This transcript of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR was generated using AI transcription and lightly edited for readability. It may contain errors, and speaker labels are approximate. The audio recording is the authoritative version.
Welcome to Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR, the podcast where we elevate the stories of the plaintiffs' bar and dive into the key trends shaping the civil justice system today. I'm your host, Ray DeLorenzi, and in each episode, we'll bring you insightful interviews with leading attorneys, expert perspectives on current legal events, and in-depth discussions on the issues that matter most. Now let's jump in.
It's just this interesting, and it's a distinction I think people are missing, is that the AI is training on your website, but just because it's training on your website doesn't mean it's returning it in a result. The one resource that a law firm controls to market themselves, their website, is something that is no longer being returned to an individual who is potentially searching for them, and that is a brand new world.
Jillian: Hello and welcome to Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR, a special guest edition here today with myself, Jillian DeSimone, hosting and joined by Ray DeLorenzi, founder and CEO of RebuttalPR. Hi, Ray.
Ray: I don't know how I feel about this, Jillian. You've taken my hosting chair, but I'm so glad to be here and this is going to be fun.
Jillian: We're happy to have you. Welcome to Ithaca, New York. Well, we're here today to talk about an SEO report that I know means a lot to you. So I think before we get too much into that, we should just start out with, what is SEO? What is the history here? I know there's been a long love affair with a lot of folks in SEO and everything it entails, but why? Where did that start? Where did that come from?
Ray: Yeah, sure. And Jillian, I think calling it an SEO report really is, in some ways, reversed from how I conceptualized it, which is more about AI. And there is so much discussion about AI in the legal field to a nauseating degree. And a lot of it is about how law firms are trying to streamline or become more efficient using AI. I think my interest was how lawyers and law firms are trying to be viewed or seen by AI engines, but also many long-time SEO vendors are seeing the writing on the wall. And they're pivoting to saying, oh, we can get you into AI search results.
And to be blunt, my bullshit detector has been going off on this, so I really wanted to dig into the research, see what the facts on the ground were, and put together a resource for lawyers who are trying to grow and market their practice in a genuine way and prevent them from getting sold down the river by SEO vendors who are promising things that they cannot deliver. So that was really the genesis of it.
Now, to answer, I think, what your actual question was. There have been SEO vendors for two decades that have worked with the plaintiffs' bar, amongst other industries, but we're obviously talking about the plaintiffs' bar here, to help increase their ranking in Google. And I know we'll talk about this later, but essentially with Google and people using that tool and finding 10 blue links and then clicking on one to then go to a website, those days aren't over, but they are certainly on the decline. And it's something that every lawyer needs to be aware of.
Jillian: Okay. And when you're talking about the 10 blue links, you mean someone Googles a firm and then they get a page in front of them that just has the top 10 firms, right?
Ray: Yes, exactly. And 10 blue links used to be the shorthand for that. Let's put aside the fact that now you have four ads up top, some on the side, some on the bottom, but putting that aside, yes, Google search, 10 blue links, that was how one would be associated with the other.
Jillian: Okay. So you went right to some of the AI stuff. So I do want to clarify early on, what about GEO? What is that and what is the difference? Because you were talking about SEO firms wanting to get in a bit on the AI, but what is the differentiation there? And what do those terms mean?
Ray: So SEO was search engine optimization. Now you're hearing AEO or GEO. It's essentially, in short, optimizing for the AI search bots and engines. So GEO is generative engine optimization. It all is AI related, just to really boil it down. If someone were to search ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or Grok or pick your AI of choice and are looking for a lawyer, how can a law firm come up in those results?
And you have SEO vendors again who are seeing, oh, Google's declining. How do we pivot? And now they're proclaiming that they can get you in these engines. And there's just so much smoke and mirrors there that what we really wanted to do was shine a light on what the real situation is, what the data is, and empower lawyers to make decisions accordingly.
Jillian: Sure. So just to stay in what it used to be before we get too far along into what it looks like now, what did SEO mean early on? What all had to happen for a firm to make sure that it was making the most of their SEO process or engagement?
Ray: Yeah, sure. SEO had its heyday more like, let's say, 10 years ago. And I think some would probably debate me on that and that's completely fine. But there were a few things at play that were in fact important. First is you needed a website that conformed to certain web standards. And I'm really boiling this down. There's obviously other search engines, but really we're talking about Google in terms of market share. How can that search engine crawl your website and take that data and then make sure you can appear in the rankings in the first place? And how were you generating content that was responsive to the queries that people were putting into Google so that your website could appear?
There were a host of tactics back in the day that SEO vendors would use with law firms to game the search engine. And honestly, they worked. For example, they would create dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of pages on their website answering the same question but with small derivations. They would make these lists that Google at a certain point would favor and it would help you in rankings. SEO vendors would do what was called keyword stuffing. They would jam all these terms into pages that again would help with rankings.
A couple of years ago, Google undertook a process that really changed how their algorithm worked and it devalued companies that used a lot of those tactics. So if you used those tactics, let's say you were number one in Google, those tactics would make you feel pain and it would bring you off the first page.
Jillian: That was intentional? Google did that on purpose?
Ray: Yes, because they felt, appropriately, that people weren't answering the queries that consumers actually had. Companies were just trying to game the system, understanding that if they were in the top couple links, they were going to get all the business. Because even if you're like seven, eight, nine, 10 in Google, you're pretty much nowhere. And if you're on the second page, you're a ghost.
So SEO went through all these algorithm changes, and there were seminal events in which Google did that, and then Google actually changed and said, you know what, we're not going to roll these out as big updates. We're just going to keep rolling these out all the time. Because Google's view, which was right in many ways, was we're here to answer people's questions and we're not going to reward companies or law firms or whatever industry that was gaming the algorithm. So by and large today, SEO should be about making sure you have a functioning website that answers the questions that people would have. Its heyday, though, was in the past, in my view. And again, I know there can be disagreements on that. And now obviously with the advent of AI, you can really say that the heyday is in the past.
Jillian: I mean, that's a good layup. Why? What has changed? How do people seek out law firms or attorneys these days?
Ray: Yeah. How people are searching for information is undergoing the most drastic change since Google was invented. And you're seeing year over year, 15 percentage point drops in people using Google to find a lawyer or people using Google to find anything. How are people doing it? One is they're using a chatbot. So let's say ChatGPT or Claude, and they're not asking like they would in Google. Often in Google, people say, like, car accident lawyer. No one types that into a chatbot. They'll say, you know, I got in a car accident on this highway, and here's my injury. And then, who is a lawyer in my area who can help me with this particular situation? That's how people now talk to those chatbots.
Another thing happening is even if people are using Google, Gemini is their AI product. They're putting those results right there on top and essentially capturing people before they even get to the 10 blue links. So you have these changes all happening at the same time. And that's impacting website traffic. People are never getting to someone's website when they're getting the answer ahead of that.
Jillian: Yeah. Well, so you talked about individuals finding attorneys. What does this mean for referring attorneys? Maybe sometimes there are existing relationships there, but if there isn't, does that change? Or is it typically the same, asking the chatbot the question?
Ray: Yeah. Behavior amongst anyone using the internet to find information is changing, whether that is an injured consumer or a referring lawyer who may have a case in a practice area they've never touched and they're trying to find someone. Yeah, they are. It's not across the board. People have different behaviors, and it's not like Google search is on the fritz. It's still huge swaths of the public that use it. But if someone's looking for information, they are increasingly doing it through an AI chatbot, or Google is presenting them with AI information before they're even getting to actual web page results.
Jillian: Okay. And then you touched on this a little bit. I think there's probably more there. What is the robot doing? So what do folks need to be thinking about in terms of feeding those robots, or the AEO or GEO? What is the shift now?
Ray: Yes. And this really gets into why SEO is becoming so much less relevant, because we looked at the research of how AI is returning results to individuals who are searching, and a few things are happening. One is they call these large language models, LLMs, black boxes. So for some vendor to proclaim that they can get you in this black box, when we do not know how the black box is trained, is indeed ridiculous. However, there has been a bunch of research done to determine what they are training on and how they are delivering results. And those are two different things.
It is apparent that AI models are training on law firm websites and using all that data to inform their knowledge. However, when a consumer is searching for something and getting an answer, that answer by and large never includes a law firm website. So the one resource that a law firm controls to market themselves, their website, is something that is no longer being returned to an individual who is potentially searching for them. And that is a brand new world.
You can look across multiple AI systems, and what these AI tools are returning to individuals who are asking questions is third-party validation. It is returning, for example, rankings. So there's several out there like Chambers or Super Lawyers or Best Lawyers. Those come up frequently. News sites are coming up very frequently. Anytime another person or entity is speaking about you, that gets returned at a much greater frequency than anything you pay for or control.
And think of it as, let's say you were running billboard ads or TV ads or radio ads. AI is not going to return that in its results. Your website is just the same. It's likely training on that data, but it's not returning it to an individual using that chatbot. So essentially, optimizing your website, while I would never say it's not important, is not what's getting returned to someone who's searching for you. It's returning things that you have to go earn, not things you can go pay for.
Jillian: Yeah. So an entity that is not yourself. It knows an ad. It can recognize an ad.
Ray: Yes. And it treats your website as an ad, essentially. And again, it's just this interesting, and it's a distinction I think people are missing, is that the AI is training on your website, but just because it's training on your website doesn't mean it's returning it in a result. It's informing its knowledge, but it's not influencing the outcome of what someone searches.
Jillian: Okay. So what should folks do? What should attorneys and law firms be doing about this? What are the next steps?
Ray: Yeah. And look, this is where someone could really take a look at this report and say, you know, these RebuttalPR folks are just completely self-serving. And look, if someone wants to make that argument, I'm glad to have the debate. It just so happens that what we have done at RebuttalPR for years, well before AI was invented, was working with law firms who wanted to reach their audience in a different way, through a more authentic means. Again, there's nothing wrong with advertising. It's a different business model. What we do is we help elevate the profiles of law firms and their attorneys through getting them in the news, working with them on being seen more in their community, doing thought leadership work like op-eds and awards and speaking appearances.
It just so happens those are the things that AI values tremendously, which again sounds self-serving coming from me, but it happens to be the way of the world, and it has happened to work out that way. So the law firms we work with, getting them in the news more, talking about their cases, their practice areas, the issues they care about, they are more naturally being seen at much greater levels in AI than other law firms. And I want to be clear, we would never guarantee that, oh, we can get you in this AI search result.
You have to be everywhere. It is an all-of-the-above strategy. SEO, I think for a while, used to be almost a silver bullet. You could do that, and then you would be seen in search results. With things pushing towards AI, that is simply not the case. It's not like your website is unimportant, but all the SEO tricks are just no longer relevant in the world in which we are living. And understanding what AI cares about, which again is third-party relevancy, things you cannot purchase, things you cannot replicate, those are what's valued now and where law firms really need to turn their attention.
Jillian: Yeah, I think something I was listening to said PR and earned media is having a comeback or something, which, like you said, may sound self-serving, but I have heard it in other places. I think it's fair.
Ray: Yeah. And what we've seen, and I want to also disabuse lawyers and law firms of this, is that it does not mean, oh, I just need to put a press release out every week. That is not going to help you. There's a bunch of newswire distribution services. People may have heard of PR Newswire, Business Wire, and even they are trying to position themselves, oh, work with us, pay to put your press release out, we'll get you in AI. That is also seen by AI as paid, because it is.
What we are talking about here is using your story and your expertise to actually get into the news, get interviewed by, let's say, your local TV station, quoted in an online news outlet. Again, it really spans the gamut depending on what practice area you're in. We work with law firms all the time where maybe all they care about is being in their local paper. And then we work with some law firms where we work to get them in more national outlets, whether it's, let's say, the New York Times or NBC News. It really depends on what is important to that law firm and getting them in front of their audience. But it's clear being authentic and having a reputation that is supported by third-party validation is what is driving the AI search results right now.
Jillian: Yeah, that makes sense. Well, so some folks may say SEO is not completely dead yet, though, right? So what should firms still be doing in terms of that work, and what feels like a fair amount of money and time for them to still be spending on that piece, in your opinion?
Ray: Yeah. So you need a website. And the website needs to have information that a potential client, someone that you feel like you could serve, would need to answer their questions. Every law firm is different in what that needs to look like. Writing the content for a website, something we do very regularly, I would never say is unimportant. It certainly is important, because let's say you're talking about someone who may be dealing with the most catastrophic thing in their life. They need to trust someone. Not all the time, but let's say they get an AI result for law firm X. They may then go check out law firm X and review their website, and they need to feel like they can connect with that law firm. So the website is very important from that perspective.
But there are a couple of free tools, and we outlined this in our report, Google Search Console and Google Analytics, that really tell you how you're ranking and how your website is performing. And we've done this before: you can hook these up with Claude or ChatGPT or another, and we just happened to use Claude, so I'm not plugging them specifically, and say, hey, analyze this website and how it's performing and ways you can optimize the site. And it comes back with extremely useful information that a law firm can then act upon without having any outside vendor whatsoever.
Now, let me be clear. I would use it for that counsel, but then you need to execute on it. And while AI could maybe make some tweaks to the website infrastructure, I would never have AI write content for your website. I think that is a recipe for disaster. But in terms of analyzing your website, how it's performing, and changes that can be made to help increase its performance, AI is very useful in that regard. Some law firms may have someone who's more tech savvy who can do that in house. Sometimes you may need a vendor to do that, and it's hard for me to recommend what makes sense there. But we also work with law firms that have a pretty basic website and have done zero SEO work and are frequently found by potential clients because they are well known in their practice area, and they've developed their reputation really through that third-party credibility and validation.
Jillian: Yeah. That makes sense. Well, I know you don't have a crystal ball, but AI is changing so much every day, and we've covered some of the changes that have happened. Is there anything on your mind that you think people should be thinking about for the future, and next steps after these immediate ones, and how this might continue to change?
Ray: Yeah. You're right, I don't have a crystal ball. And maybe we enter a world in which there is a new large language model released and all of a sudden law firm websites are going to be the only thing that gets delivered in the search results. But that is not the trajectory we seem to be on. Here's what I think we can close to guarantee: people going to general Google search is going to continue to decline, while people using an AI chatbot is going to increase significantly.
We are recording this interview the day after iOS 27 for iPhones was released, and that has finally fixed Siri, which has been a running joke for over a decade for how bad it is, or how bad it was. Now it's going to be built in, and it's built on Google's Gemini. But here's why that matters. A billion-plus people have an iPhone. And really, if we're talking about people in the United States, we're talking about tens of millions of people who will now have access to a functional Siri with a quick swipe of the finger and be able to ask Siri real questions and get real answers. And that is only going to increase the use of AI and decrease Google's relevancy.
So that, again, is something that just got released yesterday. And even to get access to Siri, it's a wait list. Just personally, I installed it yesterday and I was on the wait list for 18 hours, and I haven't played around with it, but I just got through. But more and more people are going to be using that. And I think the fact that it's on an iPhone, once it's there, if the trends prove out, adoption rates just go through the roof. So I think that is something we can guarantee: traditional Google search is going to continue to decline while AI search will increase. Again, at what rate I don't know, but you're going to see that significantly.
Outside of that, I don't like to make huge proclamations of where things are going to go. But people put all their eggs in the SEO basket for quite some time. And now, if we're going to use eggs, the chickens are coming home to roost. Can we do that? I know you have chickens, Jillian.
Jillian: Yeah, I'm the target demo for that.
Ray: So yes, I think the days of, oh, I can just focus on my website and SEO, those are over. I do not think, oh, I can just ignore my website and do other things to make sure I'm in AI. Again, anyone who's guaranteeing that is selling you a bag of junk. No one can guarantee that, but it is clear based upon the data we have today, based on the models that are out today, that being in more places that have third-party validation and are more supportive of your reputation is what matters. Again, these essentially are areas you cannot pay to be in. Your website is a place you pay to be in. Advertising is a place you pay to be in. Putting a press release on PR Newswire is a place you pay to be in. The places you cannot pay to be in are what AI is right now going to recommend at a greater rate.
Jillian: Yeah, more credibility. Yeah, that makes sense.
Ray: Again, it's so hard to say where this is going to go, but I would first encourage folks, shameless plug, to go to rebuttalpr.com, and you will find our AI SEO report there, which is a free download. Folks can read it, and then I'd love to get your feedback. You can tell me I'm full of it, or that it was the greatest thing ever. We are undergoing, though, a massive change in how people get their information. And I said this before, it's the biggest shift since the advent of Google.
What's really interesting about this time is, and again, we also discussed this in the report, you can say, oh, being in the news, the news industry is dying, which I would push back on significantly. The news business is in huge trouble, but there has never been a greater ability for people to get information than today. Tomorrow, there will be more ways for people to get information. There is more information available than ever, and it's an infinite resource that will continue to grow. If you think through that lens, how do I make sure I'm in more places, so when people are searching for information, I, the law firm, I, the lawyer, can be increasing the odds that I am the person that's found to help that person who's in need? I think if you approach it...
Jillian: Sorry, people are hungry for places that they trust, right? Even though the news business has a moment of treachery, there's also the flip side of people want to believe what they are reading, and there are fewer places where they can do that. These news sources are ways for them to trust. If you're quoted in there, it's just a different kind of visibility.
Ray: That's why it's also a fascinating moment. The use of AI tools is growing exponentially at a time when people are looking for places and people and resources they can trust, which is weird because people show a lot of distrust of AI, but they are flocking to it. When it comes to news, it's interesting. If you ask people, can you trust journalists? I don't know what the current numbers are. I saw some not too long ago, and trust in journalism is lower than it has been in quite some time.
However, let's just do a quick left, right sort of thing. If you ask someone who's more conservative, okay, what about Fox News? They're like, oh, well, of course I can trust them. Or you ask someone on the left, can you trust MSNBC? They'll be like, oh, of course I can trust them. So again, choose your own adventure for how people get information. Local news, though, is incredibly trusted. It's really the national news that has a trust issue.
People are, again, I think, while AI is increasing in use, dying for real-life interaction. I think you're seeing this pendulum swing back to people wanting to be more involved in their communities. They're much more educated about the dangers of social media. And I think people are looking for that personal interaction. What can they trust? Who's credible? So while these things feel incongruent, for a lawyer or a law firm, the question is how are you arriving authentically and also in a way that people can view you as credible and someone they can trust?
Jillian: Yeah. And if someone searches for an attorney or a firm and they ask, why did you pick this? It's only going to help if you have several pieces of quoted coverage to back it up. Because sometimes I ask the robots and it'll be like, I don't know. But then sometimes it'll give me all these sources. And that's when I'm like, okay, fine. I trust this thing.
Ray: Yeah. And look, this is a small sample size, and this is not something I would consider gospel. But in areas where there's breaking news, I'm going to give an example. Let's say there's a big chemical explosion in X location, and we happen to work with a law firm in that location. And they are then quoted in news coverage talking about the impact on the community, what it means. They're not there hawking their services. One, that is not something a news outlet would ever consider. And two, it is not the type of genuine, credible, authentic outreach that we would support or ever recommend.
But again, let's take that situation: explosion in X community, a law firm that happens to be in X community has expertise in speaking about it. Again, this is a small sample size, and I wouldn't say it's across the board, but when we've done searches like, hey, tell me about the explosion in X place and a lawyer I may be able to call, they are citing the news coverage that we have worked with the law firm on immediately, and then citing the law firm or the lawyer that was in that coverage.
And again, part of that is the model hasn't trained on that data because it just happened. But a lot of these models have web search capability that allows them to go search out real-time information, and then they are finding that. So someone could do that same search a minute later and get a totally different result. But we were talking about how you increase your chances to be found in this increasingly evolving world, and the data we lay out in the report is really clear on what AI is favoring versus discounting.
Jillian: Yeah. Okay. Well, on that note, just to reiterate, you can go to our site, download the report, and reach out to us. We would love to continue this conversation and get on a call.
Ray: Yeah. Thank you, Jillian, for filling my enormous shoes.
Jillian: Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR. Don't forget to subscribe and follow to join us next time. We'll see you all then.
