If your firm’s organic traffic has plateaued or declined over the past year and your digital marketing team can’t fully explain why, the answer is probably not your SEO. It’s the search engine.

AI search summaries, Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the answers users now see directly inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot, are intercepting clicks that used to flow to firm websites. The shift is measurable, it’s accelerating, and it hits large law firms harder than most industries because of the way Big Law has historically built its content programs.

This isn’t a doom-and-gloom piece. The total addressable market of legal search hasn’t shrunk; and the firms protecting their pipeline are the ones reworking their content and measurement frameworks around how search actually works now. Here’s the data, what it means for large firms specifically, and the three changes that matter most.

The Data Behind the Traffic Shift

The numbers from the back half of 2025 and into 2026 are stark, and they’re worse for sites that publish a lot of informational content, which describes nearly every Am Law 200 firm.

• Organic CTR dropped 61% on queries where AI Overviews appear, falling from 1.76% to 0.61%. Paid CTR fell 68% on the same queries.
• AI Overviews reduced clicks to the #1 organic result by 58% as of December 2025, which is nearly double the 34.5% reduction measured just eight months earlier.
• Zero-click search rates grew from 56% to 69% after the AI Overview rollout, marking a 13-percentage-point shift in roughly a year. More than two out of three searches now end without a click to any website. (Click-Vision)

Layer on AI Mode, Google’s conversational search experience that surfaces even longer synthesized answers, and the directional message is clear: the share of searches that resolve inside the SERP keeps climbing. Any digital visibility strategy still built around the assumption that sheer size or online ranking equals traffic is operating on a model that no longer reflects user behavior.

Why Traditional Law Firm Strategy Is Especially Exposed

Most coverage of AI Overviews treats every industry the same. It shouldn’t. Large law firms are unusually exposed for three structural reasons tied to how Big Law has invested in digital over the last decade.

The Informational Content Trap

Most large firm content strategies overweight timely legal alerts—client-targeted electronic dispatches summarizing regulatory updates, court decisions, and legislative changes—while underinvesting in deep service pages that answer the sophisticated legal questions firms hear from clients every day.

Both content types lose ground here, but for opposite reasons. Legal alerts are exactly what AI Overviews are best at summarizing: a synthesizable explanation of a finite event. The user gets the answer in the SERP and never clicks. Informational queries are seeing 40–70% traffic drops because the AI summary is “good enough.” (Dataslayer)

Service pages, on the other hand, often don’t exist in sufficient depth to be visible at all, and if a firm has no substantive content answering a sophisticated practice-area question, AI engines have nothing to cite. The firm is simply absent from the answer.

There’s an irony embedded in the first problem: firms with the strongest libraries of informational content are often losing the most click-through volume, because AI engines can extract complete answers from their well-structured pages without sending the user anywhere. Strong content is being mined for citations while traffic to that content collapses.

A firm can hold Position #1 for a target keyword and still see declining traffic from that keyword. If your digital marketing reporting still centers on keyword positions and organic sessions as the primary website KPIs, your dashboards are measuring a system that no longer maps cleanly to business outcomes. Rankings remain a leading indicator of visibility, but they’ve decoupled from traffic in a way that requires a new layer of measurement (more on this below).

Transactional and Local Queries Are the Bright Spot

Not every query type is affected equally, and this matters enormously for where to focus.

Transactional queries with hiring intent, i.e. “employment lawyer Chicago,” “SEC enforcement defense attorney,” “M&A counsel for SaaS acquisitions,” still generate clicks because the searcher needs to evaluate and contact a specific firm.

AI Overviews also appear in less than 5% of branded SERPs, so anyone searching your firm by name is still going to your site. And local-intent queries behave similarly: someone searching for a specific legal service in a specific market still needs to visit firm websites to evaluate fit (regardless of whether or not they use “near me” or the locality name in their query).

These query types are where click-dependent lead generation still works. Protect and expand here while you rebuild the rest of the program around a different model.

Three Changes to SEO, Content, and Tracking

This is the playbook. Three changes, each addressing a different part of the program, all working together.

Change 1: Restructure Content Strategy by Query Intent

Start with an audit. Categorize every URL on your site by the dominant query intent it targets (informational, navigational, transactional, or local) and map traffic trends for each category over the past 12 months. Then segment your strategy by category:

• For informational content that’s lost traffic, stop measuring it by clicks. Reoptimize for AI citability: answer-first structure, attributed expertise (named attorney authors with credentials), structured data, clear factual claims that can be extracted cleanly. The new job of this content is authority-building and AI citation, not click generation.
• For transactional and local content, double down. Practice area pages, attorney bios, and location pages still drive clicks and conversions. Make sure they’re fully optimized with schema markup, clear calls to action, and conversion tracking that ties back to the matters that originated from organic search.
• For net-new content, prioritize dual-purpose pieces: structured well enough to earn AI citations and targeted at queries that still generate clicks. Deep practice area analysis, attorney thought leadership on specific developing legal issues, and experience-based content drawn from actual representations all hit both marks. AI engines can synthesize commodity legal information; they can’t synthesize the perspective of a partner who’s litigated 40 of these cases.

Change 2: Optimize for AI Citation

The new currency in AI-influenced search is the citation. Being named in an AI Overview creates a flywheel that ranking alone no longer does.

Brands cited in AI Overviews earn approximately 35% higher organic CTR than non-cited brands on the same SERP, while non-cited brands absorb the full CTR decline. Citation is the difference between participating in the new search economy and being shut out of it.

The SEO goal shifts from “rank high and capture clicks” to “be the source AI engines trust enough to name.” In practice, that means:

• Content structured with clear, attributable claims AI can extract and credit
• Answer-first formatting (the answer in the first paragraph, followed by elaboration)
• Schema markup that declares entity relationships, such as FAQPage, LegalService, Attorney, Organization
• E-E-A-T signals at the page level: named attorney bylines, credentials, dates, and citations to primary sources
• Off-site authority signals (digital PR, citations from authoritative legal publications) that give AI engines confidence to recommend your firm by name

Pages that combine substantive text, structured data, and clear topical signals are showing meaningfully higher citation rates—Wellows reports 156% higher AI citation rates for content with this multimodal-plus-schema profile.

This is not a separate strategy from SEO. As we always say, good seo is good geo. It’s SEO adapted to how search now actually works. The same authority signals, content quality, and technical foundations that drive rankings are what earn AI citations. The work compounds.

For a deeper breakdown of how GEO sits alongside (not instead of) traditional SEO, see The 5 Pillars of AI and Generative Engine Optimization and What Is GEO and Why Digital PR Alone Isn’t Enough.

Change 3: Update Your Measurement Framework

If your reporting still centers on organic sessions and keyword rankings as the headline metrics, your dashboards are telling an incomplete and increasingly misleading story to firm leadership.

A modern measurement stack for large firms tracks:

• AI citation frequency by platform (Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot) and by practice area
• Branded search volume trends as a proxy for awareness, since branded queries are the surface where AI hasn’t disintermediated clicks
• Share of voice—measures how often your brand is mentioned or cited in AI-generated responses compared to your competitors.
• Referral traffic from AI platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot referrals are appearing in GA4 and increasingly need their own segment)
• Conversion rate by channel and content type, because fewer clicks should mean higher-intent clicks

The qualitative test is this: with fewer but more intentional clicks, firms should see higher time-on-site, deeper engagement, and better lead quality from organic search even as total traffic declines. If you’re seeing traffic decline and engagement decline, the issue isn’t AI Overviews, it’s that your content needs work.

Use Ahrefs, Semrush, or similar tools to flag which target keywords trigger AI Overviews and which don’t. This lets you separate keywords where clicks are structurally declining (and where strategy needs to shift to citation) from keywords where your content performance is actually slipping (and where SEO work still applies in the traditional sense). Conflating those two diagnoses leads to wasted budget on both ends.

The Reframe for Partnership and Budget Conversations

How marketing leaders frame this internally will determine whether they get the budget and runway to adapt.

“Organic traffic is down 15%” sounds like marketing failure to a managing partner who doesn’t track search algorithm shifts. “AI citations grew 40%, branded search is up 25%, conversion rate from organic improved 20%, and decision-stage engagement increased 30%” tells the actual story: a team that adapted ahead of a market shift and protected the business development pipeline while competitors lost ground.

The path from search to engagement has changed. Firms that keep optimizing exclusively for clicks on queries that no longer generate clicks will see compounding decline. Firms that adapt will capture a disproportionate share of the visibility that still converts, and they’ll build a citation moat that’s hard for laggards to close once AI engines have learned to trust certain sources.

A few questions worth asking your current SEO partner:

• How are you adapting our strategy for AI Overviews and AI Mode?
• What percentage of our target keywords currently trigger AI summaries?
• Are we being cited in those summaries, or just ranking beneath them?
• What new KPIs are you tracking, and how do those tie to matter origination?

If the answers are vague, the strategy hasn’t caught up to the search environment. For more on why 2026 is the year this catches up to firms one way or the other, see 2026 Is Your Law Firm’s Digital Visibility Inflection Point.

The new normal isn’t coming. It’s already here. The firms moving now will spend the next 24 months building a position that’s expensive and very hard to replicate.

9Sail works exclusively with law firms on SEO, content, and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). If you’re trying to figure out how AI search is affecting your firm’s pipeline—and what to do about it—our team can help you diagnose and rebuild. Learn more about our law firm GEO services.