Google’s own guidance echoes its importance.

From a content perspective, the key to your law firm’s visibility in AI search comes down to depth. 

Under a single ranked list of blue links, you were just competing on one page per query. So you were incentivized to build one strong page and push it. But now when an algorithm runs eight searches for a single query, the law firm showing up in five of those eight is going to do better than the firm with just a single strong page.

Pages ranking 9th for a question that almost nobody typed directly used to be worthless. But now that same page can be retrieved as a supporting source for a question that does convert. Because it’s sitting alongside a relevant question that the system searched on its way there. 

How to Approach Your Law Firm’s Content for Query Fan-Out

From a strategy standpoint, the way query fan-out works in the legal space should change how your approach content creation. It’s similar to the way you may have built pillar pages in the past or created hub-and-spoke content. But volume alone won’t be enough. 

Each piece of content being created needs to have enough depth to stand on its own two feet. While simultaneously working alongside everything else on that particular subject. 

Step 1 – Start by Mapping Your Fan for Scenarios Within a Practice Area Search Term

Stop thinking in keywords and start thinking in question sets. Start with your primary practice area and think about an actual scenario that your clients approach you with.

Let’s say a woman had a mammogram read as normal but was diagnosed with stage 3 two years later. She may search for some version of “my mammogram was clear and now I have stage 3 bread cancer.”

That question fans into:

• How often radiologists miss cancer on mammograms
• Whether a missed diagnosis is considered medical malpractice
• If a two-year delay changes her prognosis
• When the clock to file a claim starts (the scan or diagnosis)
• Whether her state caps noneconomic damages
• Who is liable: radiologist, imaging center, hospital, or ordering physician
• What cases like this typically settle for

If you’re a medical malpractice lawyer, go count how many of these your site answers with a real page instead of a single sentence in your practice area overview.

For most firms, the honest question is probably just one. And it’s the last one on the list, which also happens to be the one every competitor on the market has already built. 

Repeat this exercise for your three strongest case patterns, and you’ll quickly have a content plan that’s more practical than any keyword export can give you. 

Step 2 – Then Multiply by Jurisdiction or Variable

Legal questions fan out in a way that most industries don’t have.

For example, a question about recovering from knee replacement surgery is relatively straightforward. Are there variables? Sure. But it’s not like the answer is different for someone in Connecticut than it is for someone in Colorado.

But now take the breast cancer scenario. Depending on the jurisdiction, there will be different answers for:

• What’s rejected outright
• Damage caps
• Loss of chance rules

You can expand here for other variables like specific hospitals in your area, the age of the patient, family history, and so on.

A single practice page can’t answer these types of questions for everyone (and it shouldn’t).

You need to be specific in a way in which the algorithm’s retrieval system decides that your pages accurately answer the sub-query that it’s searching for. 

Step 3 – Understand How Your Coverage Compounds

A common mistake made here is that a law firm’s marketing team or an agency or whoever is making content decisions decides to publish ten new pieces on a subject and then moves on because they feel like that gives the site depth.

That’s not the right approach.

Coverage compounds within a practice area. Your blog post on affidavit requirements makes your interactive filing clock deadline tool more retrievable because they share entities, citations, and internal links.  So a system evaluating your website on its expertise in delayed-diagnosis questions will find a denser cluster instead of an orphaned page. 

But none of this carries over to your truck accident pages. 

Yes, as a whole, there is still a connection when evaluating the quality of a domain. But the fan-out for one practice area or search pattern won’t necessarily move the needle for an unrelated subject.

Your truck accident content needs to have its own depth to carry weight and appear in AI searches. 

Step 4 – Use Your Client Intake Notes as a Research Point

There are SEO tools out there designed to identify query fan-out gaps. And while you can definitely use them, none of them know your firm the way you do.

And none of them have access to the information you’re sitting on.

Your client intake questions should be your starting point. What is actually bringing people to your door for a consultation?

Those are the questions you should be targeting with your content strategy because it’s what you already know and it’s what you’re already having success with. 

Start small. Look at the last 50 clients you signed. You might find that 30 of them share a common story or scenario that just isn’t covered enough on your site.

That’s where you should focus. Turn those into new blog posts, case studies, practice pages, location pages, and podcast episodes with videos embedded and transcripts published on your website. 

Final Thoughts

The floor hasn’t moved. Meaning a page still has to be indexed and eligible to appear in snippets before it can be pulled into any of this.

So traditional SEO principles still matter. And content still matters too.

But the way your law firm approaches it just needs to look a little bit different to align with how AI search engines are evaluating your site and serving answers to users.