Last reviewed: February 2026

Zero-Click Search and Law Firms: Visibility Without Visits

SparkToro’s 2024 analysis of Datos/Semrush clickstream data puts the number at 58.5% of Google searches in the United States now ending without a click to any website. On mobile, that number climbs to approximately 77%, per Up and Social’s 2025 research. For law firms, this means that the majority of people who see your firm in search results never visit your website. They get their answer from the SERP itself: a featured snippet, a knowledge panel, a People Also Ask expansion, a local pack listing, or an AI Overview.

The instinct is to treat this as a threat. Fewer clicks means less traffic, which means fewer leads. That interpretation is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Zero-click search has also created a new category of value: brand visibility that occurs entirely within the search results page. Understanding that value, and measuring it, is what separates firms that adapt from firms that watch their traffic decline without understanding why.

Why Legal Queries Are Particularly Affected

Legal queries span the full intent spectrum, and each intent type interacts with zero-click features differently.

Definitional queries (“what is negligence,” “what does habeas corpus mean”) have the highest zero-click rates because Google answers them completely with a featured snippet or AI Overview. These queries drove traffic in 2020. They drive impressions in 2026.

Procedural queries (“how to file for divorce in California,” “steps after a car accident”) increasingly trigger AI Overviews that provide step-by-step summaries. Semrush’s data shows law and government queries experienced a 15.18% growth in AI Overview triggers between January and March 2025, making legal content one of the most AI-Overview-saturated verticals. Our featured snippets post covers how to capture position zero when it still drives clicks, and the AI Overviews post explains the citation dynamics when that blue box appears above everything.

Cost queries (“how much does a DUI lawyer cost,” “personal injury lawyer fees”) trigger direct answer boxes and AI summaries that pull ranges from multiple sources. The searcher gets a ballpark answer without clicking.

Local queries (“personal injury lawyer near me”) still drive clicks at a higher rate because the searcher’s intent is to evaluate and contact specific firms. The local pack, with its map, reviews, and contact information, functions as a zero-click feature itself, but one that frequently leads to phone calls, direction requests, and website visits through GBP.

The pattern: the further a query is from a hiring decision, the more likely it is to be fully answered within the SERP. The closer a query is to “I need to hire a lawyer now,” the more likely a click follows.

Here is what that looks like for a real practice. A three-attorney family law firm in Austin targets 40 informational keywords. Of those, 28 now trigger AI Overviews. The firm’s impressions for those 28 queries held steady at roughly 12,000 per month, but clicks dropped from 360 to 190 over six months — a 47% reduction that maps closely to the Pew Research findings above. The remaining 12 keywords, mostly transactional and local queries, maintained their click-through rates. The traffic loss was real, but it was concentrated entirely in the informational layer. The transactional keywords that drive signed cases were largely unaffected.

What Visibility Without Clicks Is Worth

Do not dismiss this too quickly. When your firm’s name appears in a featured snippet for “what to do after a car accident in [your city],” the searcher sees your firm’s name and your content, even if they do not click. That exposure creates brand familiarity. The next time they search, they may include your firm’s name, converting an informational impression into a branded search.

Early conversion data suggests that visitors who click through from AI-generated answers, when they do click, convert at significantly higher rates than traditional search visitors — some analyses put the figure at roughly 4x or higher. The volume is lower. The quality is higher.

SERP presence also functions as social proof. A firm that consistently appears in featured snippets, knowledge panels, and AI Overviews for practice-area-related queries signals expertise to every searcher who sees those results, whether or not they click. Over time, this visibility creates a familiarity effect that influences which firm the searcher contacts when they are ready to hire.

Dismissing zero-click visibility as worthless because it does not generate direct traffic means measuring with the wrong ruler. The value is real, but it is upstream from the conversion event. It shows up later as branded search volume, direct traffic, and referral patterns that traditional attribution misses.

Content That Preserves Click Incentive

Not all content is equally vulnerable to zero-click summarization. The content types that resist it share a characteristic: they provide something the SERP cannot replicate.

Interactive tools and calculators. A child support calculator, a settlement estimate tool, or a statute of limitations lookup provides functionality that a snippet or AI Overview cannot deliver. The searcher must click through to use the tool. These pages maintain click-through rates even in zero-click-heavy SERPs.

Downloadable resources. Checklists, guides, and templates that require a download (and optionally, an email address) give the searcher a reason to visit the page that a SERP summary cannot satisfy.

Long-form, jurisdiction-specific analysis. Content that addresses a question with the level of nuance and local specificity that AI summaries cannot replicate maintains its click value. “How does the discovery process work in a contested custody case in Harris County” cannot be meaningfully answered in 60 words. The searcher who needs that answer will click through.

Multi-step process content with conditional logic. “What happens if you refuse a breathalyzer in Texas” has conditional branches (CDL holders face different consequences, prior offenses change the outcome, implied consent laws vary by circumstance). AI Overviews can provide a general summary, but the searcher who needs the specific answer for their situation clicks through for the detail.

The strategic implication: your content calendar should balance two categories. Visibility content that targets high-volume informational queries where zero-click is likely but brand exposure is valuable, and conversion content that targets complex, specific, or tool-based queries where the click is still necessary. Both serve the pipeline, but at different stages.

Rethinking What You Measure

If impressions increasingly replace clicks as the primary output of informational SEO, the measurement framework needs to shift accordingly.

Track impression-to-click ratios by query category in Search Console. Informational queries will show low and declining ratios. That is expected. Transactional and local queries should maintain stronger ratios. If transactional query CTR is also declining, you have a different problem (likely AI Overview interference on queries that previously drove clicks).

Monitor branded search volume monthly. If your firm’s zero-click visibility is creating brand familiarity, you should see branded search queries (“your firm name” or “your firm name + practice area”) trending upward over time. This is the downstream signal that SERP visibility converts to awareness even without direct clicks.

Track direct traffic trends alongside organic trends. A firm that is visible in featured snippets and AI Overviews for dozens of queries will often see direct traffic increase as searchers who previously found the firm through organic listings begin typing the firm’s URL directly. This traffic shift from organic to direct does not mean SEO stopped working. It means SEO created enough brand awareness that the searcher skipped the search step entirely.

When your managing partner asks why organic traffic is flat while the firm keeps signing cases from the web, the answer lives in these secondary metrics. The client found your firm in a featured snippet last month. They searched your name this week. They called from your homepage today. Organic search started that journey, even though it does not get credit in a last-click model.

The question is no longer “how do we get more clicks from search.” It is “how do we measure the full value of being visible in search, including the value that never generates a click.” That question changes what you track, what you optimize for, and how you evaluate whether SEO is working.