5 Predictions That'll Change the 2026 GEO for Attorneys

Here are five systematic predictions on how AI visibility will reshape family law firm client acquisition. 

It's what we're watching happen in real-time with generative engine optimization, multi-platform law firm marketing, and conversational AI queries replacing traditional search behavior.

Hit with traffic drops in Q3 2025 or relying on a single platform for lead source? This episode shows how to audit your AI visibility and diversify before the market leaves you behind.

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📄 CHAPTERS  

0:00 - GEO for Attorneys: Why the 2-3 Year Client Search Starts in AI 

0:30 - Prediction 1: First Mover Advantage Closes Mid-2026 

0:56 - How Search Behavior Shifted to Perplexity and ChatGPT 

2:45 - Why "Search Paragraphs" Replace Keyword Queries 

5:21 - Content Gaps That Kill Your LLM Visibility 

10:06 - Prediction 2: Content Without Context Won't Rank 

14:08 - Prediction 3: AI-Generated Content Detection Gets Aggressive 

21:42 - Prediction 4: Templated Multi-Location Pages Get Hammered 

24:00 - Prediction 5: Single Platform Reliance Will Destroy Your Firm 

27:19 - Getting AI Accounts and Auditing Content Gaps

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Transcript

0:00

It's going to be wild to watch how people search and conduct their knowledge because, like bringing it back to family law. We know that the search process is 2 to 3 years long. So there's going to be so much interaction with AI before purchasing decision happens that you're going to miss the whole boat years ahead of time. If you're not there. welcome back to the Sterling Family last show. We have a great episode today we are going to talk about. We're going to put our tinfoil hats on and talk about our predictions, the five predictions we have for Geo in 2026. Tony, our first prediction is that the Geo first mover advantage will close by mid 2026. I'm assuming it is because AI is everywhere now. Everyone knows about it, everyone's asking about it. And the early adopters, you know, everyone's becoming that. Yeah. I mean, the more and more, these, these tools become reliable and they hallucinate less, and they're just being adopted more and more. So, and like, on the from a, you know, generative engine perspective in terms of, like showing, having visibility in the limbs, you're, there's firms that have been moving towards that since the beginning, having really well structured content. So that's, that's definitely coming. I would say there's. The general move of users moving away from search and towards, perplexity or ChatGPT or Claude to do investigations has significantly moved already. Search is still something to be used, but it's it's like part of the ecosystem. I don't think it's going away. It's just, a lot of people are treating these LMS as like, personal advice givers essentially. And it's like, it's it's changing how people interact with the internet in a pretty large way. Like I still use search, but it's way closer to the end of my, the end of my search process. And I'm, I'm often times going direct to brands because brands are recommended. By the LMS. So it's very much just it changed the way I'm, I'm searching it's changing the way a lot of people are searching. I know my wife actually is using perplexity a lot more, for, for a ton of things instead of going direct search. And then she, she uses search to find things at the end. So it's just it's changing how people are operating with the internet. Search doesn't go away. It's just it's changing. It's part of the equation, not the only equation. Yeah. I think it's fully time to accept that this is here to stay, and that the firms building AI visibility now are going to dominate referrals for years. Right? There's no longer like, wait and see if it's going to work. Like, this is a thing. It's time. And, one thing that we tell prospective clients and our clients all the time is like, just go to an alarm and search. Who are the top family attorneys in your city, right. And then ask perplexity the same question. And see who shows up. what's what's what's interesting is that's not how people are using it. So what they're you got to think about how they're actually leveraging these LMS when they're doing it. Because that's how you would use it for search. Right? You would, you would like switch. So and like at first that's what people are doing. They're just kind of using it as an augmented search. But they're seeing they're getting a whole bunch more than they asked for. That's really good. So they're starting to use it as like a scenario advisor. So they're like how I typically use AI. My my go to is grok because I can speak into it really well. It has the best back and forth from a speaking perspective. So that's my preference. And I go and I just, you know, I call it I just throw up into grok, give it, you know, 3 or 4, you know, depending on what I'm doing, you know, 90s to four minutes of just me talking to it, explaining what I'm trying to do. Yeah, yeah. Just literally thinking out loud, not trying to structure it, not trying to be perfect, not trying to do anything. And then it gives me a response. Typically I'm also asking you like ask me other questions about this, about my scenario or about my situation or about what I'm trying to do, interview me and ask me more questions so that I can, like, I can fully give you all of the things to consider in your solution. So that's typically where I'm starting. And then it's then it's giving me several options after. And then I go to those things and do my research. So it's just it's completely changing the query streams because it's not you're not going you're I don't think especially future, future version people are going to go to ChatGPT and they're they're not going to they're not going to go, who are the top family law firms in whatever city they're going to say, you know, I'm married with two. Yeah. I'm married. I'm married with two kids. They're seven and they're seven and nine. We homeschool, you know, we have four, one K. We own a couple businesses. You know, here's we live we live in this area. What? And and we're getting a divorce. Like what do you who what what should I do? What's my first step like that would be probably a query. And then if you don't have information on your site or other references externally about all of those things I just mentioned, you are not going to be visible in the LMS at all. Like grok is not going to show you for that that search query, and it's not a search query. It's like a search paragraph or a search, you know, story essentially, that it's taking, synthesizing, then taking all the information it has in its database to return you some results that are, it thinks are going to be answering your query. So. Okay, that's a great point. So. different. So so assuming that's true, the our listeners need to ensure that they have lots and lots of content and relevant topics on their site as it relates to how people are going to do their generic research before they're even ready for a divorce. Right. Yeah. So this is where, this is where video content is really helping firms that have gone into that. This is where kind of makes doing a combination of, you know, where are you located and where do you serve. So essentially like service type content, core content, which would be like what are the things that you actually do? So like what do you actually do, where do you do it. And then what are like natural language scenarios that get covered. So like that's part of our content plan. It's typically three fold. And we do a lot of videos as well at Sterling because like the, the whole purpose is we need to attack it. We need attack search the search front because they're still going to be searchers. We need to attack the location front because people are still going to be interacting with maps in a real heavy way. And this and the LMS, the models are using maps to pre pre include location adjusted information. And then you need to have like natural language conversation story based scenario based conversation about particular topics. So like one of the things that we do is we take a scenario, completely anonymous, anonymize it and write it up as an article. So we'll base it will basically change. The attorney will change the location. We'll use the root of the story, change the to change the client names. But then we'll literally we'll have a blog post about what what occurred. So like client information is still protected. Nothing is divulged from that perspective. It's also why we changed the attorney. So there's really no way to go research the story. But it's it's an amazing opportunity for natural language models like ChatGPT or Perplexity or Clod or whatever. They're going to see that information and then you're going to be more relevant to different story based interactions that are happening on these, on these platforms. So it's just you got to think about content differently, because the way people are interacting with these tools is very different than how they're interacting with search. 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. So speaking of content, Tony, our second prediction is that AI is going to kind of lose generic content more than Google ever did. And, you know, you've been doing search for a long time, and there were definitely moments when you could just throw a bunch of content up or keyword stuff the hell out of a page. And it feels like people are trying to, hack the, the geo algorithm. But I think what we've seen is that it's so much more personalized, and the more specific and deliberate you can build content, the more effective you're going to show up. Yeah, yeah. It's, the way the AI models are gathering, sorting and compiling information back to users from a chat perspective or it's way more advanced than what you're getting from an SEO, or from a search page, that's primarily driven from contextual information and, off site linking, both of which are easy to manipulate. And that's why a lot of law firm sites, especially the ones that we take on here, rocket clicks, they have their way over indexed on location pages. So at some point, you know, we'll have, you know, the biggest example we had is, we had a firm that had, I think, 12 locations total. They had 786 pages that were dedicated to location variants. The content that wasn't dedicated to location variance was under 200. So, it's just it's a it's a huge problem in the space. Generally it's just over optimization on top of over optimization. And it just it doesn't work. It doesn't hasn't worked for SEO for a long time. It actually started really getting penalized. In the last several years or pages, sites that were doing that, they've lost a lot of rank. And it's because they, they were it was easy to see what they were trying to do. But with, with the AI models that they don't necessarily care how many pages on a site say the same thing. That's just going to count as the same as one thing. Because they're not returning pages, they're returning information, so they're synthesizing information. So if you're if you have 500 pages or 5000 pages saying you are relevant to the city of Milwaukee, that's just one data point, because you're one site and it's one piece of information about you and your brand being relevant to Milwaukee. So it's not going to help you like you need. We, the sites need to have three different types of content. They need some location content because that's going to help feed the maps. And that's primarily where these AI models are determining location, proximity from like, is the service, something that a user should consider based on where they're located? A lot of it's coming from the maps because they're pulling all of that map data. The second is like, what types of practice area information do you have and how how specific do you get with that info so that you can it can be contextually applied to what we were talking about before, which is just someone kind of throwing up into an AI model to determine what they should potentially do next. And that information is going to be really helpful there. And then story based information or information similar to like videos or information similar to videos, which are more story based content, they're going to also help from, contextual perspective, because that's what the AI models are looking for, is like, who's relevant? Like for my scenario, if I was going through a divorce, they would want to know. They'd want to be able to pull a firm in the Milwaukee area that they, they trust is relevant to, married with kids, owns a business, all these different types of things. So, you know, if I don't have that type of information on my site, I'm not going to be I'm not going to be there. When the AI returns the information. So. Yeah. This really makes me think about, other agencies that we've encountered in this space and a lot of their, contracts are deliverable based contracts. They are. Well, we'll do two blog posts a month, or we'll do three landing pages a month. And the problem with that is exactly what you're saying. It's just creating more work that's irrelevant. That's not pushing these sites forward. It's like, well, I got to get the content out. So I'm going to create some more location pages and then you end up with that firm you're talking about, 700 pages dedicated towards locations. Yeah. I mean, and it's there's no, there's, you know, there's no restarting you. If it took you four years to get to that place, like, that's four years of wasted content building where it's valuable because like that, that's not really what it works. It doesn't. It hasn't worked for a long time. I mean, that's really SEO from like, you know, 2007. So it's pretty outdated. It's almost 20 years old. So, the internet's of all the time from there. And like, now that we have like, now that we have the tools and the platforms that actually can consume the information, those sites are really being left behind as the as the internet changes and Yes. Good point. Okay. Moving on to our third prediction agenda. Browsers will control 60% of the family law short list by 2027. Give us an overview on what these browsers are and why we think they're going to control so much of this market share. So if you've used, perplexity or comment, so perplexity is is a model. The if you, there's a browser called comet. It's built right. The perplexity models built right into it. ChatGPT has, has their own as well. The these are changing the way browser usage is, is happening. There's a fair amount of switch that's already occurred. So perplexity, for instance, has 50 million active users. Most people, most people haven't heard of it. It's not a, it's not a significant AI platform at this at this point, in terms of like, you know, when you compare that to how many monthly active users are on Google, like it's a very different number. So, it we're still on the early adopter curve. But they have a browser that's called comet or Perplexities built right in. So every time you actually go to your browser to do something, you're going to get an AI result back. You're not going to get a search page back. And it's it's delivering different information that you're going to start consuming in a different way. And it's changing behavior patterns. What what's going to be really interesting is as these, these models continue to, become adopted in the greater marketplace, general search from browsers may not even be a thing in the future. I know for myself, like I have, I'm I'm a fairly big AI nerd. I use a lot of my a lot of my information gathering, is actually happening more and more of it is actually actually happening directly through slack because I've created my own slack agent that does things that I want it to do and can plug into anything. So I'm not even leaving my I'm not even leaving my workspace. Like, I'm just I'm sitting in slack, connected to my team. One of my team members quote unquote name is Patrick, and that's my AI that does a whole bunch of different So you're like starting your search there. Hey, Patrick. I'm. my search there. I'll give them a task to, like, do research on X, Y, and Z, and it'll give me back a whole bunch of information. And I've never I have not left slack. So it's, there's a ton that's going to change in this marketplace. So, you know, we're we're very much on the early adopter curve. And that's going to as it continues to become more and more standard use, you know, like which browser do you use it. You know, you'll still have your interaction with the internet is going to continue to look at it more and more different, because you you may not be starting ever in a browser like I know, for me, like I don't a lot of stuff, I don't even start in a browser. I'm starting in slack because that's where I want to control my communication. Patrick. Because like my the agent that I've built, it's it's in my email. It's in my iMessage and all of it routes through my slack. And now I just have one space to do things versus all of these different spaces that are, you know, they just continue to sprawl and it's a pain in the butt to manage, especially, you know, calendar like my. Totally off topic and not related to family law firms, but are you seeing that same interaction happen when you're doing e-commerce? Like, I know you're a big Nike sneaker guy. Are you going to are you going to ask Patrick to give you the latest sneaker releases? I mean, I mean, I'm not a, I'm not a shoe head like that. So, like, I don't really track shoe releases. Like the most recent one I did, I wanted to get I wanted to get my. But we wanted to get different toothbrushes for our family. Right. So we ended up getting auto rush, which is like this huge. It's like this. It doesn't look like a toothbrush. You stick it in your mouth and it, like, brushes your teeth for you. Because I want to make my girls brush their teeth better. So like, what better way than to get them a dinosaur toothbrush that they put in their mouth? It's like top and bottom. And it does like a way better job than you would if you did it by yourself. I found that through this process So it's doing research on all kinds of things. Yeah. Like you're starting there. Yeah. Correct. Starting there and then it shows me a bunch of potential products. And I go to those sites and I look at them and, there's a lot. But that's why, you know, people that are more visible in these AI platforms, they're seeing a they're seeing a higher, they should be seeing in their analytics more direct traffic. That's that's likely what's happening because they're getting recommended. And then people are either clicking through the links in the yellow them they might be seeing that is referral traffic or people are just going to those domains. That's so interesting. Yeah. It's going to be wild to watch how people search and conduct their knowledge because, like bringing it back to family law. We know that the search process is is 2 to 3 years long. So there's going to be so much interaction with AI before purchasing decision happens that you're going to miss the whole boat years ahead of time. If you're not there. At the end it depends how you're set up. Like I don't I'm not really sure how I would get opted into anything at that, like the way that I'm using it, because I'm, I'm direct direct port into via the API and I've created my own slack agent and it's, it's just going to anthropic the API key. So like there's I'm not getting ads, I'm never going to get ads on my slack instance unless slack starts doing that. But even then like these are these are encrypted messages back and forth to my agent. So I do think marketing is going to continue to change. It's going to look different. We're not there yet. Like this is an existential threat. But there is the market is going to change a lot. Like I I've said for a long time, like the best book for anybody to read that's in marketing. Any honestly, any business owner should read this too. It's called scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. It was written in the 1920s. It's old as shit. It is super old, but it is actually marketing. It's none of this. Like, let's try to manipulate a search engine to get our brand in front of it. You know, it's all about messages. It's all about hooks. It's all about presentations, about offers. It's about how you had to advertise when you you had to, like, figure out how to get in front of people, grab their attention in a second, and then have them do an action. So, I just think the world is moving more towards that. Branding is going to become more and more important than it has in the past. It's going to change the way marketers have to think. And if they're just, you know, platform automatons, they're going to struggle in this new world because they're not really marketers. They're just, you know, they they know how to put the keywords in the right place to make the Google ads ad pop. Like, that's not really marketing. That's just platform management. I mean, that book, along with the Waterfall method by Anthony Karl's. Sure. Yeah. We can, but Throw that on the left. Love it. Okay, moving into number four, which we've touched on a little bit, and that is that Google will aggressively index templated Multi-Location pages. So if you have a location in Tempe and a location in Phoenix and a location and, wherever, and you have just the same content, but you change the address, you're going to get screwed. Yeah. I mean I mean that's been that's been the case for a while. What's, why it's becoming more and more important is like those, those the Google search pages is changing. If you go to a Google search page now and you just like look at what returns when you do any type of query in Google, like you're getting an AI overview first for a large percentage of queries, you're then going to get maybe an ad or two, you're going to get a map, you're going to get, and then you're gonna get a couple organic search results. You used to get ten all the time. You're not even getting ten organic search results anymore. So Google, it's, you know, the index. Maybe that's aggressive, but they're they're just not going to be visible. They're they're not going to be visible. And like what worked in the past to get you visibility is not going to work in New World. And it's that's that's continue to happen. I mean there is some pretty large updates in 2025 that Google targeted. And a lot of people got some traffic wiped out right around the Q three mark of last year. I think that was the second or third time they had updated that part of the algorithm, because I think the first time we actually saw this was late 2024. They they tested it in December, then they rolled it out pretty hard in April. And they did it again with another update in August. So this has been the trend. It's been this has been the trend for a long time though. Way back when they did the Panda and Penguin algorithm implementations, which I believe was like 2008 and 2009. This has been their direction. They just have better tools to implement now and way better processing power with using these AI models to improve their search results. So that's what they're doing. As well. I think the, the fifth prediction is the most important one or the most, relevant for today. And that is that a reliance on a single platform will put you out of business. If you're a law firm, only gets leads from Google ads today or loses today, you have to diversify. Yeah, 100% like that. I mean, that's it's that's so true. And the the tendency, even the tendency for a lot of people that are starting to use AI, they're picking essentially building out a whole infrastructure for their IT. Like if you're really into AI, a lot of people are like picking a whole infrastructure to just use cloth or just use ChatGPT or just use Google. We're so early in this right now that that's like deciding is AltaVista, Yahoo or, you know, ask Jeeves going to win the search game. And it's like, oh no, Google. The Google is going to win the search game. And like, they weren't even a player when this whole thing started. So that's where we are in the evolution of these AI models is like, we don't know which one of these are going to win. Grok started super far behind. They have really leapfrogged forward with all of the data that they're, you know, they're leveraging from their models that they've they've been working and using in full self-drive mode. And on a Tesla that's being retrained with language. So like they're coming along really fast. Google has gotten a lot better. They started they started from a full infrastructure perspective where OpenAI just started from a models. So like, we don't know who's going to win at this point. And some of the winners and losers are going to be picked, not necessarily even because of quality. Like there's definitely going to be things related to what's going on in the marketplace generally. Like Claude just got slapped by the, you know, the War Department or whatever you want to call it at this point. And like, they're not they're not going to get military contracts, which means they're going to get way less funding than the people that got opted in. That's not fair for them. But the reality is like, that's going to make a difference because the other companies that got picked, they're going to get funded and they're going to have more, more access to capital and opportunities. Then Claude, who's I think one of the top right now. So it's like we don't know who's going to win at this point. It's just it's a it's an ever evolving marketplace right now. So like really getting into one single platform, whether that's your marketing strategy or your AI strategy internally. You're, you're setting yourself up for you're setting yourself up for failure. Maybe you'll get lucky and roll the dice. Well, but that's, that's just something that people should have on their minds as this world starts to change and we move towards this, I, I, you know, integrated work. Yeah, yeah. Integrated workforce and like, workflow opportunities and work and visibility and marketing and all the things. So if I'm a law firm owner listening to this and I'm thinking to myself, Holy shit, Tony just scared the crap out of me. I'm not doing anything with AI. What's their first step? What's what's the first thing that a law firm owner should do? Or who should they talk to about understanding? What? What the they need to be doing from a high visibility perspective. I mean, I would if you're not using AI currently like that's probably your first step is like do you have you have a cloud AI account. Do you have a Gemini account. Do you have a ChatGPT account? Do you have one of these to start using and like getting into your normal everyday utility of your, you know, your daily work habits? Because I, I don't ever go to search first anymore. A lot of my interaction every single day is with grok or with my with my slack agent. I guess, where I'm starting most of my my work to challenge my thinking, to just refine what I'm what I'm thinking. I'm going to start with. So if you're not doing if you're not starting with that, like you're that's probably the biggest thing. And then secondly, start using the tool if you're going to if you want to know, like what can I do better to be visible in in AI search, in AI, chats, ask it, give it your website. Say, what are my what are my content gaps that are holding me back from visibility in. In the, in the AI models. So and you're going to get a different answer from all the different lumps because they're all built. They're all built differently. So, you know, that's probably where I would start is you're going to get a whole bunch of information and you're going to start actually using the tool that you should be using to, you know, as you're as you're venturing with all of us to figure out what this new world of world of work looks like when we're all AI enabled. That's right. So I appreciate your time, as always.