The Future of AI Search feat. Jason Hennessey

So we've mentioned AI search a couple of times here.

Obviously, that's the massive like shift in the legal marketing space over the last couple of years.

Let's just start big picture.

You know, what's your take on sort of the rise of AI search? Where do you see that going kind of from a macro perspective?

Yeah.

You know, when it first started to kind of enter the market, I think everybody was, you know, scared, at least in our industry.

It's like, whoa, what is this? As I just mastered the Google algorithm, what the heck is this thing now, you know? And so you now have like, I think, ChatGPT and Perplexity and Cloud, and there's like so many of them, you know? And so everybody was just scratching their head, just trying to figure it out.

And so I think now that it's been a couple years, I think we've all come to the same consensus that SEO still and will always remain the foundation for GEO, right? Because at the end of the day, It's a matter of optimizing content, right? And so the content that you then optimize that you publish on a website, whether it's a site that you own or a site that you contribute to, is influencing the large language models, but it's also still impacting Google, right? And so...

So a lot of the principles that we have been applying for two decades are still applicable today when you're trying to optimize for a prompt on ChatGPT.

For years and years and years, like good SEO could put... bad law firms at the top of Google.

You know what I mean? Like, with the right strategy, you could force Google to ranking a bad law firm, right, at the top of the search engines just through links and content and, you know, technical SEO.

Whereas ChatGPT, it's much harder to get a bad law firm.

What do I mean by bad, right? I'm talking about a law firm that treats their clients bad, treats their employees bad, has never really tried a real case in their life.

They're just more of like a settlement mill or like...

What's going to happen is, you know, because when you do a prompt on ChatGPT, it does like 50 fan-out queries, right? And then from there, it's like, okay, great.

What are their Yelp reviews? What are their Google reviews? Like, do they have an A-plus rating on the Better Business Bureau? Do they have a Glassdoor positive reviews for their employees? Are they actually in good standing with the state bar, right? It's kind of doing all these fan-out queries really quickly to be able to cite and source.

the reputable firms that those people that are in need for a lawyer are looking for.

So it's a little different.

I think reputation and sentiment have a much bigger impact today than it has ever had.

That makes a lot of sense.

And it really is so interesting.

At Spotlight, we've never been an SEO first agency.

We tend to work with Law firms, maybe they don't actually get their best clients from Google.

They're heavy on referrals and that type of thing.

And they're very specific about the types of clients they want to work with.