Last reviewed: February 2026
AI Overviews Are Reshaping Law Firm SEO Strategy
Your personal injury blog post ranked on page one for two years. Steady traffic, consistent leads, no complaints. Then sometime around mid-2025, impressions held but clicks dropped by a third. The content didn’t change. Your rankings didn’t move. What changed was the blue box sitting above your listing, answering the searcher’s question before they ever reached your site.
That box is Google’s AI Overview. And for law firms, it is changing the competitive dynamics of organic visibility faster than any algorithm update in the past decade.
Your Traffic Already Dropped. You Might Not Have Noticed.
The numbers paint a clear picture. Seer Interactive’s September 2025 study, tracking 3,119 informational queries across 42 organizations and 25.1 million organic impressions, found that organic click-through rates fell 61% for queries where AI Overviews appeared, dropping from 1.76% to 0.64%. Paid CTR collapsed even harder, down 68%.
Those are averages across industries. Legal is worse in some respects. Big Dog ICT’s research puts the number at approximately 77.7% of YMYL legal queries triggering an AI Overview, as of late 2025. That’s not a niche problem. That’s the majority of informational legal searches being answered, at least partially, before the searcher scrolls.
A Pew Research Center study tracking 68,000 real search queries found users clicked on results 8% of the time when AI summaries appeared, compared to 15% without them. That’s a 46.7% relative reduction in clicks, measured through actual user behavior rather than keyword tool estimates.
For law firms still measuring SEO success primarily through rankings, these numbers expose a blind spot. You can hold position one and still lose half your traffic if an AI Overview sits above you.
What Google Pulls From and Why It Matters
AI Overviews don’t generate answers from nothing. They synthesize from pages Google already trusts, which means the algorithm’s source selection carries enormous weight.
Advanced Web Ranking data shows AI Overviews averaging around 169 words and including approximately seven links when expanded. The first organic result often appears about 1,674 pixels down the page. That pushes even position one below the fold on most screens.
Pages that get cited in AI Overviews share specific characteristics. The content ranks well organically already. Heading structure is clear and parseable. Answers appear within the first 40 to 60 words after a question-format heading. Paragraph conciseness matters because AI systems extract discrete answer blocks, not flowing prose.
For legal content specifically, verifiable credentials play an outsized role. Firms getting cited consistently have attorney-reviewed content with bar numbers, jurisdiction-specific statute references, and structured data connecting authors to their qualifications. The E-E-A-T post details why these trust signals carry measurable weight for legal content specifically — and why they matter even more when AI systems are selecting sources.
Which Practice Areas Are Hit Hardest?
Not all legal queries are affected equally. And the distribution is worse than you’d expect. ### Informational Versus Transactional: Where the Damage Concentrates
Informational queries bear the heaviest saturation. “What is a statute of limitations,” “how to file for divorce in Texas,” “do I need a lawyer after a car accident” type searches now routinely display AI-generated summaries.
Science-related queries lead all categories at 43.6% AI Overview trigger rate, according to Safari Digital’s 2026 analysis. But local intent legal queries, which include many practice area searches, trigger AI Overviews at 68%. That number matters because local intent is where law firms convert.
Transactional and branded queries remain more resilient. AI Overviews appear in less than 5% of branded SERPs (Trial Guides’ analysis). Searches like “[your firm name] reviews” or “[attorney name] phone number” still drive clicks. The vulnerability concentrates in the informational middle of the funnel, exactly where most law firm blog content lives.
A two-attorney family law firm in a mid-size market feels this differently than a 50-attorney multi-practice firm. If your content strategy relies heavily on informational blog posts to drive awareness, the impact is immediate and significant. If your traffic already comes primarily from branded and local transactional searches, the exposure is lower. But it’s still growing.
How to Measure What’s Actually Happening
Google Search Console doesn’t offer a filter that separates AI Overview-affected queries from standard organic results. As of June 2025, AI Mode clicks count toward Search Console totals under the “Web” search type, and AI Overview clicks follow the same pattern. You get the data, but you can’t isolate it natively.
What you can track is the symptom pattern. Pull your Search Console data for informational queries, the ones your blog posts target. Compare impressions to clicks month over month. A widening gap between stable or growing impressions and declining clicks signals AI Overview interference. Your content is still being seen by Google. Searchers just aren’t reaching it.
Look at specific query-level data. If a query that used to deliver a 3% CTR now delivers 1.2% despite holding the same position, an AI Overview is likely sitting above you. Cross-reference by manually searching your top 30 to 50 queries monthly. Note which ones display AI Overviews and track whether your firm is cited in them.
Third-party SEO platforms like Semrush and Ahrefs now flag which keywords trigger AI Overviews in their SERP feature tracking. Set up alerts for your priority legal queries so position changes and SERP feature appearances get surfaced without manual checking.
The metric that matters most going forward isn’t position. It’s visibility share: how often your firm appears anywhere in the searcher’s view, including inside the AI Overview itself.
Do this now: search your top five practice area keywords on Google. For each one, note whether an AI Overview appears. If it does, check whether your firm is cited in it. That ten-minute audit tells you whether this post is urgent reading or strategic planning — and whether your current content strategy is built for a SERP that no longer exists.
Shifting Strategy: Optimize for Citation or Avoid the Battlefield?
Before the tactical response, the strategic question: should you fight for citation position inside the AI Overview, or redirect to queries AI can’t fully answer? The answer depends on your practice area and current ranking position. A firm already ranking in positions one through three for high-value transactional queries has different calculus than a firm whose traffic comes primarily from informational blog posts.
There are two valid strategic responses, and the right one depends on your firm.
The first is optimizing to be cited within AI Overviews. Seer Interactive’s data shows brands cited in AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks compared to non-cited brands on the same queries. One AI citation can generate more qualified traffic than ranking third in traditional results. Getting cited requires clear heading structure, concise answer formatting within the first 40 to 60 words after a heading, attorney-authored content with verifiable credentials, and jurisdiction-specific precision. Generic explainers won’t cut it. AI systems cross-reference legal claims against authoritative databases, so content citing “California Vehicle Code Section 23152(a)” outperforms content saying “DUI laws vary by state.”
The second strategy is targeting queries AI Overviews can’t fully answer. Complex, multi-step, jurisdiction-specific questions resist summarization. “How does the discovery process work in a contested custody case in Harris County” is harder for an AI system to synthesize than “what is child custody.” The more specific, localized, and procedurally detailed your content, the less likely an AI Overview can replace it.
Most firms need both approaches. Optimize your existing high-traffic informational content for citation potential while building new content around queries that require depth AI can’t replicate.
The timeline for seeing results from either approach is measured in months, not weeks. Content reformatted for AI citation typically takes 4 to 8 weeks to be re-crawled and potentially cited. New content targeting complex queries follows standard indexation timelines of 2 to 6 months before ranking and traffic patterns stabilize. Firms that implemented AI Overview optimization strategies in early 2025 began seeing citation appearances by Q3 2025.
The two numbers that matter most in 2026: the ratio of impressions to clicks on your top 50 informational queries, and whether your firm appears inside the AI Overview for those same queries. One tells you whether Google is answering your readers’ questions for you. The other tells you whether your content made it into that answer — or got left out entirely.