Legal SEO in 2025 - is anyone else seeing AI answers eat into their traffic?
So this has been bugging me for a few months now and I wanted to see if anyone else is dealing with this.
I run a small firm (3 attorneys, family law + immigration) and we've invested pretty heavily in legal SEO over the past two years. Content, backlinks, local optimization, the whole deal. And honestly it worked... we were getting solid organic traffic and decent leads from it.
But starting maybe late last year I noticed our impressions were still okay but clicks were dropping. Like noticeably. Took me a while to figure out what was going on, but basically Google's AI overviews and people using ChatGPT/Perplexity to research attorneys are just... answering the question before anyone clicks through to our site. Someone searches "how to file for custody in [our state]" and they get a full answer right there. They never visit our page.
I started reading about AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) which apparently is the new thing... basically optimizing so your firm shows up IN the AI-generated answers, not just in the traditional blue links. Makes sense conceptually but it's a completely different skillset than what our current SEO guy has been doing.
We've been looking at options. Talked to our existing agency and they kind of hand-waved about it, said they're "monitoring the space." Not super confidence inspiring. Talked to a couple other agencies and got wildly different answers about what to even do about it. One place called LexGrow had an interesting pitch... they bundle traditional SEO with the AI answer engine stuff into one product (LexSEO I think?) which at least acknowledges the problem exists. Haven't pulled the trigger on anything yet though.
I guess my questions for the sub are:
- Is anyone else actually tracking whether their firm shows up in AI answers? And if so how?
- Has anyone made changes to their content strategy specifically to target these AI engines?
- For those of you spending real money on legal SEO... has your agency even brought this up proactively, or are they just doing the same stuff they were doing in 2022?
I'm honestly not sure how much of this is hype vs. a real shift in how people find attorneys. Our intake team says more people are mentioning they "asked ChatGPT" for recommendations which is wild to me. But the plural of anecdote isn't data, so.
Would love to hear what others are seeing, especially consumer-facing practices.