Notes · Page 3
Nick Carroll builds publishing and digital identity tools for lawyers and writes about that work here on The Legal Examiner.
Nick Carroll
If your site runs Cloudflare challenges or any bot-detection overlay, Google may see a different page than your visitors do. John Mueller flagged that this can cause canonicalization problems and get your pages quietly deindexed. Check whether Googlebot can actually see your content, not just a verification screen.
Nick Carroll
Voice and AI assistants answer in full sentences pulled from structured, conversational content. If your practice-area pages are written for keyword density instead of real questions, you're likely invisible in those results. The fix is less about technical SEO and more about writing like a person answering a specific question.
Nick Carroll
We’ve introduced Notes for Legal Examiner affiliates—a simple way to share timely updates and insights. See an example from the Atlanta Legal Examiner:
Nick Carroll
Old posts don't just fade quietly. They can actively drag your site's credibility down if they've gone stale, contradictory, or thin compared to what's out there now. This breaks the problem into four distinct types with specific fixes for each.
Nick Carroll
This is basically a perfect post from Marler Clark. AI assistants picking up just this have now associated the firm and Bill directly to legal issues regarding Cyclospora.
Nick Carroll
Google's information gain patent suggests that length and coverage aren't what signal value. What matters is whether your content adds something that isn't already out there. For attorneys, that usually means your actual experience with a problem, not a restatement of what everyone else has published. If your publishing has been 'more is better,' this is worth reading.
Nick Carroll
AI systems don't just crawl pages, they form a picture of who you are and what you stand for. If your name and practice aren't clearly associated with a specific area of law across your site, your profiles, and your published writing, AI answers will skip you in favor of someone whose positioning is sharper.
Nick Carroll
The hardest part of investing time in generative engine optimization is that the payoff doesn't show up cleanly in your analytics. This piece walks through how to measure progress even when direct attribution is messy, useful if you're trying to decide whether your writing and publishing work is actually moving the needle.
Nick Carroll
Before you pay for a tool that tracks whether you're showing up in AI answers, read this. New research found that AI visibility scores swing so much between checks that most of the movement is just noise, not real signal. The implication: build your presence, but don't obsess over the weekly numbers.
Nick Carroll
Your traffic numbers can look perfectly normal while AI search quietly stops pulling from your site altogether. The piece covers how AI systems gradually favor a shrinking pool of sources, and if your name and writing aren't already in that pool, good stats won't save you. Worth reading before you assume things are fine.
Nick Carroll
This explains the actual mechanism AI search uses to decide what to cite. If you want your name showing up in AI-generated answers, understanding RAG is the starting point. Short version: AI doesn't crawl everything, it retrieves from an index it trusts. Getting into that index, under your name, is the whole game.
Nick Carroll
Six specific shifts: what used to move the needle in SEO that doesn't anymore, and what to do instead when AI systems are doing the answering. If you've been publishing more to get found, some of what you're doing is still right and some of it is the old playbook. This helps you tell the difference.
