Building Family Law AI Search SEO That Drives Leads

AI search SEO is breaking family law traffic models. Rankings up, traffic down. Here's what the data shows and how to fix it.

The decoupling started in September 2024. Impressions climbing, clicks tanking. Firms with thin content, those "divorce lawyer + city" page variants, got crushed. 

Firms building topical authority and pairing video with natural language content are winning AI overview citations and direct site visits. 

So in this episode, we’ll break down the Google Search Console diagnostic, the tools to check your AI visibility across ChatGPT and Perplexity, and how to measure visibility in this new landscape.

The gap isn't your SEO strategy. It's whether you built for zero-click searches and AI overviews from the start.

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📄 CHAPTERS  

0:00 - Building Family Law AI Search SEO That Drives Leads 

1:17 - The Great Decoupling: Why Rankings Are Up But Traffic Is Down 

3:32 - How to Diagnose AI Search Impact Using Google Search Console 

4:34 - Waterfall Metrics: When Traffic Loss Actually Hurts Your Business 

5:28 - Thin Content vs. Topical Authority: Which Sites Are Getting Crushed 

6:29 - 88% of AI Overviews Target Informational Searches Family Law Firms Need 

7:15 - How AI Citations Drive Direct Site Visits Without Clicks 

11:07 - Zero-Click Searches: Winning Visibility Even When Nobody Clicks 

12:38 - Why Customer Sentiment and Reviews Impact AI Search Results 

13:35 - Natural Language Content: Why Video + Transcripts Outperform Written Articles

15:09 - Stop Measuring Vanity Metrics: The New Visibility Framework for 2026

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Transcript

0:00

I would say some of the things that are important for any firm that's trying to be visible in, in AI search overviews, is customer sentiment is very important to the results. So if you're a firm that doesn't take care of your clients in a really meaningful way, that's invisible in the marketplace, a lot of reviews, you're likely to not perform very well in these AI overviews or these AI search results. All right, everyone, welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show. You have the normal crew here I am, Tyler. Dolph, your host. And with me today is the co-founder of our very own family law firm, Sterling Lawyers. This is Tony Karl's. On the last episode, we gave you the framework to measure whether your SEO is working. Today, we're going to explain that even why, even if you have good measurement, it might show a troubling trend and why that trend is not your fault, right? We are in the the wave of AI and it is changing everything. And it is hitting family law firms harder than most practice areas. Today we're going to talk about what's happening in the space and what you can do about it. We have five major realities of the 2026 what we're calling the visibility crisis. Tony. The first one is the great decoupling why rankings are up, but results are down. Yeah. I mean, this is, this started happening around, September, I believe, of 24. And it's been continuing to to go, throughout all this year and last year. And what we're seeing, decoupling means exactly what it, what it means. Typically in the past, when you saw traffic grow organically, you would see your when you see impressions grow organically, you would see your traffic grow organically. We've seen very much the opposite. As of, recently this as of, 20, 24. And it's just accelerated, where we're seeing greater visibility but actually lower throughput from a traffic perspective. And it has everything to do with eye overviews as well as, searches being done in ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini, pulling data in, and not actually, so users are getting information from you, they're seeing your brand, but they're not actually ever getting to your website, which is what the decoupling is. So you're what we're seeing a lot of is greater visibility improves rankings, but we're not seeing direct to site traffic. So a lot of what we talked about in our last podcast is vanity metrics. So if you're if you're tracking vanity metrics, you're probably very disappointed right now because you're seeing you're seeing some vanity metrics perform really well. But you're seeing, you're seeing traffic not actually perform really well. So there's, it's a bit confusing, but when you dig into it, what you're seeing is greater visibility through AI overviews and, significant gaps in traffic. Actually getting to your site. Yeah, I think the sense we have is the media and law firms saw a 19% decline in organic traffic in 2025. Some firms dropping nearly 80%. But for most of them, rankings didn't change at all. Just the traffic stopped coming. Correct. What can firms do? What can they look at to understand if this is happening to them? You know, do they pull up Google Search Console and look at impressions and clicks over the last 12 months? Yeah. I mean, that would be to be one really good place to start diving in. The what you because what you'll very likely see is if you zoom out and you look at, I think the most, the longest term, you can pull is 16 months in Google Search Console. If you do that, you're going to see, you're going to see your impressions either staying the same or going up, and you're going to see your, your click traffic actually going in the opposite direction. So it's going to look very much like a, like a pretty weird graph in some ways, because some of you think some of your metrics are performing better if you overlaid rankings on it as well, you're going to see continued pattern. So that's how you know it's happening to you. The biggest question is, is it is it impacting your business? So, some people that have lost traffic, have seen their waterfall, regress or not, stay the same or get worse, which means, you know, the number of inbound inquiries or phone calls and web leads, qualified leads and sets go down. Other firms are not seeing that because they're they're replacing that traffic and visibility through through AI overviews and AI search. So that's what we would like to see. There's a fair amount of overlap between, what we do to rank sites organically from an SEO perspective, as well as what helps that helps your visibility in the AI models from AI overviews. So if you've been doing that well over the period, if you've been building a site that's structurally sound with lots of robust information, not just the same information over and over again, you're probably performing pretty well. That's what we've generally seen. If you have thin content where every single page is a different variation of divorce lawyer, you probably have seen your traffic dip significantly because you have a very thin website. We've seen several, fairly large sites from a page count perspective. See fairly significant traffic reductions that actually negatively impacted their business. Because what they, what they had done historically is just build out tons and tons of pages of all the different variants of divorce lawyer. So Milwaukee divorce lawyer, Milwaukee family lawyer, Milwaukee military family lawyer in Milwaukee, so on and so forth. Divorce lawyer, variant. All of those pages are filled within content to say the same exact thing. They're not they're not helping at all. They're actually hurting the site. So there's a whole bunch of law firms that look like that. And there's other than that, the right way all along, and they're the ones that are that are winning now. Yes. Our second point is around AI and the AI generated answer boxes. And I just want to read something that we just got delivered. And it is, in January 2025, the the AI answer box appeared at on roughly 6.5% of queries by July. That peaked at nearly 25%. And and now they're sitting around 15%. But I think what makes this devastating for family law is 88% of the queries that trigger AI are overviews, and, and informational based searches. And this is exactly the content that family law firms use, right? Guides about divorce timelines, custody explanations, property division overviews. So this is impacting family law in a major way. Yeah, yeah. So, the firms that are winning or those that have that are being referenced in those AI overviews, so they have really good pages for that type of content, like how to file for divorce and your state how child custody works. And you're like, you're going into your deep diving into the information that you can give on a website without giving legal advice. Those sites are being referenced in those AI overviews. So people are starting to see their brands. So it's and it's changing their behavior because, you're what you're seeing direct direct site visits happen as a result of that because they're seeing they're seeing the information that they're they're looking for. It's being collated by AI. And then you're being referenced on the side as supporting, supporting the AI overview there, then going to the site through that process. So you're seeing site traffic change in terms of where it's where it was coming from in the past, where it's coming from now, and sites that just focused on those like super low funnel divorce lawyer keywords, they're they're the ones that have been hurt the most because they don't have good robust content. That's, helping them rank for all of the research, research type topics that people want to review before they start making a decision on who they're going to work with. Yeah. Pretty wild. What what can a firm do. As far as understanding if this is affecting them or not. Is it like doing some incognito searches to see if they're showing up versus our competitors for some of these? You can do that. There are there are definitely a bunch of tools that will help that you can just plug your website and explain a little bit about your site, and it will then give you your visibility in, in the different AI platforms. ChatGPT perplexity, cloud, so on and so forth. it'll tell you, you know, here are the here the queries that are most, most frequently used. And here's your visibility as well as here. Well, here are the other people that are visible for that same set of information. So it'll basically aggregate it for you. And you can see like how well are you represented or how how poorly are you represented or not represented at all. And it kind of gives you some insight on where are the most where are the important things to start thinking about ranking for and building content around, versus what you've done in the past? You don't necessarily need to use a tool. One of the things that you could do is, if you're using Claude or, Gemini, you could easily take your website, explain what you do as a firm, and tell it to analyze your website and give you a topical cluster of, content that you could build to improve your website's authority on a particular topic. And it's going to give you a whole bunch of topical ideas that you could start leveraging where you can you can start seeing your content gaps, especially the important ones. Family law is unlike other practice areas. Your callers are not shopping for a service. They're looking for someone who makes them feel safe enough to share. The worst thing happening in their life. The firm that hears them first wins every time. And that's what changed everything at Sterling. We eventually built that system into four actionable steps on this free training. Mary Sankey, who leads our sales team, is going to break down the entire four step sales system. She is sterling sales manager. She's the one who runs it every single day. So go ahead and register below for the sales secrets of an $18 million family law firm. I'll see you there. Just jumping back to the list. Our next point is around the zero click searches. I think for a long time we've, assumed that Google's whole model is to get rid of websites entirely to be the information source that users needed. And so we're seeing these zero click searches continue to increase. You're seeing the same thing on your end. Yep, yep. It's happening more and more. And that's why, that's why you're seeing what you're seeing in the data is impressions showing up. It shows up as an impression and a ranking, but you're not getting any, you're not getting any traffic. That's because they're just getting their answer. And the AI overview. So, what's important is that your brand, your brand has an opportunity to be referenced in that, in that section because users prefer results that cite their information. So, a different, different models are doing it differently. But a lot of them will show you where they pulled the info from. So you can go to you can go to the next step and review that. Where where did you pull this information on how to you know, how to file for divorce? Oh Sterling Lawyers is the source. Interesting. I'm going to go look at their website. So we're seeing a lot of that. love it. Okay. So really, you know, the new playbook is to win visibility even when nobody clicks. And it's everything you've been talking about. Having your content be super authoritative and focused and not just copy and paste it from page to page. Page. Is there anything else as it relates to prioritizing your agency or your team internally on how to counteract some of this? But I would say some of the things that are important for any firm that's trying to be visible in, in AI search overviews, is customer sentiment is very important to the results. So if you're a firm that doesn't take care of your clients in a really meaningful way, that's invisible in the marketplace, a lot of reviews, you're likely to not perform very well in these AI overviews or these AI search results. So, that's really important. And then the second thing is video content has continued to become more and more important, primarily because in a video when we're talking about a topic, the way we talk about it with natural language is extraordinarily different than if I were to write a if I were to write an article about the same exact information, it's going to be buttoned up, it's going to be pristine, it's going to be exact. It's not going to be this back and forth that we're currently having, which means when, when, when you do an AI research project, it's going to want to it's it's starting point is all the natural language you're going to dump into the chat, which is not going to be overly thought out and perfectly conducted. Question. It's going to have rambling and nonsense and ums and i's and like I think and blah, blah, blah. It's going to have all of that stuff in it. It's going to feel like a natural language question. If your content doesn't have any of that or isn't referencing, that type of language likely not to perform very well in the AI search results. So you know why video is important is if you're having a conversation about a topic, the way you have that conversation and talk about is very different than how you would write about it. So pairing those things together and leveraging the transcript on the page and leveraging the ability to take all of that and make a really good article. But pairing those two things together is becoming more and more important. And that's why firms that have invested in that in the future and are integrating their video content with their website content, they're performing better. But it's it's because they have a lot more natural language evidence on their site than firms that don't. the world is changing before our eyes. It's pretty wild. And our our fifth and final point is exactly that. Do not measure what you've been measuring in 2020 and 2021. The game is changed. And so you need to measure differently how should firms think about what they're measuring and what they're looking at on a daily or weekly basis to know if they're winning or losing. One of the things that we talk about in our, you know, our eight waterfall metrics is, it's a category called users. And it's really visibility. So like you should you should know how visible you are from a bunch of different traffic opportunities. So whether that is, different chat platforms, like ChatGPT or cloud or whatever, or it is Google search or it's or it is maps or it is paid. Paid search. How visible are you in these different channels? And getting your benchmarks there is really important because that's going to directly impact the next one down, which is inquiries. So if you don't know how things are shifting from one category to the next, or how the how you might have lost some direct traffic to your website, but you're still just as visible in a search results. Maybe your SEO metrics look more poor, but you're getting picked up here and nothing is actually happened with your your waterfall, with your business. So you're still, you know, you're still doing good and you're performing good and you're growing, and that's all great. But understanding why is really important, because then you can better understand where you should continue to invest, because you're going to see the pattern of where things are moving to and from. This is, it's pretty wild stuff hot off the press, right? The crisis is real, but so is the opportunity. So firms that understand this shift and adopt their strategy now are going to own the visibility landscape in the future. Those that will wait. It's going to be really hard to buy back the market. And so in our next episode we're going to cover how this disruption is, how to turn this into a scaling advantage, including AI visibility, multi-platform visibility. Make sure to check that out. And if you missed our, our third episode in this series where we break down the metrics and framework for knowing whether your SEO is actually working, make sure to check that out, because that will help build on everything that we are going to share with you. Tony, thank you so much for your time with this. Look forward to continuing the journey.