Good post on LinkedIn by Joe Giovannoli about some legal blogs being swallowed by Google’s AI overviews and AI engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Visibility from Google clicks is disappearing, per Giovannoli.
What changed?
Google’s AI Overviews.
Content that used to drive traffic is now being cited, without delivering a single visit. And it’s not just one case. It’s happening across nearly every firm we work with.
Impression spikes are your new visibility signal. If clicks vanish but impressions rise, you’re still surfacing, just not getting credit.
And per Giovannoli, “AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity don’t invent visibility. They inherit it.”
But it’s important to look at what motivated a lawyer to publish a legal blog in the first place to see which legal blog publications are getting swallowed.
Many, if not most, of the successful legal blog publishers are driven by the purpose of building a name, relationships and a longstanding and growing book of business—not traffic, visibility and search rankings.
Search rankings were and still are a byproduct of these authoritative blog publishers whose authority and name grew by focusing on a tight niche, personally writing their blog posts in a genuine fashion, placing their blog publications on a separate domain than the law firm website, engaging their audience, weaving in stories, citing other sources (including other legal blogs) and the like.
The public is gradually switching from search engines to answer engines ala ChatGPT. Legal blogs published in the above authoritative fashion are not being swallowed by these answer machines. They are performing well with the LLM’s using a legal blog publication’s copy in delivering answers and listing the legal blog publication as the “source” following the LLM’s answer.
I agree with Giovannoli that this isn’t the end of legal blogging, it’s the end of publishing for volume, and it’s the start of publishing with purpose.