How to Show Up in AI Search With Sterling’s 4-Step System

How to show up in AI search isn't luck. Sterling logged 678 trailing mentions in just one month last April. Closest rival? 53. Here's the gap.

Most firms stop at attorney pages, which makes them invisible in AI search. In this episode, we break down the 4 signals we use at Sterling to earn AI citations, attract qualified clients, and stay visible where people are actually searching. 

AI is the new pre-consultation layer, and clients research for 18-36 months before they call. Win top-of-funnel visibility now, and you land on the shortlist. Skip it, and paid search bleeds you dry.

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📄 CHAPTERS  

0:00 - How to Show Up in AI Search: The 678 vs 53 Visibility Gap 

3:33 - Why Clients Research 18-36 Months Before They Call 

8:09 - Topical Breadth Is the Moat: 474 Topics, 24 Categories 

13:11 - The 4 Signals That Win AI Citations 

16:30 - Decision Pages and Calculators Win, Not Service Pages 

22:25 - Free AI Citations vs. $9 Clicks: Build an Annuity

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Transcript

0:00

Why does one Wisconsin family law firm get cited by AI 678 times a month, while its closest competitor gets cited 53 times? Sterling lawyer shows up an 8.14 million AI search interactions a month. Karp, the biggest brand name Family law firm in the same market shows up 429,000 times. Divergent shows up 299,000 times. Same state, same practice areas, same clients searching for the same questions. The gap isn't about advertising, spend or attorney count. It's about which pages on the website AI engines decide to cite and which ones get ignored. In this episode, we will break down what we do differently and how we built a 19 times AI audience lead and the one content decision that drove that entire gap. Tony, welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show. You know, if you are on LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook or whatever, everybody's talking about AI and how you have to AI your law firm and now's the time. And I think what's funny is you don't see a lot of like actual results, like what is actually happening. What are law firms actually doing to show up in AI search? And ironically, of course, sterling is crushing. And it isn't something that we did last month or even last year. It's been a consistent strategy over time that is allowing us to crush the competition as we get started here. Give me just some stats as it relates to where Sterling shows up and how we're crushing. Yeah. So we're so we're talking about our presence in Wisconsin. So we are. Our two biggest competitors are Karp & Iancu and divergent family law. And they're you know, they run very successful firms, decent size pretty decent sized firms actually. But we are destroying them in in AI visibility. It's not even close from a marketing perspective. So just like the the trailing mentions, for instance, as an example, AI mentions over in the last month, we have 678 compared to our two biggest competitors, which are 94 and 53. And then everybody else like massively falls off a cliff from there. It's not even close. We are easily six x, we're six and x closest, and we're we are 1010 to 20 x everybody else. Same thing with audience. Our audience share on AI. AI answers. So how often we're cited in AI answers. In April it was 8.14 million times. Next closest was 429 and then two 99,000 429,000 299,000. And then again, it falls way off a cliff. So we're just literally crushing the competition in so many different areas. And it's nothing we did over the last year. This has been our long term. It's been our long term strategy. It's like, how can we meet the clients where they are in their journey? We've done a ton of surveying on the types of things that they we all know they're going through, and the length of time they go through them is not small. It's a massive timeline. Our internal surveying, when we've done one on one surveys with clients, they are in market for 18 to 36 months before they call you, before they call you the law firm they are. That is how long they are considering and researching and trying to figure out what they're going to do and if it's going to if they're going to have to do it. And what are the consequences of doing it? And who would I work with and why would I work with them, and what are all the things I need to think about and blah blah blah blah, blah, blah, blah. That's how we've built our content. And that is why we are absolutely annihilating everybody. And we've always done that because we want to meet the clients where they are and help them along the journey. It's why we perform really well in the marketplace consistently. We also build out the low funnel pages. But most law firms and we work with a bunch of them, they only focus on the low funnel. Let's build out attorney pages that that does not work long term. It only gives you a subsection of the marketplace and it's just a big mess. And now the miss is becoming bigger because now now it's having a massive impact on visibility with AI. Yes, 100% AI is accelerating that. And so today we have five five truths, five things that we've noticed that we've done in the marketplace that's working, that we want to share with all of our listeners. And so the first one is that AI has become the pre consultation layer. And you were just talking about this, right. The the timeline of divorce is much longer than I think anyone realizes or, or even if they realize that they're not doing anything about it. And people are now turning to AI to do some of that pre research. 100%. And they're looking at they're looking at a massive variety of things because they need to they want to start planning what what if they're going to have to go through this. What does it mean and what does it look like? And how is it going to affect me. Because they have no clue. And like, they're going to do research and it's easier now than ever, and it's going to continue to become more and more easy as technology continues to develop and the internet continues to grow. And like people spend more and more time on devices and access to information is just so readily available. They do research. They do research emotionally. If that's just how they do it, they have a question that pops up. It's so much easier now to get an answer than it was even three years ago. Two years ago, like I think in the past people would have either waited or felt like they had to call an attorney, but then knew they were going to get charged, so maybe didn't give all the contacts or, or you know, again delayed their decision. But now they have instant education access. Yeah. And it's for, for for people that are using AI a lot. You go to it to you literally have back and forth conversations where you're feeding it lots of information about a scenario so that you can then understand the response. I often every single day, at least once a day. I'm having a a pretty long conversation with, with an LLM. Usually it's the one per day for sure. Every day is how I do my Bible studies now. It's a it's a really inductive process where I go through 13 different angles of how to analyze a chapter of the Bible. It's literally one of the things I do, and it takes me a 35 minute walk to do one, one chapter, and it's a back and forth conversation, and then I can go super deep on the context and the translation and all of the different things. It's all readily available. It's like I have a theologian in my ear. What do we think is happening with people that are going through the potentially going through a divorce, like they're researching what's right and what what is readily available to them in their hand. These two had to call out, bother a friend, or schedule something with the pastor or higher therapist or like do something because they weren't. All our surveys were pre AI being a huge thing, so they were still doing the research they were researching online. It was harder. That's that's literally the reality now. It's easier. That's way easier. And if you're if you're thinking about what are they going through and what are the things they're talking about, you're going to be so far ahead of this pre consultation layer. And it's such a good investment because you're meeting your clients where they are. And they're going to see you along the journey that they're taking. And they're going to trust you more when they come to come to the point in the process where they want to make a decision to hire an attorney, they already know you. They're to trust you, they're to senior content, they're familiar with you and everything you've said thus far. Great point. And that I mean, that really leads into our second point, which is that the topical breath is the moat, right? Like you, you've said it a few times. Meet the clients where they are. Well, in order to do that, you have to develop content that has a distinct point of view as it relates to all these different elements and situations that people encounter during this situation. And there's there's a lot of topics. So we have we've identified 474 different topics. I believe it covers about 24 different categories. And it's all demographic psychographic types of types of information. So an example would be all of the things that a business owner that would be going through divorce would be thinking about researching and getting information on it would another example would be people that are going through a divorce that are currently pregnant, people that are going through divorce, where there's domestic violence and there's so many different permutations of that psychographic demographic information of like what? What is that person's journey going to look like, and what is the information that they are going to want to see and engage with. And thinking about those topical trees is really important, because that allows you to be the expert as they're going through the journey of researching, and it doesn't have to lead, and it shouldn't lead on most of this process to a point where they're trying, you're trying to get them to convert into a consultation. They are in the information gathering process, and you can meet them there and give them value before they ever engage with your firm. And like, that's why they're then going to call you at the end, your goal. From a marketing perspective, our goal has always been how can we be in in what we call the short list? It's always we call it the short list. What that means to us is who are the top three firms that we're going to consider using? How can I, as the person in charge of marketing, get Sterling lawyers on the shortlist? That's my job. And like part of it is being visible at the end of the journey, which is where everybody focuses. But the easiest way to get on the shortlist is to be visible where everybody else doesn't do any work, which is way at the top of the funnel and like, nobody's there. So it's easy for us to show up and rank and add value consistently over and over again. And as they're doing it, they just keep saying, oh, look, there's that. There's that brand again. There's that silly s road logo again that we have. It's and it like it has worked really, really well and we're doubling down on it. We're not slowing down on it. We're continuing it. And the gap between what where we are and where most firms are. It's significant and we're going to keep doing that. And that's going to be our that's going to be one of our advantages is like we are we understand what's happening here and we're not going to aggressively chase crappy, unspecific, valuable content because that is the that is what a lot of people in the marketplace are doing. They're just spinning up a whole bunch of lawyer content. We've seen a whole bunch of sites that have done that. We just came across one down in Texas that had what was it they had? I believe it was like 7000 pages on their website. And almost it was like 5000 of them were attorney page variance. They didn't have that many locations. They had 12. There was no reason for that. Many variants. And like they have all gotten pulled out of the index since 2024. They are now like really hurting from a visibility perspective because they just built thin, unviable content. It didn't talk to anybody. It was just, you know, different versions of the same page over and over and over and over again. And that's been ripped out of visibility like that doesn't work Stop doing it. because when you did it the right way in the past, you beat all the people that were just trying to spam the internet, because that's what that is. It's just internet spam. And these models have gotten way better. Google's gotten way better at it. You know, they're still like 88% of all search search interactions, whether it's LMS or or Google. But LMS are definitely not serving that. That is 100% not in not in their, you know, quote unquote index or research process. It's just not there and not visible. It's not valuable content. So if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, I want to, I want to do this, I want to sign up with the marketing agency. I need to caution you that this approach is not a silver bullet. Quick turnaround ROI positive in 30 days. This Tony's talking about work that we've done over years so that we could again meet the clients where they are, knowing that where they are might be 18 months from scheduling a consultation. And so if you're expecting an ROI in 30 days, this isn't the route. This is a long term approach that is going to create growth for years. And it's going to it's going to impact your your bottom of the funnel really well because the things AI is looking for is it's looking for a couple different things. One is one is do you do you exist in a locality? We can all easily check that box by being visible, by being on maps within Google and Apple and all of the main priority maps that exist having quality reviews. If you don't have quality reviews in today's world, you are not going to win. Like if you do not care about client service, your firm is as at a very high risk. The third is specialization. What do you say about yourself and what is your depth of specialization? Like do you actually specialize in something. So a lot of firms that don't go deep and just go abroad and say they do everything, those those are not firms that show up. Well, they're showing up worse and worse in search and in the LMS. And it's because there's nothing they're not specialized. They're missing one of the four things. And then the fourth one is third party. Third party affirmation of point number three. So if you're not special, if you're not identifying and going deep into specialty on your site, you're going to miss that one. And you're also going to miss the fourth one, which is opportunities for third parties to affirm your depth of knowledge and expertise in an area. That's what's showing up from a visibility perspective. It's those four things. And if you're not focused on those four, how do you have really good location local signals for law firms specifically? Like any local business, I guess this would apply to good local signals, really quality reviews like how are you showing up from a service perspective? Are you seen as an expert or specialist or someone that really specializes and understands a topic area? And then is there third party affirmations of that? And it's similar similar to in the past link building. But it isn't link building. It's more PR type work. It's more work of third party entities that are authority authority entities referencing you like something that we do at Sterling every year is we do we look for any places that we can get, get awards that are very specifically related to either family law locally in our area, or nationally specific to family law, or awards for best like best places to work, top workplaces, those types of things. And that all is massive local signals and it's great for your business as well. Like so there's there's a lot of things here that are important factors that you can leverage that puts you in a position to win the lead generation game. Moving forward. Looking at our third point, and I think it's really important to distinguish between low funnel activities like I want to show up locally for Milwaukee divorce attorney, which is important. We're not discounting that at all. But what we're talking about is how AI is changing this narrative and the short term approach versus the long term approach. So what we've noticed is the pages winning an AI are not service pages. They're not lawyer bios, their decisions, their definitions and their calculators. Talk to us a little bit about what you're seeing their. those are all of the that's where almost all of the citations are. Is is in that. And it's where most of the it's where most of the people doing research are spending their time. They're spending very little time towards the bottom of the funnel. Like once they're at a place where they're going to make a decision, they're going to they're going to quickly make a decision because something happened that is triggering them to move forward. And they've already done a whole bunch of research. So like one of the questions we ask in our sales process, and this is one of the things that we talked about in one of our recent webinars is what happened that made you call today, like literally what happened that made you finally move forward today? Because we know you've been doing we know you've been in this place for a long time and something occurred. So as it pertains to like so we really respect that because we understand what these clients are going through. And a lot of our content is built out around, you know, how much, how much do things cost and what what drives costs. Calculators for spousal support and child custody and child support, different types of parenting plans and parenting arrangements, and the different types of forms that you're going to have to fill out from divorce perspective. Defining terms such as gals talking about what happens with marital home and like all of these different like permutations of of content that are important in people's journeys, because they're all of these clients are going through a journey where they basically have four large things at stake in all four of those things property division, do they have alimony or spousal support, their child custody and rights to their kids and the child support piece? All of those have so many different subcategories and permutations. And if you're not, if you're not addressing them, the LMS are not going to cite you and bring you up and show your brand and give you an opportunity to start serving them in any meaningful way. Well said. So we we have 217 performing topics in AI that's already showing up. That's a thing. We have 257 new decision pages in production. Talk to me and our audience about how you think about the amount of content we're able to produce and the topical relevance. You talked about this a little bit early on about the different permutations of each situation, how like mind map that for our audience so that they can start to build this at their firm as well. I kind of covered there's there's five main topics. Obviously the the we always look at it in in a couple different buckets. So you have your main categories and there's five main categories for a firm that's doing family law, specifically divorce. You got divorce, property division, spousal support, child support and child custody issues. And then there's going to be what we what we would call procedural content. And that's like how things are how things are generally done. And what what is said about what is said about those particular topics pertaining to the law. And then we have topics that kind of dig deeper. So like a situational topic would be like division of retirement is general and broad division of a Wisconsin pension plan for teachers is a very specific version of that. And it actually has different, different keywords and different things that are important to it that we show up for because we talk about it, give them an answer. We don't do anything that's like giving legal advice, but we literally talk about all of these different things and like that all then rides up into our our property division topic. So some of the new ones that we're like, clearly identified that we have opportunity for is like, how do we talk about blended families? Like there's large opportunities there. How do we I mention business? We cover that pretty well. But the gig economy is another one. Like how do we how do we reference that? Because there are so many people that are doing those types of things. Now cohabitation is one LGBTQ and divorce is another one. There's there's tons of subsections in the religious and cultural international. When you start doing divorces with different cultures and ethnicities, dowries, and there's just a whole bunch of different things that have to be considered that are that are being searched for, and they're of interest to the users and they're of interest to that journey. And the better you can like, think through who are your people that you're working with and how can you speak to them and their their specific angle on a particular, you know, top five category, the better you're going to show for them and the better, the more likely you're they're going to be. They're going to pick you to be on their shortlist. And if you don't screw up the first phone call, you're likely to win that client. So you're listening to this get writing, map out the topics that you care most about or that you hear most about in your phone calls of your your intake team is saying, yeah, that people are always asking about this particular thing that is your North Star to start building these pages on your site so that you can start showing up in AI. And those are great resources for follow up. To like all of this for us is very connected in in sterling. Like we build content that we know our users are going to like and appreciate. And then our intake team that answers the phones and does all the follow up, they they leverage that in their follow up process so that we can continue to speak to them in a way that is specific and meaningful versus, you know, general and cold. So there's there's so many different lever points for all of this stuff, if you think about it strategically. Okay, final point. I think something very important we're going to talk about ROI. We have we have clients today and we we bring on new law firms and they'll they'll complain to me in the sales process that their current agency just just tells them, well, you got to spend more. You got to spend more, you got to do more PPC. You know, these cost per clicks are not inexpensive. This is a very competitive marketplace. And if you are just going to rely on paid search to grow your firm, you're going to you're going to run out of money. You have to do some things that are not just pay per click driven. And so if you think about the difference between like a free AI citation versus a $9 cost per click, that gap is massive. Yeah, I mean, all of these things should be thought of it thought of as annuities. So like the goal is not build content fast. The goal is build build quality content of value because it becomes an annuity for you. That's literally what it becomes when you do good. In the past. And we had to do all this stuff manually, we we wrote most of this content pre I like this is just the result of what has occurred. And now we're doubling down and we can go faster now. But it's all been an annuity. That's why this has been this was this was our starting point. When we started the firm, we had to drive 27 calls for a week. We were just then that was all organic because all through the maps and all organic and those that was the annuity that then allowed us to start spending some money on paid search and then start growing the firm, because you're if you have an annuity that's working, you can choose to take it and live a live a lifestyle off of it or take it and reinvest it. So that's the approach that we've taken is like everything we're building, how do we make this into a recurring annuity so that it can we can continue to reinvest it appropriately and grow the firm over the course of the last 13 years. I love it. Tony, I really appreciate your time, listeners. AI is not going anywhere anytime soon, so I hope you found this valuable. If you have any questions as it relates to how we think about AI rocket clicks or Sterling lawyers, please reach out and we will see you next time on the Sterling Family Law Show.