GEO for law firms: how AI search changes thought leadership
You’ll remember this if you’re as old as I am…
I’m taking you back to when we used to say “World Wide Web” and your dad wasn’t sure what email was.
Back then, there was no search engine optimisation because there were no search engines.
Yahoo! and sites like it weren’t search engines. You would search them, but you weren’t searching the internet; you were searching a directory of links uploaded by website owners.
SEO is born
In 1998, the new kid on the block didn’t rely on website owners to list their sites. Google went looking for websites.
When you searched Google, Google matched your keywords to sites it knew mentioned them.
What I’m about to say next would have your account manager at your SEO agency screaming like the movie teen who sees the axe murderer at the window.
Then… nothing much changed for 27 years
Yes, Google got better at understanding the meaning behind the words you typed.
In agency speak, Google got better at “semantic understanding”.
(Semantic understanding is your family knowing you’re not literally dying when you say you’re starved of appreciation at work.)
What has never changed about “search”, as the wizards call it, is what’s most important to your firm being found online in 2026. (Yes, I’m already in 2026 because I’m that futuristic.)
Today, 27 years on, Google still matches your query to pages. The matching is better and smarter, but it’s matching nonetheless.
AI search changes everything…
AI search does something fundamentally different.
First, your tool for AI search starts from knowing you (often because its “memory” feature is on by default).
Even if your AI tool doesn’t know about you as a person, it can infer a great deal by reading and understanding the whole of your search — every word and all the meaning under the surface.
Then, AI search doesn’t send you to a page. Instead, it…
- Uses what you really want to know
- To find the right webpages, which it
- Reads for you to
- Give you a digest of what they say
That’s why ChatGPT and Perplexity have captured such a fat share of search so quickly — the experience is more satisfying to the user because the user feels understood by the tool.
If you want your firm to be seen…
AI search changes the fundamental game for the first time since 1998.
In AI search, you’re not fighting to be in the top three results on Google; you’re fighting to be in the AI digest with a citation that sends clients to your site.
How to make your SEO agency anxious
If you want to make your SEO agency vibrate with anxiety about how much you know about AI search, talk about cosine similarity.
Cosine similarity is the fancy maths the AI performs to decide which webpages have the best answers for your search.
From the user’s perspective, cosine similarity is the difference between book recommendations from:
- Googling “crime books with a sense of humour”
- Telling a bookshop owner you like Janet Evanovich but have never got on with Carl Hiaasen
Enter a new initialism: GEO (generative engine optimisation).
GEO is simply the art and science of persuading AI search tools like ChatGPT to draw on your website instead of your competitors’ websites.
And the foundational skill of getting your firm to the top of the citations comes back to the reason AI search is catching on like a Labubu dipped in crack.
GEO means you have to really understand your reader.
Imagine you have a partner with a hankering to write about wind farms.
Winning at SEO would mean:
- Your firm having a website that Google recognises as authoritative in this domain
- Your firm having a website that does the right things for the user, e.g. loads quickly and doesn’t unexpectedly offer cheap pills for NSFW conditions
- Having the right keywords in the right distribution
How you win or lose at making thought leadership visible to AI search
Winning at GEO requires #1 and #2 also. (Even more that hasn’t changed.)
The key difference is that #3 — exact-match keywords — matter far less.
The AI understands synonyms, context and related concepts. “Wind energy regulatory compliance” and “wind farm permitting requirements” are semantically equivalent to the AI in a way they weren’t to old Google.
You’re no longer playing Salt Bae, dropping in extra keywords when a partner wants to write about wind farming.
A keyword here, a keyword there
What matters in GEO is whether the partner’s article answers what the reader actually wants to know.
With our wind farm article, you could be onto a winner if the reader wants a partner’s musings on the general state of wind farming, complete with I-went-to-university-for-this name-checking of pertinent Regulations, parliamentary Mumblings and Other Capital Letters.
However, if the AI tool determines from the reader’s search and context that the reader has a need for a particular type of information, your “overview” piece is likely to remain in the internet’s dampest cellar.
Especially if your partner has written the same renewables overview piece every other law firm has on their websites.
Know your client, win your client
“Know your reader” has been the cornerstone of communication since cave artists twigged that their audiences liked a spot of bison hunting.
Sure, for a 27-year period, a firm could invest in SEO (and decent web architecture) to persuade Google to send readers to its thought leadership.
But those expensive-to-win readers would leave without dropping their business cards in your brandy snifter if the article didn’t deliver what they really wanted.
What’s changed with GEO is that you won’t get the readers in the first place. Not until you:
- Understand them and what they are truly looking for when they search for information
- Give it to them
Nutshell: AI search will bring you zero readers if you write about what should interest clients, not what does interest clients.
Which brings me to Asymmetric Strategic Intelligence (ASI).
ASI is how you come to know your clients in ways you’ve never known them before. We learn what they want, what motivates them, what frustrates them and… what they’ll read.
This isn’t what they tell you in a feedback survey. It’s not what your partners assume based on 20 years of coffee catch-ups.
ASI tells you what your ideal clients actually think, worry about and search for when they’re trying to solve a problem.
Client insights pay twice in GEO.
First, you get clients to your website.
There’s a significant first-mover advantage if you’re the firm that properly understands what the client is asking — deeper than the keywords, down to the real question behind the search. While your competitors are still writing generic overview pieces, you’re answering the question the client actually has.
Second, you get clients to pick up the phone.
Plenty of SEO money gets flushed down the agency toilet because firms get clients to their website only for the clients to push off again without a hello.
Understanding your clients helps you craft articles they’ll read and write those articles in a way that gets them to think, “I need to give you a call about this.”
This is how you convert website visitors into conversations in 2026.
GEO rewards the firms that know their clients best. ASI is how you become one of them.
Is now the time to know your reader better than ever?
Have you got a big pitch coming up? A panel renewal in the next 90 days?
In a 15-minute call, we can identify your most critical intelligence gaps — the unknowns that are costing you clients, positioning power or growth momentum.
You’ll leave with clarity on whether ASI Research fits your situation and, if it does, exactly how it would work for your firm. No generic pitch—just a frank assessment of whether this methodology solves your specific problem.
It’s easy to set a time.
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