Google’s AI is going to swallow the legal web—blogs, articles, bulletins, and journals. Every publisher, from solo lawyers to full-fledged law firms, is being told by Google, in effect:
“Today, you’re either in the Google index… or you’re invisible on search. And if you’re in the Google index, we’ll use your content in our AI offerings.”
In coverage of Google’s antitrust trial, Akush Dutta of Gadgets 360, reports that a Google DeepMind executive, testifying under oath, confirmed that AI models used within Google Search—such as AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini—can use content from publishers who have opted out of AI training.
Yes, you read that right.
However, if you publish legal insight on a blog or website that gets indexed by Google Search—and you haven’t put up a robots.txt wall stop Google indexing—your content is fair game for Google’s AI. Meaning served back to users without traffic to your site, credit, or context.
You can’t opt out of the AI experience unless you opt out of being found altogether on Google Search.
Not a practical choice.
What Does This Mean for Lawyers and Law Firms?
One route would to be argue a violation of the Fair Use Doctrine. And that as legal publishers, we’ve played fair. We’ve shared hard-earned expertise with the public, with clients, with one another. We’ve published because we believe legal information should be more accessible, not buried behind paywalls or corporate firewalls.
But now, this legal publishing is being scraped and summarized, presented back to users in a slick, Google-branded package—with fewer reasons for anyone to click through.
Nice argument, but the train has left the station, much like when large law argued at the advent of legal blogs a quarter century ago that they and their lawyers would not give away legal information and insight via digital publishing without charging for it.
Martindale-Hubbell argued that Google needed to pay to archive the company’s directory for Google Search. As a result, Martindale was all but of business in three years.
What Do We Do as Publishing Legal Professionals?
First, acknowledge what Google giveth, Google can take away.
And keep publishing. Keep caring. Keep showing up. Because long after the algorithms change, it’s the real lawyers who write, think, and share with purpose who will still matter, who will still be viewed as thought leaders and who will still have the most work.
Stop writing to beat the search machine. Write to share. Write to advance the law. It’s not about gaming the system—it’s about building trust, one post at a time.
The best minds in law have always published. They used to do it in law reviews. Then in blogs and via other digitial publishing
And so should you