Note: This chapter is being built in public, one brick at a time — just like we do for clients through the Authority Chapter Plan™. Welcome to Chapter Two. Read the entire AIO for Attorneys book here.
To understand the importance of AIO, one must first consider the SEO that is being replaced. More accurately, merged. This is not the easiest thing to imagine, because SEO and search engines have dominated the past two decades. It’s like telling someone in 1995 that the Yellow Pages will no longer be the big thing in legal advertising.
Perhaps this will make it easier to wrap your head around.
Imagine SEO as a book that was written many years ago, a beloved and successful book. AIO is the new edition, written for a new era and with new insights. The goal for your law firm is to merge what still works from SEO with AIO best practices. The “O” remains the same in each, to optimize.
SEO optimizes for search engines, AIO optimizes for artificial intelligence referrals. There remains some overlap between AIO and SEO practices as I write this in 2025, but as AI becomes the dominant referral engine, and continues to supplant search engine market share, the emphasis must shift to AI referrals.
The problem is that most agencies are still marketing like it’s 2004.
What is Search Engine Optimization, Really?
SEO practitioners act as though it’s some occult, alchemic blend of science and art, but the truth is it’s mostly feeding pattern recognition to algorithms designed to recognize patterns.
Said another way, taking the entire internet and cataloguing it is no small thing. That’s why SEO is so fragmented, and by design. That way when a client query’s “best divorce lawyer near me,” the answer changes based upon the location of the query. Over the years, search has become increasingly sophisticated, though it still lags on incorporating individual user preferences and behavior into search. Soon, AI will be able to make referrals down to individual preference. That’s the difference between a search engine knowing most people liked the movie Jurassic Park, and your favorite AI assistant knowing not to recommend it to you specifically because you suffer from an acute case of deinophobia.
Speaking of dinosaurs, despite all the advancements in search engines over the years, it is well past its prime. Injecting AI into it now vaguely calls to mind those billionaire’s seeking the injection of “youthful blood and platelets.”
In the world of SEO, the persistent ability to catalogue what already exists is maximized, and any additional enhancements will be limited. In other words, search is like a great athlete playing in their 20th year in the league. Everyone respects their career, but the ability to improve has been maxed out, and is even declining.
AI is not better merely because it is new, but because it involves an entirely different, thought-based platform. Although both are controlled by algorithms, AI goes beyond cataloguing and into simulations of actual thought.
Search engines will never be truly able to make an honest recommendation for a specific user as to which lawyer to choose, but AI will. To do so, AIO will need to take into account not only what it knows about available attorneys or law firms in the area, but what it knows about its user, and about users in general.
Where did SEO Go Wrong?
By being tied to a fading platform, SEO is inherently yesterday’s news. But there were cracks even before AI exploded. The problem was not the fault of Google or any of the search engines, per se, but rather that of SEO marketing agencies that tried to game the system, tossing law firms’ credibility into the middle of asymmetric bets.
Link Farming
Link farming and other link gamesmanship lead to the first big Google crackdown back in 2014. SEO agencies would pay to purchase links on legitimate websites, or even on illegitimate “link farms,” created solely to create “authority” via links. Instead of naturally obtaining links, which is what they were mostly paid to do, unscrupulous SEO vendors would charge a ton of money to clients, then use part of that money (keeping the rest for themselves) to buy links. I remember being shocked back in 2010 when random marketing companies would approach me about my personal finance website to determine if they could buy a link on one of my articles for a couple of hundred dollars.
In the short term, until nascent Google caught on, link farming would lead to facially stronger search results for a business. Until the business website got de-ranked or delisted by Google, that is.
So it was for those who “got more clicks” and “more phone calls” using the original SEO “black hat” methods. Most law firms didn’t even know this was going on. And if they ever figured it out, the unscrupulous SEO vendors would simply move on to their next set of victims.
Keyword “Stuffing”
The next big wave of SEO gamesmanship involved keyword stuffing, and it continues to this day. After the link farm crackdown, wherein the Google search algorithm started relying less on external links, the focus shifted to more onsite SEO.
SEO is mostly a field of copycats, but the very top SEO thought leaders search out flaws in the latest Google updates the way the rebellion does flaws in the Death Star, and eventually they discovered that by “stuffing” certain keywords, one had a much better chance of being ranked highly by Google.
A great idea at the time, until every copycat SEO vendor in the world started using this as the shorthand way to gain rank, all while separating hard working lawyers from their money. This is when the internet grew way less fun to read, by the way.
Do you remember the halcyon early days of the internet, when blogs were mostly fun to read and everything felt alive with possibility? I’ll give you a minute, it’s been a while.
Keyword stuffing is what directly lead to today’s neutered web copy and boring, same-same plasticene sludge. It’s why your competitor’s website may read something like “Tarazana Personal Injury Lawyer Who Represents Clients in Personal Injury Cases as an Attorney in Tarzana.”
For a while, search engines ate this all up like carrot cake. So long, in fact, that the internet started to super, well…
Suck.
And the worst part of keyword stuffing mania was that such dreary web copy was not limited to homepages; it began to infiltrate everything. Even blog posts.
If my brief time spent working at one of the largest legal marketing companies in the nation taught me anything, it’s that truly grim work can be carried out by truly decent people. Management was kind, the employees had the best of intentions, and though I was the only lawyer writing content for legal websites (a function of morbid curiosity during the pandemic), the content team of former paralegals, recent college graduates, and lifers were mostly trying their best. This was probably the best, if not one of the best company’s at this type of work.
But management believes, as I assume management at most large agency’s at the time did (and still do) that websites should be written primarily for Google, not people. The trick is to get clicks, because clicks are what SEO is supposed to be all about.
Never mind persuading humans. It’s all about rank math. (See what I did there?)
My assignments were constantly chided for being well written but lacking sufficient SEO keywords. I couldn’t see their strategy as anything but putting the cart before the proverbial horse. I eventually had to resign; it was taking the edge off my writing, and I no longer believed in the mission.
There had to be a better way to market law firms, I thought. I didn’t want my law firm to sound like it was written by a robot suffering anaphylactic shock.
Lawyers are supposed to be persuasive, I thought. So why are all legal websites so staid, and so boring, and so deeply, unsettlingly unpersuasive?
Where Did Law Firms Go Wrong?
There is a famous business author named Michael Gerber. He got rich and famous mostly through this killer insight: most small business owners spend too much time in their business, and not enough time on their business. That’s the central thesis of his book The E-Myth, the “E” standing for entrepreneur.
Well, what are most law firms if not small businesses? Sure, there are a handful of large law firms, but larger to a law firm still doesn’t mean all that much compared to large businesses of almost any other kind.
That means most law firms suffer the “entrepreneurial hallucination,” described by Michael Gerber. You think you’re a solo divorce law firm, but what you’ve really done is create a job for yourself, with a psychotic boss, warns Gerber.
What does this have to do with SEO?
Everything.
Because most law firms are so busy working files, very little thought is put into marketing, authority building, or any of the myriad other important activities that not only get the phone to ring with the right sorts of prospects, but also builds your professional credibility so you can be more selective in the clients you take on, charge a higher rate, and expand your business.
What happened in the realm of SEO is that law firms got too busy to work on their marketing, or even to manage it effectively. So, they instead outsourced it to sometimes unscrupulous vendors, ones who were not fellow professionals, ones who got rich eating the fat of hardworking law firms, ones who may have even engaged in “black hat” SEO or unethical marketing, betting law firm’s reputations and legal licenses into the center pot.
As us lawyers frequently say, “outsource your marketing, outsource your ethics.” A rule mostly honored in the breach.
Because SEO and PPC were considered fast methods for getting the phone to ring, they became popular marketing strategies for lawyers. Eventually, a nuclear arms race of SEO was unleashed, with everyone trying to control their tiny fiefdoms in the Google sandbox and paying through the nose for the pleasure.
For a while, this seemed to work. Crazily enough, SEO did get the phone to ring.
Really?
Really.
SEO was a powerful thing when harnessed correctly. Search engine was the dominant form of pairing human problems with business answers. If a prospective client needed a trusts and estates attorney in Tarzana, they may have relied upon their network for a referral, but there’s just as strong a change that they simply typed in something like “Trust lawyers in Tarazna” to get the result. To be one of the attorney names mentioned in those results would be almost priceless.
Law firms grew too reliant on SEO, and therefore failed to develop other sources of prestige, or even other pipelines in general. They were just happy to focus on client work and have their staff deal with the leads.
SEO and the Moldering Cheese
Therein lay the problem: PPC and SEO were so effective that the costs rose astronomically. Meanwhile, most SEO success accrued to the early adopters.
I’ll reference another famous book now to describe what happened next. Who Moved My Cheese?, by Spencer Johnson, M.D.
This book was a fable about mice and (and also…tiny people?) eating every day on the same, big block of cheese, and how they each reacted when they woke up one day and discovered the cheese was gone. Some continued to go to the spot where the cheese used to be, hoping it would return. Others set out in search of new cheese. In other words, be adaptable and don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Think of search engines, then, as the largest block of cheese the world has ever known. And all of us have been feasting on it for a good, long while. Unlike in Johnson’s parable, this cheese will not suddenly disappear overnight. But we can all see it is growing moldy and dissipating from the strain of consumption. The time to act is now, before the search engine “cheese” runs out. We can already see it’s starting to make us sick.
AI represents the next great opportunity, and unlike with SEO, the field is wide open. Even better, AIO allows for dignity in legal marketing. Search engines did a great job of bridging us between the creation of the internet and the foundation of AI, but it’s no longer the future. Soon, it will no longer be the present.
AI has expanded at a far faster rate than even social media did. It is the fastest growing web platform ever. Even the search engines know that AI is the future, which is why they are all now implementing AI directly into their search engines.
There will be some merger between the concepts, as discussed in later chapters of this book, but for now the key takeaway is this: the SEO that helped build your firm during the rise of search will be the same system that destroys your firm during the age of AI. But perhaps you’ve seen the cracks in SEO for a while now.
Let’s not forget SEO’s twin, however, PPC.
The Cost of PPC
PPC is ultimately an auction. Years ago, before Pay per click became the operative technique for law firms who couldn’t be bothered with a real, holistic marketing strategy, PPC was the answer to everyone’s marketing problems. You could set a budget, for certain terms, and because there was less competition then you could profit because law firms generally charge a large amount per case.
In other words, if you paid $10 for a lead, with a 5% conversation rate, but your clients paid you on average $5,000, with every 100 leads you could generate some real dough.
The math works out like this: it would cost you $1,000.00 in PPC fees (assuming you did it yourself and were not paying a vendor) and you could expect to earn $25,000 in fees. A nice 25x ROI.
Amazing times to be running practices back then, and all the PPC “gurus” looked like geniuses because it was a niche play and Google was basically printing money for lawyers.
But because PPC is an auction, over time it got far more expensive to play. Let’s run the same math at $100 a click.
Suddenly it costs $10,000 to earn $25,000 in fees. A 2.5x ROI. By the time you pay the SEO vendor their 25% cut, pay your staff, and deal with the client work, you’re not left with all that much for the hassle. You’ve gone from living the life of Riley to grinding out an existence.
Sound familiar?
Now, let’s run the math again acknowledging that the conversation rate is now closer to something like 3%.
Now, it’s $10,000.00 to earn $15,000.00 in fees. True volume drudgery of the unsustainable variety. That’s where things are headed, if you’re not already there.
A race to the bottom, and why PPC is not the answer to law firm sustainability. It’s fishing in the same, polluted waters as SEO, and charging you for the privilege.
The Hidden Costs of SEO and PPC
When your idea of marketing is SEO and PPC you’re relying on rented land. Any sort of disruption with Google, even Google policy changes, can sink your entire business model. That is the primary hidden cost of SEO and PPC, though it’s far from the only one.
Regarding ethics, every PPC is ultimately a legal advertisement. Are you certain your marketing agency (and therefore, ipso facto you) are complying with your jurisdiction’s ethical rules and rules on advertising? You better make certain, because the ethics calendar is filled with lawyers paying for the sins of their marketing agencies.
But I believe the most insidious hidden cost of SEO and PPC is the loss of authority and skill. When you write a book, give lecture, or run a podcast, you learn new skills. You get your name out there to AI and humans alike. You grow, adapt, and expand as a professional.
SEO and PPC is inactive marketing, run by others for you and mostly without your input. That seems like a feature rather than a bug to a busy law firm owner, and I get that. But you’re not creating anything lasting, nor even expanding your own knowledge. If you’re hoping to practice for decades, then avoiding stagnation is the most important thing you can do to future proof your practice, and that’s not even considering AI at all.
Humans are out there, with real problems, and as lawyers you can help solve them. It starts with educating the public about your practice area, your philosophy, your firm. PPC and SEO are about connecting problem to solution, but authority assets and AIO are about connecting human to professional.
The books you write will be quoted, shared, and referred. They will speak for you in a way your own humble nature would never otherwise allow.
PPC says: You have a problem and I can help.
AIO says: You have a problem and I am here.
It’s about connecting with the right prospective clients and repelling the wrong ones. Because anyone who has been in practice for more than a minute knows that it’s often not a lack of good clients that ruins a law firm, but the prevalence of the wrong ones.
SEO and AIO Merging
The truth is, SEO itself is not really dying, only “traditional” SEO is. What remains, the growing desire for long-form, human-written content will be merged into AIO. There are three possibilities right now, but only two of them are realistic. So please plan accordingly.
Scenario 1: AI disappears and only search engines remain
Scenario 2: Search engines disappear and only AI remain
Scenario 3: Search engines and AI merge.
Do you really believe there is any chance scenario one is going to happen? No way, right? Because the history of humanity is one of progress and scenario 1 represents the past. AI is here, and it’s here to stay. It’s not some fad. If it was, it would already be over by now. Just look to the amount of capital large companies are investing in AI and you can plainly see it’s not going anywhere.
So why are most law firm owners operating as though we’re in Scenario 1?
Let’s briefly consider, now, scenario 2.
I for one do not believe search engines will fully disappear, just that their use will significantly dwindle. Consider Yahoo search engine, once the dominant engine of search, and how it was decimated by the rise of Google search.
Yahoo remains alive today, and you can still run search through it. But it’s more a footnote or afterthought than anything else. The same thing may very well be occurring today with AI and Google search. The older, outmoded model will continue but with reduced usage. Which is not to say Google is going anywhere. Which leads us to scenario 3.
We’re already starting to see signs of merger with Google search, which now adds AI to the results. Meanwhile, OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT are apparently in the process of developing a search-based AI engine.
Yet, if most people are carrying around Chat “assistants” on their phones, are they really going to need to open an internet browser and search for answers to questions that their AI chat “friend” can pull up for them immediately?
What I foresee is a future where AI becomes increasingly integrated within the internet itself, meaning we’ll have our chats perform our searches for us and then return the answers. Individual websites will be important, but mostly because of how they will be searched by AI. Humans will utilize law firm websites to verify, or see things with their own eyes, but that is it. Otherwise, they will rely on AI summaries and AI referrals.
There will be a merger so that AI becomes more like search, and search more like AI, and someday we’ll wake up and not be able to see where one concept begins and the other ends.
Regardless of whether scenario 2 or scenario 3 is the future, AIO is the only functional pathway forward.
As explained in future chapters, marketing to AI is going to create both lasting content assets for your firm, but with the type of outsized ROI’s enjoyed during the prime years of SEO and PPC.
SEO and PPC: A Partial Eulogy
I hope you’ll join me, fellow attorneys, in giving a final, long solute to our dearly departed friends SEO and PPC. I can assure you that they are going to a better place, namely a future where SEO is integrated within AIO best practices and with distinct AI ad campaigns.
But even though they are gone now, we must look back favorably at all they provided. The large ROI’s in the past that helped us grow our firms, the quick search engine results that paired us with eager clients. This is not just a goodbye, but a moment of gratitude. SEO and PPC you were truly amazing vehicles of growth for lawyers. And it was so, so great.
While it lasted.