Yes, getting articles published in a legal journal was good PR and provided a valuable backlink, but you could still be included in those coveted first 10 blue links without spending hours…days even, crafting a thought leadership piece that would pass the critical eye of your peers. Well, those days are now over and if you are not publishing regular, original, valuable thought leadership articles in high quality publications, your Google rankings and AI visibility are probably taking a hit.
What’s Changed?
In a word – everything. The most important thing you need to keep in mind is that, thanks to Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT (plus Claude, Gemini, etc), people are making buying decisions long before they click on a service provider’s website. Let’s take a common example. A wife informs her husband (Mr H) that she wants a divorce. Mr H immediately jumps on his phone and asks Google, “Will I lose my house in a divorce?” In the past, Google would have produced a list of websites, ranked in order of what its algorithms believed provided the best answer for Mr H’s question. Now, Google's AI Overviews will provide an initial answer, listing the websites it has referenced on the right hand side of the screen. Dear reader, you may be thinking “ahh yes, but everyone knows Google AI Overviews tell us all to eat rocks and use super-glue to stick cheese to pizza and Mr H will naturally take the Overview information as a guide only and scroll past to view the list of results”. But alas, you are mistaken. Ahrefs' tracking of 300,000 keywords shows that when an AI Overview sits above a page ranking first in traditional results, that page now loses 58 per cent of the clicks it would otherwise expect.
Now, if the above statistic doesn’t cause you to raise your eyebrows, this one should - for informational queries (which describes Mr H’s question) in 2026, brands cited in Google AI Overviews achieve a 35% to 120% higher organic CTR compared to uncited competitors.
If Mr H does not see your law firm’s name cited as a source on the right hand side of the AI Overview panel, your firm simply does not exist to him. And it gets worse. Let’s say he now asks, “who are the three best divorce solicitors in Liverpool?” Mr H gets propelled out of Google’s search screen altogether and enters the AI Mode function. Three firms are presented to him. That’s it. No additional blue links to other law firms, or a map listing all the local firms in Liverpool. Personally, I would not buy a Lotto ticket based on the odds that Mr H will contact any other firm aside from those Google believes are the ‘best’.
What earns a citation inside an AI Overview answer?
Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands to establish which signals correlate most strongly with appearing inside AI Overviews. Being mentioned across the web, named and discussed by other sites regardless of a link, scored a correlation of 0.664, roughly three times stronger than backlinks alone, which scored 0.218. Brands in the top quartile for mentions averaged 169 appearances inside AI Overviews; the next tier down averaged just 14. More than a quarter of the brands studied had never been mentioned in an AI Overview. Ahrefs cautions that its finding indicate correlation rather than definitive causation. However, ‘if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…..’
A feature or mention in a national or trade publication typically produces both a back link, plus a citation of your firm and one or more of its lawyers. In terms of AI visibility (also known as GEO) and SEO (which is just as important as ever) this is gold.
A 2026 survey of 500 SEO professionals found 34 per cent rate digital PR as their single best-performing link-building method, nearly double the 18 per cent who rank guest posting first. Eighty-five per cent of PR campaigns produced measurable SEO results within three to six months, and 66.2 per cent of respondents now track AI citations as a specific performance metric, a figure that barely existed as a KPI twelve months earlier.
The above findings link directly to Google's increasing emphasis on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). Content attributed to a named, verifiably qualified solicitor and reinforced by external validation, such as press coverage or placement in a high quality legal journal, is treated as more trustworthy by search engines and generative AI systems than anonymous content. This in turn increases your firm’s chance of being cited buy AI Overview or ChatGPT, leading to increased odds of someone like Mr H filling out your firm’s contact form or giving you a call.
How to get started with digital PR
If you are already working with a digital marketing agency or PR agency, you need to have a chat with them to ensure they have a digital PR strategy in place. Remember, this is not about firing off press releases. It involves understanding the legal industry and trade journals, developing relationships with editors to find out the type of content their readers are interested in, and, most importantly, writing valuable, engaging articles that people actually want to read.
For small law firms without marketing or PR support, digital PR is absolutely crucial. Without it, you risk becoming invisible to potential clients. Try to put aside one or two afternoons per quarter to research, pitch and write a thought leadership piece for a legal publication. Another tip is to follow legal journalists on social media. They sometimes reach out for comments on particular legal issues.
All businesses now need to work smarter for Google rankings and AI visibility. Digital PR is one of the most effective ways to increase your SEO, GEO, and brand visibility. In addition, it propels your law firm’s brand above those polluting the web with unedited, generic AI content that no one reads. So, start showcasing your expertise, because interesting, valuable, personality-filled writing is back, and thanks to Google’s algorithms and AI crawler requirements, here to stay.
Corinne McKenna is the co-founder and director of Lawtelligence, a specialist legal marketing and AI training agency serving UK solicitors and barristers. She has an LLB degree from the University of Canterbury (NZ) and over 28 years’ experience in legal writing, editing, sales, online training, and marketing.
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