Nick Carroll

Similarweb data shows email and direct traffic holding up as organic search loses ground. If you've been counting on Google to bring people to your site, this is a nudge to build something you own: a subscriber list, a newsletter, an audience that comes back without needing to find you first.

#LawFirmSEO #LawFirmMarketing #SmallLawFirm

What channels grow when organic search shrinks?

Similarweb data from the US and France shows where email and paid search are growing, why Direct is holding up better, and how the mix varies by industry.

growth-memo.com

HubSpot's organic traffic dropped by 80% but revenue held because they'd built a direct audience that didn't depend on Google. If you've been treating your site purely as an SEO play, this is the case for building relationships that don't run through search. On publish.law, reader accounts can follow, like, reply, and comment, creating a direct audience independent of search traffic.

#LawFirmSEO #SmallLawFirm #LawFirmMarketing

HubSpot Lost 80% Of Its Traffic – CMO Kipp Bodnar Explains Why Revenue Kept Growing

HubSpot lost 80% of its website traffic and still grew revenue 19%. CMO Kipp Bodnar explains what HubSpot measures now and what SEOs should track instead.

Search Engine Journal

Pages that AI systems actually cite tend to answer the question in the first few lines, not three paragraphs in. If your posts bury the point, they get pulled up but not quoted. A publish.law site serves your content with an /llms.txt index and per-post structure AI crawlers can read, but leading with the answer is still on you.

www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-cited-pages-more-ofte…

#AISearch #SmallLawFirm

One in five ChatGPT conversations is someone looking something up, not generating text. That's a real slice of the people who might be researching a legal problem. If your name and writing aren't in the sources AI pulls from, you're invisible to that audience entirely.

#AISearch #SmallLawFirm #LawFirmMarketing

ChatGPT Data: 1 In 5 Consumer Messages Now Seek Information

Looking things up now makes up about as large a share of consumer ChatGPT messages as writing, though the increase is smaller than earlier data.

Search Engine Journal

There's a difference between getting credit in analytics and actually shaping what AI learns about you. This piece draws that line clearly: attribution tracks where traffic came from, but AI influence is built through what's published and how it's associated with your name. Worth understanding before you read too much into your referral data.

Google Gets The Thank-You

A buyer can arrive through Google after making the important part of the decision somewhere else.

Search Engine Journal

Personal AI agents shop, research, and recommend on behalf of users without them ever visiting a search results page. If someone asks their agent to find a good estate planning attorney, your site needs to be readable by machines, not just humans. That means structured content on a domain you control, with clear signals about who you are and what you handle.

What Personal AI Agents Like Meta Muse And OpenAI Dots Mean For SEO

Meta's Muse and OpenAI's dots reach websites through a connector or a browser. What that means for robots.txt, on-page SEO, and analytics, and what to do now.

Search Engine Journal

Google is testing a feature that lets users pick which sources AI Mode pulls from. If someone's already familiar with your writing, they could set your site as a preferred source and get answers drawn directly from your content. Building a recognizable name now, before this rolls out broadly, is how you end up on those lists.

Google AI Mode Citations With Source Preferences For Preferred Sources

Google is testing letting users view and modify their preferred sources list directly from within the AI Mode citations sidebar. There is a new button named "Source preferences" and when you click on it, it opens up your preferred sources list where you can add or remove preferred sources.

Search Engine Roundtable

Google is building a separate content ingestion lane for user-generated content like forum posts and social answers, bypassing the normal crawl. If you're answering legal questions publicly, whether on Reddit, LinkedIn, or your own site, this changes how fast that content can surface in search. Your direct answers may now move faster than your polished articles.

Google Takes Applications For A UGC Pipeline Separate From Crawling

Approved forums and social platforms can send content and interaction signals through a separate pipeline. Here's who can apply and how it compares to crawling.

Search Engine Journal

ChatGPT overwhelmingly cites primary sources: original research, official bodies, firsthand expertise. If you want your name showing up in AI answers, writing that reflects your actual experience in a practice area matters more than repackaging what others have said. Your bio, your posts, your takes — the original stuff.

ChatGPT's Most-Cited Sites Tilt Toward Primary Sources, Data Shows

Government health, research, and regulator sites climbed ChatGPT's U.S. citation ranks while explainers fell. Most free, logged-out answers skipped search.

Search Engine Journal

If you've published anything in the last two or three years, you've got posts sitting on page two that already earned some authority. Refreshing them, updating stats, tightening the angle, adding a recent development, is often faster than writing something new and gets more traction.

#lawfirmseo

Content Refresh Strategy: How To Update Old Posts For New Wins - Above the Law

A consistent content refresh strategy helps your law firm get more value from the work you have already invested in creating.

Above the Law

Your site's job used to be getting the click. Now it's being credible enough that AI systems trust it as a source. The article lays out what that shift actually means: structured content, clear authorship, and a site that signals expertise rather than just existing.

AI Search Is Changing Your Website’s Job, Here’s How To Adapt

Newfold Digital CEO Sachin Puri shares how AI search changes websites, why crawls differ from referrals, and what businesses should measure beyond traffic.

Search Engine Journal

John Mueller confirmed that AI training crawlers are actively hitting sitemaps and RSS feeds. If you publish anything online under your name, your sitemap and RSS feed are part of how AI systems find and index your work. Having those set up and pointing at everything you've written isn't optional anymore if you want to show up in AI-generated answers.

Google's Mueller Says AI Crawlers Access Sitemaps & RSS In His Logs

Google's John Mueller says AI training crawlers usually don't offer sitemap submission and suggests default sitemap names or RSS feeds to help them find sites.

Search Engine Journal

Cloudflare's traffic data shows automated requests now outnumber human ones, with AI agents growing fastest. That means your site already has a non-human audience reading it constantly. What you publish, how it's structured, and whether AI can make sense of it matters just as much as whether a person can.

The Internet has a second audience

More than half the traffic reaching sites on Cloudflare is now automated, and AI agents are the fastest-growing part of it. We're giving site owners the tools to see who's visiting, decide who gets in, and charge for access.

Cloudflare Blog

"What could the founder of a baseball team known for dancing players and a senior-citizen dance squad possibly teach lawyers about running a small firm?" That's Bob Ambrogi, on hearing that Savannah Bananas founder Jesse Cole was keynoting this year's Kaleidoscope. The answer turned out to be plenty. Bob came away with 15 takeaways for small firms, and most of them are sharper than what you'd get from a legal marketing panel.

What the Savannah Bananas Can Teach You About Building a Successful Small Law Firm

I’ll confess: When I heard that Jesse Cole, the founder of the Savannah Bananas baseball team, was to be the keynote speaker at 8am’s Kaleidoscope conference, I found myself scratching my head. After...

LawSites

Schema markup tells search engines and AI systems exactly who you are and what you practice, in a format machines can read without guessing. If your site doesn't have it, you're leaving your name and expertise off the table. This piece walks through what's worth adding in 2026, and attorneys with a publish.law site get schema.org structured data shipped automatically under their name on every post and page.

Schema Markup 2026: The Hidden SEO Boost For Lawyers - Above the Law

Understanding how schema markup works and deploying it effectively across your website gives you an edge over competitors.

Above the Law