Most legal marketing teams heading into the 2027 planning season already know they need to do something about AI visibility. What they don’t know is how to explain it to a management committee, how to scope it against a realistic budget, or how to answer the partner who wants an ROI projection for a channel that’s still being defined.

On October 21, 9Sail Founder and CEO Joe Giovannoli sat down with Kevin Thomson, 9Sail’s newly appointed Head of Digital Strategy, to address exactly that. Kevin brings 15 years of digital marketing experience in the legal industry, and his first webinar appearance at 9Sail focused on the question legal marketers are asking more than any other right now: how do we actually get this funded?

The conversation covered how to assess a firm’s digital foundation before layering in generative engine optimization, how to use competitive research to move skeptical decision-makers, how to sequence investment for different team sizes, and how to measure progress in a way that builds trust rather than frustration.

Key Takeaways

1. GEO is already reshaping how clients find firms. Generative engine searches are peeling off from traditional Google at a meaningful and growing rate. Firms that treat GEO as a “future consideration” are already behind the firms that don’t.
2. The foundation comes first. Before optimizing for AI visibility, a firm needs to know where its digital foundation stands today. A well-optimized website that Google trusts is also a better-positioned site for generative engines. The Venn diagram between SEO and GEO overlaps more than most people expect.
3. GEO and SEO are related but distinct, and should be tracked separately. They share foundational inputs but operate differently enough that lumping them together in reporting obscures what’s actually working. Traffic from ChatGPT and traffic from Google organic search represent different behaviors, different intents, and different optimization levers.
4. Competitive research is the fastest way to move a skeptical decision-maker. Managing partners are competitive by nature. Showing them which firms are consistently showing up when a prospective client asks a generative engine for a recommendation—and demonstrating that it isn’t happening by accident—tends to move conversations that data alone doesn’t.
5. The cost of doing nothing is the hardest cost to quantify, but the most important one to communicate. Firms aren’t losing visibility they know about. They’re failing to gain visibility in a channel that’s growing. By the time the gap becomes obvious, the firms that moved early will have built authority that takes significant time and sustained investment to close.
6. Start with one practice area. Don’t swallow the ocean. Firms attempting full-firm GEO visibility in a single initiative consistently underdeliver. A focused start with one practice, one industry group, builds the internal proof of concept that unlocks broader investment.
7. Meaningful results take six to nine months. Setting that expectation from the beginning is what keeps a program alive long enough to work.

Access the Webinar Recap