There is a particular kind of email landing in principals’ inboxes at the moment, and it offers to fix your firm’s visibility in AI answers through some new technical service with a price attached. I have read a few of them now. They sell AI search optimisation as though it were a thing you install, and the pitch works because almost nobody has the time to go and check whether what is being sold actually exists.
Google has already answered this
Google’s documentation on AI features says plainly that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews and no special optimisations necessary. No new file to upload, no AI specific markup, no dedicated machine readable anything. What it asks for is what it has asked for over the last fifteen years, which is content that can be crawled, important material sitting in text rather than inside an image, and structured data that matches what a human being actually sees on the page.
Read that twice, because it reframes the whole conversation. AI search optimisation is not a technical category that opened up last year, which means anybody charging you a monthly fee to install it is charging you for the absence of a problem.
So why is your firm not showing up
If AI search optimisation is not a technical category, the honest question is what is actually going wrong, so I went and looked. I have spent a lot of time lately reading law firm websites the way a client would, across family, personal injury, wills and estates, commercial and criminal. I went in expecting to find bad ones. They were mostly fine, well built and accurate, and plenty of them had clearly cost real money. Almost every single one had the same four problems, and not one of those problems is technical.
The first is that the opening paragraph is about the firm. Established in 1994, serving the community for three decades, committed to achieving the best possible outcome. All true, and all worthless in that position, because the most prominent text on a page is treated as the strongest signal of what that page is about, by a person scanning it and by anything reading it for a line worth quoting.
The second is that the state is never named in the body of the article. An address in the footer does not tell a reader in Toowoomba that this page is about Queensland, and it does not tell anything assessing the page whether you are the right source for a Queensland question. Naming it inside a sentence is eleven characters of work and it does more for AI search optimisation than any markup you could add.
The third is attribution, and this is the one I would fix first. A great many of those articles carried no author, no date and no photograph, and occasionally a byline that just said Admin. A firm whose reputation lives entirely in the names of its principals publishes its actual expertise anonymously.
The fourth is hedging. There is an enormous amount of room between reckless and unreadable, and a lot of those pages had landed a long way toward unreadable, with every sentence carrying a depends on the circumstances until nothing on the page was ever stated plainly enough to lift.
Why those four beat anything you could install
Each of the four is a decision about how a sentence is written, which is exactly why AI search optimisation keeps being sold to you as technical work. Technical work can be done to you while you get on with practising law. Editorial work cannot, because it needs somebody who knows the subject to make different choices on the page, and that person is you or one of your solicitors.
The upside is that it costs almost nothing beyond attention. This is the least glamorous and most valuable work available to a firm right now, and it sits inside the SEO and blogging side of what we do, though there is nothing stopping a firm doing it in house once somebody can hear the difference.
Where AI search optimisation actually starts
Take the ten questions your intake team fields most often, written down in the words clients use on the phone rather than the words that appear in the legislation. Open the page on your site that should answer each one, and read only the first paragraph. If the answer is not in it, move the answer up and let everything about the firm sit underneath, where it will still be read by anybody who cares.
Then put a real solicitor’s name and a date on each piece, name the state inside a sentence, and count the qualifying phrases. If there are more than three or four in a thousand words they have stopped protecting you and started hiding you.
That is a week of somebody’s attention and it will outperform anything you buy this year, because AI search optimisation is not a service being withheld from you, it is a standard you either meet on the page or you do not. In the only sense that means anything, it is writing that a person and a machine can both use, and the bar in this profession is currently very low.
