April 2, 2026 • 29 mins
Here are five systematic predictions on how AI visibility will reshape family law firm client acquisition.
It's what we're watching happen in real-time with generative engine optimization, multi-platform law firm marketing, and conversational AI queries replacing traditional search behavior.
Hit with traffic drops in Q3 2025 or relying on a single platform for lead source? This episode shows how to audit your AI visibility and diversify before the market leaves you behind.
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📄 CHAPTERS
0:00 - GEO for Attorneys: Why the 2-3 Year Client Search Starts in AI
0:30 - Prediction 1: First Mover Advantage Closes Mid-2026
0:56 - How Search Behavior Shifted to Perplexity and ChatGPT
2:45 - Why "Search Paragraphs" Replace Keyword Queries
5:21 - Content Gaps That Kill Your LLM Visibility
10:06 - Prediction 2: Content Without Context Won't Rank
14:08 - Prediction 3: AI-Generated Content Detection Gets Aggressive
21:42 - Prediction 4: Templated Multi-Location Pages Get Hammered
24:00 - Prediction 5: Single Platform Reliance Will Destroy Your Firm
27:19 - Getting AI Accounts and Auditing Content Gaps
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
It's going to be wild to watch how peoplesearch and conduct their knowledge
(00:04):
because,like bringing it back to family law.
We know that the search processis 2 to 3 years long.
So there's going to be so much interactionwith AI before purchasing
decision happens that you're going to missthe whole boat years ahead of time.
If you're not there.
welcome back to the Sterling Familylast show.
We have a great episode todaywe are going to talk about.
(00:26):
We're going to put our tinfoil hats onand talk about our predictions,
the five predictionswe have for Geo in 2026.
Tony, our first prediction is that the Geofirst mover advantage
will close by mid 2026.
I'm assuming it is because AIis everywhere now.
(00:47):
Everyone knows about it,everyone's asking about it.
And the early adopters,you know, everyone's becoming that.
Yeah.
I mean, the more and more,these, these tools become reliable
and they hallucinate less,and they're just being adopted
more and more.
So, and like, on thefrom a, you know,
generative engine perspective in terms of,like showing,
(01:08):
having visibility in the limbs, you're,there's
firms that have been moving towards thatsince the beginning,
having really well structured content.
So that's, that's definitely coming.
I would say there's.
(01:29):
The general move of usersmoving away from search
and towards, perplexity or ChatGPTor Claude to do investigations
has significantly moved already.
Search is still something to be used,but it's it's like part of the ecosystem.
I don't think it's going away.
It's just,a lot of people are treating
(01:52):
these LMS as like,personal advice givers essentially.
And it's like, it'sit's changing how people interact
with the internet in a pretty large way.
Like I still use search,but it's way closer to the end of my,
the end of my search process.
(02:13):
And I'm, I'm often timesgoing direct to brands
because brands are recommended.
By the LMS.
So it's very much just it changed the wayI'm, I'm searching
it's changing the waya lot of people are searching.
I know my wife actuallyis using perplexity a lot more, for,
(02:33):
for a ton of thingsinstead of going direct search.
And then she,she uses search to find things at the end.
So it's just it's changing how people areoperating with the internet.
Search doesn't go away.
It's just it's changing.
It's part of the equation,not the only equation.
Yeah.
I think it's fully time to accept thatthis is here to stay, and that the firms
building AI visibility noware going to dominate referrals for years.
(02:55):
Right? There's no longer like,wait and see if it's going to work.
Like, this is a thing. It's time.
And,one thing that we tell prospective clients
and our clients all the time is like,just go to an alarm and search.
Who are the top family attorneysin your city, right.
And then ask perplexity the same question.
And see who shows up.
(03:15):
what's what'swhat's interesting is
that's not how people are using it.
So what they're you got to think abouthow they're actually
leveraging these LMSwhen they're doing it.
Because that's how you would use itfor search. Right?
You would, you would like switch.
So and like at firstthat's what people are doing.
They're just kind of using itas an augmented search.
But they're seeing they're gettinga whole bunch more than they asked for.
(03:38):
That's really good.
So they're starting to use itas like a scenario advisor.
So they're like how I typically use AI.
My my go to is grokbecause I can speak into it really well.
It has the best back and forthfrom a speaking perspective.
So that's my preference.
And I go and I just, you know, I call itI just throw up into grok,
give it, you know, 3 or 4, you know,depending on what I'm doing, you know, 90s
(04:03):
to four minutes of just me talking to it,explaining what I'm trying to do.
Yeah, yeah.
Just literally thinking out loud,not trying to structure it,
not trying to be perfect,not trying to do anything.
And then it gives me a response.
Typically I'm also asking youlike ask me other questions about this,
about my scenario or about my situationor about what I'm trying to do,
(04:25):
interview me and ask me more questionsso that I can, like,
I can fully give you all of the thingsto consider in your solution.
So that's typically where I'm starting.
And then it'sthen it's giving me several options after.
And then I go to those thingsand do my research.
So it's just it's completelychanging the query streams
(04:45):
because it's notyou're not going you're I don't think
especially future, future versionpeople are going to go to ChatGPT
and they're they're not going tothey're not going to go, who are the top
family law firms in whatever citythey're going to say,
you know, I'm married with two.
Yeah. I'm married.
I'm married with two kids.
They're seven and they're seven and nine.
(05:06):
We homeschool,you know, we have four, one K.
We own a couple businesses.
You know,here's we live we live in this area.
What?
And and we're getting a divorce.
Like what do you whowhat what should I do?
What's my first step likethat would be probably a query.
And then if you don't have informationon your site or other references
externally about all of those thingsI just mentioned,
(05:29):
you are not going to be visible in the LMSat all.
Like grokis not going to show you for that
that search query,and it's not a search query.
It's like a search paragraph or a search,you know, story essentially,
that it's taking, synthesizing,then taking all the information
it has in its database to return yousome results that are,
(05:52):
it thinks are going to be answeringyour query.
So. Okay, that's a great point.
So. different.
So so assuming that's true,the our listeners need to ensure
that they have lots and lots of contentand relevant topics on their site
as it relates to how people are goingto do their generic research
before they're even ready for a divorce.
(06:16):
Right. Yeah.
So this is where, this is wherevideo content is really helping firms
that have gone into that.
This is where kind of makes doinga combination of,
you know, where are you locatedand where do you serve.
So essentially like service type content,core content, which would be like
what are the things that you actually do?
(06:37):
So like what do you actually do,where do you do it.
And then what are like natural languagescenarios that get covered.
So like that's part of our content plan.
It's typically three fold.
And we do a lot of videosas well at Sterling
because like the,the whole purpose is we need to attack it.
We need attack search the search frontbecause they're still going
to be searchers.
We need to attack the location frontbecause people are still going
(06:59):
to be interactingwith maps in a real heavy way.
And this and the LMS,the models are using maps to pre
pre include locationadjusted information.
And then you need to have likenatural language conversation story based
scenario based conversationabout particular topics.
(07:20):
So like one of the things that we dois we take a scenario,
completely anonymous, anonymizeit and write it up as an article.
So we'll base it will basically change.
The attorney will change the location.
We'll use the root of the story,change the to change the client names.
But then we'll literally we'll havea blog post about what what occurred.
(07:42):
So like clientinformation is still protected.
Nothing is divulgedfrom that perspective.
It's also why we changed the attorney.
So there's really no wayto go research the story.
But it's it's an amazing opportunityfor natural language
models like ChatGPT or Perplexityor Clod or whatever.
They're going to see that informationand then you're going to be more relevant
(08:05):
to different story basedinteractions that are happening on these,
on these platforms.
So it's justyou got to think about
content differently,because the way people
are interacting withthese tools is very different
than how they're interacting with search.
Family law is unlike other practice areas.
Your callers are not shoppingfor a service.
They're looking for someone who makes themfeel safe enough to share.
(08:28):
The worst thing happening in their life.
The firm that hears themfirst wins every time.
And that'swhat changed everything at Sterling.
We eventually built that system into fouractionable steps on this free training.
Mary Sankey, who leads our salesteam, is going to break down
the entire four step sales system.
She is sterling sales manager.
(08:48):
She's the one who runs itevery single day.
So go ahead and registerbelow for the sales secrets of an $18
million family law firm.
I'll see you there.
So speaking of content, Tony,our second prediction is that AI
is going to kind of lose generic contentmore than Google ever did.
And, you know,you've been doing search for a long time,
(09:10):
and there were definitely momentswhen you could just throw a bunch
of content up or keyword stuffthe hell out of a page.
And it feels like people are tryingto, hack the, the geo algorithm.
But I think what we've seenis that it's so much more personalized,
and the more specific and deliberateyou can build content, the more effective
(09:31):
you're going to show up.
Yeah, yeah.
It's,the way the AI models are gathering,
sorting and compiling informationback to users from a chat perspective
or it's way more advancedthan what you're getting from an SEO,
or from a search page,that's primarily
driven from contextual informationand, off site linking,
(09:54):
both of which are easy to manipulate.
And that's why a lot of law firm sites,especially the ones that we take on here,
rocket clicks, they have their way overindexed on location pages.
So at some point, you know, we'll have,you know, the biggest example we had is,
we had a firm that had,I think, 12 locations total.
(10:15):
They had 786 pagesthat were dedicated to location variants.
The content that wasn't dedicated tolocation variance was under 200.
So, it's just it's ait's a huge problem in the space.
Generally it's just over optimizationon top of over optimization.
(10:36):
And it just it doesn't work.
It doesn't hasn'tworked for SEO for a long time.
It actually startedreally getting penalized.
In the last several years or pages, sitesthat were doing that,
they've lost a lot of rank.
And it's because they, they were it waseasy to see what they were trying to do.
But with, with theAI models that they don't necessarily care
(10:58):
how many pages on a sitesay the same thing.
That's just going to countas the same as one thing.
Because they're not returning pages,they're returning information,
so they're synthesizing information.
So if you're if you have 500 pagesor 5000 pages
saying you are relevantto the city of Milwaukee,
that's just one data point,because you're one site and it's one piece
(11:19):
of information about you and your brandbeing relevant to Milwaukee.
So it's not going to help you like youneed.
We, the sites need to havethree different types of content.
They need some location content becausethat's going to help feed the maps.
And that's primarily where these AI modelsare determining location,
proximity from like, is the service,something that a user should consider
(11:40):
based on where they're located?
A lot of it's coming from the maps becausethey're pulling all of that map data.
The second is like,what types of practice area information
do you have and how how specificdo you get with that info so that you can
it can be contextually appliedto what we were talking about before,
(12:02):
which is just someonekind of throwing up into an AI model
to determinewhat they should potentially do next.
And that informationis going to be really helpful there.
And then story based informationor information similar to like videos
or information similar to videos,which are more story based content,
they're going to also help from,contextual perspective, because that's
(12:26):
what the AI models are lookingfor, is like, who's relevant?
Like for my scenario,if I was going through a divorce,
they would want to know.
They'd want to be ableto pull a firm in the Milwaukee area
that they, they trust is relevant to,married with kids, owns a business,
all these different types of things.
(12:47):
So, you know,if I don't have that type of information
on my site, I'm not going to beI'm not going to be there.
When the AI returns the information.
So. Yeah.
This really makes me think about,other agencies
that we've encountered in this spaceand a lot of their,
(13:09):
contracts are deliverablebased contracts.
They are.
Well, we'll do two blog posts a month,or we'll do three landing pages a month.
And the problem withthat is exactly what you're saying.
It's just creating more workthat's irrelevant.
That's not pushing these sites forward.
It's like, well,I got to get the content out.
So I'm going to create some more locationpages and then you end up with that firm
(13:32):
you're talking about, 700 pagesdedicated towards locations.
Yeah.
I mean, and it's there's no, there's,you know, there's no restarting you.
If it took you four yearsto get to that place, like,
that's four years of wastedcontent building
where it's valuable because like that,that's not really what it works.
It doesn't.
It hasn't worked for a long time.
(13:53):
I mean, that's really SEO from like,you know, 2007.
So it's pretty outdated.
It's almost 20 years old.
So, the internet's of all the timefrom there.
And like, now that we have like,now that we have the tools
and the platformsthat actually can consume the information,
those sites are really being left behindas the as the internet changes and Yes.
(14:16):
Good point.
Okay.
Moving on to our third prediction agenda.
Browsers will control 60% of the familylaw short list by 2027.
Give us an overviewon what these browsers are and why
we think they're going to controlso much of this market share.
So if you've used, perplexity or comment,so perplexity is is a model.
(14:41):
The if you, there's a browsercalled comet.
It's built right.
The perplexity models built right into it.
ChatGPT has, has their own as well.
The these are changing the waybrowser usage is, is happening.
There's a fair amount of switchthat's already occurred.
(15:03):
So perplexity,for instance, has 50 million active users.
Most people,most people haven't heard of it.
It's not a, it's not a significantAI platform at this at this point,
in terms of like,you know, when you compare
that to how many monthly active usersare on Google,
like it's a very different number. So,it we're still on the early adopter curve.
(15:28):
But they have a browser that's calledcomet or Perplexities built right in.
So every time you actually goto your browser to do something,
you're going to get an AI result back.
You're not going to get a search pageback.
And it's it'sdelivering different information
that you're going to startconsuming in a different way.
And it's changing behavior patterns.
What what's going to be really interestingis as these,
(15:51):
these models continue to,become adopted in the greater
marketplace,general search from browsers
may not even be a thing in the future.
I know for myself, like I have,I'm I'm a fairly big AI nerd.
I use a lot of my a lot of my informationgathering,
(16:14):
is actually happening more and more ofit is actually actually happening
directly through slackbecause I've created my own slack agent
that does things that I want it to doand can plug into anything.
So I'm not even leaving my I'mnot even leaving my workspace.
Like, I'm just I'm sitting in slack,connected to my team.
One of my team members quoteunquote name is Patrick, and that's my
(16:38):
AI that does a whole bunch of differentSo you're like starting your search there.
Hey, Patrick.
I'm.
my search there.
I'll give them a task to, like, do research on X, Y, and Z, and it'll give me backa whole bunch of information.
And I've never I have not left slack.
So it's,there's a ton that's going to change
in this marketplace.
(17:00):
So, you know, we're we're very muchon the early adopter curve.
And that's going to as it continuesto become more and more standard use,
you know,like which browser do you use it.
You know,you'll still have your interaction with
the internet is going to continue to lookat it
more and more different, because youyou may not be starting ever in a browser
(17:23):
like I know, for me, like I don't a lotof stuff, I don't even start in a browser.
I'm starting in slack because that's whereI want to control my communication.
Patrick.
Because like my the agent that I've built,it's it's in my email.
It's in my iMessageand all of it routes through my slack.
And now I just have one spaceto do things versus all of these
different spaces that are, you know,they just continue to sprawl
(17:46):
and it's a pain in the butt to manage,especially, you know, calendar like my.
Totally offtopic and not related to family law firms,
but are you seeing that same interactionhappen when you're doing e-commerce?
Like,I know you're a big Nike sneaker guy.
Are you going to are you going to askPatrick to give you the latest
sneaker releases?
(18:08):
I mean, I mean, I'mnot a, I'm not a shoe head like that.
So, like,I don't really track shoe releases.
Like the most recent one I did,I wanted to get I wanted to get my.
But we wanted to get differenttoothbrushes for our family.
Right.
So we ended up getting auto rush,which is like this huge.
(18:28):
It's like this.
It doesn't look like a toothbrush.
You stick it in your mouth and it, like,brushes your teeth for you.
Because I want to make my girlsbrush their teeth better.
So like, what better way than to get thema dinosaur toothbrush
that they put in their mouth?
It's like top and bottom.
And it does like a way better jobthan you would if you did it by yourself.
I found that through this process So it'sdoing research on all kinds of things.
(18:50):
Yeah.
Like you're starting there.
Yeah. Correct.
Starting there and then it shows mea bunch of potential products.
And I go to those sitesand I look at them and, there's a lot.
But that's why, you know, peoplethat are more visible in these
AI platforms, they're seeing athey're seeing a higher,
they should be seeing in their analyticsmore direct traffic.
(19:12):
That's that's likely what's happeningbecause they're getting recommended.
And then people are eitherclicking through the links
in the yellow them they might be seeingthat is referral traffic
or people are just going to those domains.
That's so interesting.
Yeah.
It's going to be wildto watch how people search
and conduct their knowledge because,like bringing it back to family law.
(19:34):
We know that the search process isis 2 to 3 years long.
So there's going to be so much interactionwith AI before purchasing
decision happens that you're going to missthe whole boat years ahead of time.
If you're not there.
At the end it depends how you're set up.
Like I don't I'm not really sure howI would get opted into anything at that,
(19:57):
like the way that I'm using it,because I'm, I'm direct
direct port into via the APIand I've created my own slack
agent and it's, it'sjust going to anthropic the API key.
So like there's I'm not getting ads,I'm never going to get ads on my slack
instance unless slack starts doing that.
But even then like these arethese are encrypted messages back
and forth to my agent.
(20:19):
So I do think marketingis going to continue to change.
It's going to look different.
We're not there yet.
Like this is an existential threat.
But there isthe market is going to change a lot.
Like I I've said for a long time,like the best book for anybody to read
that's in marketing.
Any honestly,any business owner should read this too.
It's called scientificAdvertising by Claude Hopkins.
(20:40):
It was written in the 1920s.
It's old as shit.
It is super old,but it is actually marketing.
It's none of this.
Like, let's try to manipulate a searchengine to get our brand in front of it.
You know, it's all about messages.
It's all about hooks.
It's all about presentations,about offers.
It's about how you had to advertisewhen you you had to, like,
figure out how to get in front of people,grab their attention in a second,
(21:02):
and then have them do an action. So,I just think the world is moving
more towards that.
Branding is going to become more andmore important than it has in the past.
It's going to change the waymarketers have to think.
And if they're just,you know, platform automatons,
they're going to struggle in thisnew world
(21:23):
because they're not really marketers.
They're just, you know,they they know how to put the keywords
in the right place to make the Google adsad pop. Like, that's not really marketing.
That's just platform management.
I mean, that book, along withthe Waterfall method by Anthony Karl's.
Sure. Yeah.
We can, but Throw that on the left.
(21:44):
Love it.
Okay, moving into number four,which we've touched on a little bit,
and that is that Google will aggressivelyindex
templated Multi-Location pages.
So if you have a location in Tempeand a location in
Phoenix and a location and,wherever,
and you have just the same content,but you change the address,
(22:05):
you're going to get screwed.
Yeah.
I mean I mean that's beenthat's been the case for a while.
What's,why it's becoming more and more important
is like those, thosethe Google search pages is changing.
If you go to a Google search page nowand you just like look at what returns
when you do any type of query in Google,like you're getting an AI overview first
(22:29):
for a large percentage of queries,you're then going to get maybe an ad
or two, you're going to get a map,you're going to get, and then you're
gonna get a couple organic search results.
You used to get ten all the time.
You're not even gettingten organic search results anymore. So
Google, it's, you know, the index.
(22:50):
Maybe that's aggressive, but they'rethey're just not going to be visible.
They're they're not going to be visible.
And like what worked in the pastto get you visibility
is not going to work in New World.
And it's that's that's continue to happen.
I mean there is some pretty large updatesin 2025 that Google targeted.
(23:11):
And a lot of peoplegot some traffic wiped out right around
the Q three mark of last year.
I think that was the second or third timethey had updated that part of the
algorithm, because I think the first timewe actually saw this was late 2024.
They they tested it in December, thenthey rolled it out pretty hard in April.
(23:31):
And they did it againwith another update in August.
So this has been the trend.
It's been this has been the trendfor a long time though.
Way back when they didthe Panda and Penguin
algorithm implementations,which I believe was like 2008 and 2009.
This has been their direction.
They just have better tools to implementnow and way better processing power
(23:53):
with using these AI modelsto improve their search results.
So that's what they're doing.
As well.
I think the, the fifth predictionis the most important one or the most,
relevant for today.
And that is that a reliance on a singleplatform will put you out of business.
If you're a law firm,only gets leads from Google ads
(24:16):
today or losestoday, you have to diversify.
Yeah, 100% like that.
I mean, that's it's that's so true.
And the the tendency, even the tendencyfor a lot of people
that are starting to use AI,they're picking essentially building out
a whole infrastructure for their IT.
Like if you're really into AI,a lot of people are like picking
(24:37):
a whole infrastructure to just use clothor just use ChatGPT or just use Google.
We're so early in thisright now that that's like deciding
is AltaVista, Yahoo or,you know, ask Jeeves
going to win the search game.
And it's like, oh no, Google.
The Google is going to winthe search game.
And like, they weren't even a playerwhen this whole thing started.
(24:59):
So that's where we arein the evolution of these
AI models is like, we don't knowwhich one of these are going to win.
Grok started super far behind.
They have really leapfrogged forwardwith all of the data that they're,
you know,they're leveraging from their models
that they've they've been workingand using in full self-drive mode.
(25:20):
And on a Teslathat's being retrained with language.
So like they're coming along really fast.
Google has gotten a lot better.
They startedthey started from a full infrastructure
perspectivewhere OpenAI just started from a models.
So like, we don't know who's going to winat this point.
And some of the winnersand losers are going to be picked,
(25:42):
not necessarily even because of quality.
Like there's definitely going to be thingsrelated
to what's going on in the marketplacegenerally.
Like Claude just got slapped by the,you know, the War Department or whatever
you want to call it at this point.
And like, they're notthey're not going
to get military contracts,which means they're going to get way less
funding than the people that got opted in.
(26:03):
That's not fair for them.
But the reality is like,that's going to make a difference
because the other companies thatgot picked, they're going to get funded
and they're going to have more,more access to capital and opportunities.
Then Claude, who'sI think one of the top right now.
So it's like we don't knowwho's going to win at this point.
It's justit's a it's an ever evolving
(26:25):
marketplace right now.
So like really getting intoone single platform, whether that's
your marketing strategyor your AI strategy internally.
You're, you're setting yourself up foryou're setting yourself up for failure.
Maybe you'll get lucky and roll the dice.
Well, but that's, that's just somethingthat people should have on their minds
as this world starts to changeand we move towards this,
(26:47):
I, I, you know, integrated work.
Yeah, yeah.
Integrated workforceand like, workflow opportunities
and work and visibility and marketingand all the things.
So if I'm a law firm ownerlistening to this
and I'm thinking to myself, Holy shit,Tony just scared the crap out of me.
(27:08):
I'm not doing anything with AI.
What's their first step?
What's what's the first thingthat a law firm owner should do?
Or who should they talk toabout understanding?
What?
What the they need to be doingfrom a high visibility perspective.
I mean,I would if you're not using AI currently
like that's probablyyour first step is like do you have
(27:30):
you have a cloud AI account.
Do you have a Gemini account.
Do you have a ChatGPT account?
Do you have one of these to start usingand like getting into your normal
everyday utility of your, you know,your daily work habits?
Because I,I don't ever go to search first anymore.
(27:53):
A lot of my interactionevery single day is with grok
or with my with my slack agent.
I guess, where I'm startingmost of my my work
to challenge my thinking, to just refinewhat I'm what I'm thinking.
I'm going to start with.
So if you're not doingif you're not starting with that,
like you'rethat's probably the biggest thing.
And then secondly, start using the toolif you're going to if you want to know,
(28:15):
like whatcan I do better to be visible in in
AI search, in AI, chats, ask it,give it your website.
Say, what are my what are my content gapsthat are holding me
back from visibility in.
In the, in the AI models.
(28:37):
So and you're going to get a differentanswer from all the different lumps
because they're all built.
They're all built differently.
So, you know,that's probably where I would start
is you're going to get a whole bunchof information and you're going to start
actually using the toolthat you should be using to,
you know, as you're as you're venturingwith all of us to figure out
what this new world of world of worklooks like when we're all AI enabled.
(28:57):
That's right.
So I appreciate your time, as always.
It's going to be wild to watch how peoplesearch and conduct their knowledge
(00:04):
because,like bringing it back to family law.
We know that the search processis 2 to 3 years long.
So there's going to be so much interactionwith AI before purchasing
decision happens that you're going to missthe whole boat years ahead of time.
If you're not there.
welcome back to the Sterling Familylast show.
We have a great episode todaywe are going to talk about.
(00:26):
We're going to put our tinfoil hats onand talk about our predictions,
the five predictionswe have for Geo in 2026.
Tony, our first prediction is that the Geofirst mover advantage
will close by mid 2026.
I'm assuming it is because AIis everywhere now.
(00:47):
Everyone knows about it,everyone's asking about it.
And the early adopters,you know, everyone's becoming that.
Yeah.
I mean, the more and more,these, these tools become reliable
and they hallucinate less,and they're just being adopted
more and more.
So, and like, on thefrom a, you know,
generative engine perspective in terms of,like showing,
(01:08):
having visibility in the limbs, you're,there's
firms that have been moving towards thatsince the beginning,
having really well structured content.
So that's, that's definitely coming.
I would say there's.
(01:29):
The general move of usersmoving away from search
and towards, perplexity or ChatGPTor Claude to do investigations
has significantly moved already.
Search is still something to be used,but it's it's like part of the ecosystem.
I don't think it's going away.
It's just,a lot of people are treating
(01:52):
these LMS as like,personal advice givers essentially.
And it's like, it'sit's changing how people interact
with the internet in a pretty large way.
Like I still use search,but it's way closer to the end of my,
the end of my search process.
(02:13):
And I'm, I'm often timesgoing direct to brands
because brands are recommended.
By the LMS.
So it's very much just it changed the wayI'm, I'm searching
it's changing the waya lot of people are searching.
I know my wife actuallyis using perplexity a lot more, for,
(02:33):
for a ton of thingsinstead of going direct search.
And then she,she uses search to find things at the end.
So it's just it's changing how people areoperating with the internet.
Search doesn't go away.
It's just it's changing.
It's part of the equation,not the only equation.
Yeah.
I think it's fully time to accept thatthis is here to stay, and that the firms
building AI visibility noware going to dominate referrals for years.
(02:55):
Right? There's no longer like,wait and see if it's going to work.
Like, this is a thing. It's time.
And,one thing that we tell prospective clients
and our clients all the time is like,just go to an alarm and search.
Who are the top family attorneysin your city, right.
And then ask perplexity the same question.
And see who shows up.
(03:15):
what's what'swhat's interesting is
that's not how people are using it.
So what they're you got to think abouthow they're actually
leveraging these LMSwhen they're doing it.
Because that's how you would use itfor search. Right?
You would, you would like switch.
So and like at firstthat's what people are doing.
They're just kind of using itas an augmented search.
But they're seeing they're gettinga whole bunch more than they asked for.
(03:38):
That's really good.
So they're starting to use itas like a scenario advisor.
So they're like how I typically use AI.
My my go to is grokbecause I can speak into it really well.
It has the best back and forthfrom a speaking perspective.
So that's my preference.
And I go and I just, you know, I call itI just throw up into grok,
give it, you know, 3 or 4, you know,depending on what I'm doing, you know, 90s
(04:03):
to four minutes of just me talking to it,explaining what I'm trying to do.
Yeah, yeah.
Just literally thinking out loud,not trying to structure it,
not trying to be perfect,not trying to do anything.
And then it gives me a response.
Typically I'm also asking youlike ask me other questions about this,
about my scenario or about my situationor about what I'm trying to do,
(04:25):
interview me and ask me more questionsso that I can, like,
I can fully give you all of the thingsto consider in your solution.
So that's typically where I'm starting.
And then it'sthen it's giving me several options after.
And then I go to those thingsand do my research.
So it's just it's completelychanging the query streams
(04:45):
because it's notyou're not going you're I don't think
especially future, future versionpeople are going to go to ChatGPT
and they're they're not going tothey're not going to go, who are the top
family law firms in whatever citythey're going to say,
you know, I'm married with two.
Yeah. I'm married.
I'm married with two kids.
They're seven and they're seven and nine.
(05:06):
We homeschool,you know, we have four, one K.
We own a couple businesses.
You know,here's we live we live in this area.
What?
And and we're getting a divorce.
Like what do you whowhat what should I do?
What's my first step likethat would be probably a query.
And then if you don't have informationon your site or other references
externally about all of those thingsI just mentioned,
(05:29):
you are not going to be visible in the LMSat all.
Like grokis not going to show you for that
that search query,and it's not a search query.
It's like a search paragraph or a search,you know, story essentially,
that it's taking, synthesizing,then taking all the information
it has in its database to return yousome results that are,
(05:52):
it thinks are going to be answeringyour query.
So. Okay, that's a great point.
So. different.
So so assuming that's true,the our listeners need to ensure
that they have lots and lots of contentand relevant topics on their site
as it relates to how people are goingto do their generic research
before they're even ready for a divorce.
(06:16):
Right. Yeah.
So this is where, this is wherevideo content is really helping firms
that have gone into that.
This is where kind of makes doinga combination of,
you know, where are you locatedand where do you serve.
So essentially like service type content,core content, which would be like
what are the things that you actually do?
(06:37):
So like what do you actually do,where do you do it.
And then what are like natural languagescenarios that get covered.
So like that's part of our content plan.
It's typically three fold.
And we do a lot of videosas well at Sterling
because like the,the whole purpose is we need to attack it.
We need attack search the search frontbecause they're still going
to be searchers.
We need to attack the location frontbecause people are still going
(06:59):
to be interactingwith maps in a real heavy way.
And this and the LMS,the models are using maps to pre
pre include locationadjusted information.
And then you need to have likenatural language conversation story based
scenario based conversationabout particular topics.
(07:20):
So like one of the things that we dois we take a scenario,
completely anonymous, anonymizeit and write it up as an article.
So we'll base it will basically change.
The attorney will change the location.
We'll use the root of the story,change the to change the client names.
But then we'll literally we'll havea blog post about what what occurred.
(07:42):
So like clientinformation is still protected.
Nothing is divulgedfrom that perspective.
It's also why we changed the attorney.
So there's really no wayto go research the story.
But it's it's an amazing opportunityfor natural language
models like ChatGPT or Perplexityor Clod or whatever.
They're going to see that informationand then you're going to be more relevant
(08:05):
to different story basedinteractions that are happening on these,
on these platforms.
So it's justyou got to think about
content differently,because the way people
are interacting withthese tools is very different
than how they're interacting with search.
Family law is unlike other practice areas.
Your callers are not shoppingfor a service.
They're looking for someone who makes themfeel safe enough to share.
(08:28):
The worst thing happening in their life.
The firm that hears themfirst wins every time.
And that'swhat changed everything at Sterling.
We eventually built that system into fouractionable steps on this free training.
Mary Sankey, who leads our salesteam, is going to break down
the entire four step sales system.
She is sterling sales manager.
(08:48):
She's the one who runs itevery single day.
So go ahead and registerbelow for the sales secrets of an $18
million family law firm.
I'll see you there.
So speaking of content, Tony,our second prediction is that AI
is going to kind of lose generic contentmore than Google ever did.
And, you know,you've been doing search for a long time,
(09:10):
and there were definitely momentswhen you could just throw a bunch
of content up or keyword stuffthe hell out of a page.
And it feels like people are tryingto, hack the, the geo algorithm.
But I think what we've seenis that it's so much more personalized,
and the more specific and deliberateyou can build content, the more effective
(09:31):
you're going to show up.
Yeah, yeah.
It's,the way the AI models are gathering,
sorting and compiling informationback to users from a chat perspective
or it's way more advancedthan what you're getting from an SEO,
or from a search page,that's primarily
driven from contextual informationand, off site linking,
(09:54):
both of which are easy to manipulate.
And that's why a lot of law firm sites,especially the ones that we take on here,
rocket clicks, they have their way overindexed on location pages.
So at some point, you know, we'll have,you know, the biggest example we had is,
we had a firm that had,I think, 12 locations total.
(10:15):
They had 786 pagesthat were dedicated to location variants.
The content that wasn't dedicated tolocation variance was under 200.
So, it's just it's ait's a huge problem in the space.
Generally it's just over optimizationon top of over optimization.
(10:36):
And it just it doesn't work.
It doesn't hasn'tworked for SEO for a long time.
It actually startedreally getting penalized.
In the last several years or pages, sitesthat were doing that,
they've lost a lot of rank.
And it's because they, they were it waseasy to see what they were trying to do.
But with, with theAI models that they don't necessarily care
(10:58):
how many pages on a sitesay the same thing.
That's just going to countas the same as one thing.
Because they're not returning pages,they're returning information,
so they're synthesizing information.
So if you're if you have 500 pagesor 5000 pages
saying you are relevantto the city of Milwaukee,
that's just one data point,because you're one site and it's one piece
(11:19):
of information about you and your brandbeing relevant to Milwaukee.
So it's not going to help you like youneed.
We, the sites need to havethree different types of content.
They need some location content becausethat's going to help feed the maps.
And that's primarily where these AI modelsare determining location,
proximity from like, is the service,something that a user should consider
(11:40):
based on where they're located?
A lot of it's coming from the maps becausethey're pulling all of that map data.
The second is like,what types of practice area information
do you have and how how specificdo you get with that info so that you can
it can be contextually appliedto what we were talking about before,
(12:02):
which is just someonekind of throwing up into an AI model
to determinewhat they should potentially do next.
And that informationis going to be really helpful there.
And then story based informationor information similar to like videos
or information similar to videos,which are more story based content,
they're going to also help from,contextual perspective, because that's
(12:26):
what the AI models are lookingfor, is like, who's relevant?
Like for my scenario,if I was going through a divorce,
they would want to know.
They'd want to be ableto pull a firm in the Milwaukee area
that they, they trust is relevant to,married with kids, owns a business,
all these different types of things.
(12:47):
So, you know,if I don't have that type of information
on my site, I'm not going to beI'm not going to be there.
When the AI returns the information.
So. Yeah.
This really makes me think about,other agencies
that we've encountered in this spaceand a lot of their,
(13:09):
contracts are deliverablebased contracts.
They are.
Well, we'll do two blog posts a month,or we'll do three landing pages a month.
And the problem withthat is exactly what you're saying.
It's just creating more workthat's irrelevant.
That's not pushing these sites forward.
It's like, well,I got to get the content out.
So I'm going to create some more locationpages and then you end up with that firm
(13:32):
you're talking about, 700 pagesdedicated towards locations.
Yeah.
I mean, and it's there's no, there's,you know, there's no restarting you.
If it took you four yearsto get to that place, like,
that's four years of wastedcontent building
where it's valuable because like that,that's not really what it works.
It doesn't.
It hasn't worked for a long time.
(13:53):
I mean, that's really SEO from like,you know, 2007.
So it's pretty outdated.
It's almost 20 years old.
So, the internet's of all the timefrom there.
And like, now that we have like,now that we have the tools
and the platformsthat actually can consume the information,
those sites are really being left behindas the as the internet changes and Yes.
(14:16):
Good point.
Okay.
Moving on to our third prediction agenda.
Browsers will control 60% of the familylaw short list by 2027.
Give us an overviewon what these browsers are and why
we think they're going to controlso much of this market share.
So if you've used, perplexity or comment,so perplexity is is a model.
(14:41):
The if you, there's a browsercalled comet.
It's built right.
The perplexity models built right into it.
ChatGPT has, has their own as well.
The these are changing the waybrowser usage is, is happening.
There's a fair amount of switchthat's already occurred.
(15:03):
So perplexity,for instance, has 50 million active users.
Most people,most people haven't heard of it.
It's not a, it's not a significantAI platform at this at this point,
in terms of like,you know, when you compare
that to how many monthly active usersare on Google,
like it's a very different number. So,it we're still on the early adopter curve.
(15:28):
But they have a browser that's calledcomet or Perplexities built right in.
So every time you actually goto your browser to do something,
you're going to get an AI result back.
You're not going to get a search pageback.
And it's it'sdelivering different information
that you're going to startconsuming in a different way.
And it's changing behavior patterns.
What what's going to be really interestingis as these,
(15:51):
these models continue to,become adopted in the greater
marketplace,general search from browsers
may not even be a thing in the future.
I know for myself, like I have,I'm I'm a fairly big AI nerd.
I use a lot of my a lot of my informationgathering,
(16:14):
is actually happening more and more ofit is actually actually happening
directly through slackbecause I've created my own slack agent
that does things that I want it to doand can plug into anything.
So I'm not even leaving my I'mnot even leaving my workspace.
Like, I'm just I'm sitting in slack,connected to my team.
One of my team members quoteunquote name is Patrick, and that's my
(16:38):
AI that does a whole bunch of differentSo you're like starting your search there.
Hey, Patrick.
I'm.
my search there.
I'll give them a task to, like, do research on X, Y, and Z, and it'll give me backa whole bunch of information.
And I've never I have not left slack.
So it's,there's a ton that's going to change
in this marketplace.
(17:00):
So, you know, we're we're very muchon the early adopter curve.
And that's going to as it continuesto become more and more standard use,
you know,like which browser do you use it.
You know,you'll still have your interaction with
the internet is going to continue to lookat it
more and more different, because youyou may not be starting ever in a browser
(17:23):
like I know, for me, like I don't a lotof stuff, I don't even start in a browser.
I'm starting in slack because that's whereI want to control my communication.
Patrick.
Because like my the agent that I've built,it's it's in my email.
It's in my iMessageand all of it routes through my slack.
And now I just have one spaceto do things versus all of these
different spaces that are, you know,they just continue to sprawl
(17:46):
and it's a pain in the butt to manage,especially, you know, calendar like my.
Totally offtopic and not related to family law firms,
but are you seeing that same interactionhappen when you're doing e-commerce?
Like,I know you're a big Nike sneaker guy.
Are you going to are you going to askPatrick to give you the latest
sneaker releases?
(18:08):
I mean, I mean, I'mnot a, I'm not a shoe head like that.
So, like,I don't really track shoe releases.
Like the most recent one I did,I wanted to get I wanted to get my.
But we wanted to get differenttoothbrushes for our family.
Right.
So we ended up getting auto rush,which is like this huge.
(18:28):
It's like this.
It doesn't look like a toothbrush.
You stick it in your mouth and it, like,brushes your teeth for you.
Because I want to make my girlsbrush their teeth better.
So like, what better way than to get thema dinosaur toothbrush
that they put in their mouth?
It's like top and bottom.
And it does like a way better jobthan you would if you did it by yourself.
I found that through this process So it'sdoing research on all kinds of things.
(18:50):
Yeah.
Like you're starting there.
Yeah. Correct.
Starting there and then it shows mea bunch of potential products.
And I go to those sitesand I look at them and, there's a lot.
But that's why, you know, peoplethat are more visible in these
AI platforms, they're seeing athey're seeing a higher,
they should be seeing in their analyticsmore direct traffic.
(19:12):
That's that's likely what's happeningbecause they're getting recommended.
And then people are eitherclicking through the links
in the yellow them they might be seeingthat is referral traffic
or people are just going to those domains.
That's so interesting.
Yeah.
It's going to be wildto watch how people search
and conduct their knowledge because,like bringing it back to family law.
(19:34):
We know that the search process isis 2 to 3 years long.
So there's going to be so much interactionwith AI before purchasing
decision happens that you're going to missthe whole boat years ahead of time.
If you're not there.
At the end it depends how you're set up.
Like I don't I'm not really sure howI would get opted into anything at that,
(19:57):
like the way that I'm using it,because I'm, I'm direct
direct port into via the APIand I've created my own slack
agent and it's, it'sjust going to anthropic the API key.
So like there's I'm not getting ads,I'm never going to get ads on my slack
instance unless slack starts doing that.
But even then like these arethese are encrypted messages back
and forth to my agent.
(20:19):
So I do think marketingis going to continue to change.
It's going to look different.
We're not there yet.
Like this is an existential threat.
But there isthe market is going to change a lot.
Like I I've said for a long time,like the best book for anybody to read
that's in marketing.
Any honestly,any business owner should read this too.
It's called scientificAdvertising by Claude Hopkins.
(20:40):
It was written in the 1920s.
It's old as shit.
It is super old,but it is actually marketing.
It's none of this.
Like, let's try to manipulate a searchengine to get our brand in front of it.
You know, it's all about messages.
It's all about hooks.
It's all about presentations,about offers.
It's about how you had to advertisewhen you you had to, like,
figure out how to get in front of people,grab their attention in a second,
(21:02):
and then have them do an action. So,I just think the world is moving
more towards that.
Branding is going to become more andmore important than it has in the past.
It's going to change the waymarketers have to think.
And if they're just,you know, platform automatons,
they're going to struggle in thisnew world
(21:23):
because they're not really marketers.
They're just, you know,they they know how to put the keywords
in the right place to make the Google adsad pop. Like, that's not really marketing.
That's just platform management.
I mean, that book, along withthe Waterfall method by Anthony Karl's.
Sure. Yeah.
We can, but Throw that on the left.
(21:44):
Love it.
Okay, moving into number four,which we've touched on a little bit,
and that is that Google will aggressivelyindex
templated Multi-Location pages.
So if you have a location in Tempeand a location in
Phoenix and a location and,wherever,
and you have just the same content,but you change the address,
(22:05):
you're going to get screwed.
Yeah.
I mean I mean that's beenthat's been the case for a while.
What's,why it's becoming more and more important
is like those, thosethe Google search pages is changing.
If you go to a Google search page nowand you just like look at what returns
when you do any type of query in Google,like you're getting an AI overview first
(22:29):
for a large percentage of queries,you're then going to get maybe an ad
or two, you're going to get a map,you're going to get, and then you're
gonna get a couple organic search results.
You used to get ten all the time.
You're not even gettingten organic search results anymore. So
Google, it's, you know, the index.
(22:50):
Maybe that's aggressive, but they'rethey're just not going to be visible.
They're they're not going to be visible.
And like what worked in the pastto get you visibility
is not going to work in New World.
And it's that's that's continue to happen.
I mean there is some pretty large updatesin 2025 that Google targeted.
(23:11):
And a lot of peoplegot some traffic wiped out right around
the Q three mark of last year.
I think that was the second or third timethey had updated that part of the
algorithm, because I think the first timewe actually saw this was late 2024.
They they tested it in December, thenthey rolled it out pretty hard in April.
(23:31):
And they did it againwith another update in August.
So this has been the trend.
It's been this has been the trendfor a long time though.
Way back when they didthe Panda and Penguin
algorithm implementations,which I believe was like 2008 and 2009.
This has been their direction.
They just have better tools to implementnow and way better processing power
(23:53):
with using these AI modelsto improve their search results.
So that's what they're doing.
As well.
I think the, the fifth predictionis the most important one or the most,
relevant for today.
And that is that a reliance on a singleplatform will put you out of business.
If you're a law firm,only gets leads from Google ads
(24:16):
today or losestoday, you have to diversify.
Yeah, 100% like that.
I mean, that's it's that's so true.
And the the tendency, even the tendencyfor a lot of people
that are starting to use AI,they're picking essentially building out
a whole infrastructure for their IT.
Like if you're really into AI,a lot of people are like picking
(24:37):
a whole infrastructure to just use clothor just use ChatGPT or just use Google.
We're so early in thisright now that that's like deciding
is AltaVista, Yahoo or,you know, ask Jeeves
going to win the search game.
And it's like, oh no, Google.
The Google is going to winthe search game.
And like, they weren't even a playerwhen this whole thing started.
(24:59):
So that's where we arein the evolution of these
AI models is like, we don't knowwhich one of these are going to win.
Grok started super far behind.
They have really leapfrogged forwardwith all of the data that they're,
you know,they're leveraging from their models
that they've they've been workingand using in full self-drive mode.
(25:20):
And on a Teslathat's being retrained with language.
So like they're coming along really fast.
Google has gotten a lot better.
They startedthey started from a full infrastructure
perspectivewhere OpenAI just started from a models.
So like, we don't know who's going to winat this point.
And some of the winnersand losers are going to be picked,
(25:42):
not necessarily even because of quality.
Like there's definitely going to be thingsrelated
to what's going on in the marketplacegenerally.
Like Claude just got slapped by the,you know, the War Department or whatever
you want to call it at this point.
And like, they're notthey're not going
to get military contracts,which means they're going to get way less
funding than the people that got opted in.
(26:03):
That's not fair for them.
But the reality is like,that's going to make a difference
because the other companies thatgot picked, they're going to get funded
and they're going to have more,more access to capital and opportunities.
Then Claude, who'sI think one of the top right now.
So it's like we don't knowwho's going to win at this point.
It's justit's a it's an ever evolving
(26:25):
marketplace right now.
So like really getting intoone single platform, whether that's
your marketing strategyor your AI strategy internally.
You're, you're setting yourself up foryou're setting yourself up for failure.
Maybe you'll get lucky and roll the dice.
Well, but that's, that's just somethingthat people should have on their minds
as this world starts to changeand we move towards this,
(26:47):
I, I, you know, integrated work.
Yeah, yeah.
Integrated workforceand like, workflow opportunities
and work and visibility and marketingand all the things.
So if I'm a law firm ownerlistening to this
and I'm thinking to myself, Holy shit,Tony just scared the crap out of me.
(27:08):
I'm not doing anything with AI.
What's their first step?
What's what's the first thingthat a law firm owner should do?
Or who should they talk toabout understanding?
What?
What the they need to be doingfrom a high visibility perspective.
I mean,I would if you're not using AI currently
like that's probablyyour first step is like do you have
(27:30):
you have a cloud AI account.
Do you have a Gemini account.
Do you have a ChatGPT account?
Do you have one of these to start usingand like getting into your normal
everyday utility of your, you know,your daily work habits?
Because I,I don't ever go to search first anymore.
(27:53):
A lot of my interactionevery single day is with grok
or with my with my slack agent.
I guess, where I'm startingmost of my my work
to challenge my thinking, to just refinewhat I'm what I'm thinking.
I'm going to start with.
So if you're not doingif you're not starting with that,
like you'rethat's probably the biggest thing.
And then secondly, start using the toolif you're going to if you want to know,
(28:15):
like whatcan I do better to be visible in in
AI search, in AI, chats, ask it,give it your website.
Say, what are my what are my content gapsthat are holding me
back from visibility in.
In the, in the AI models.
(28:37):
So and you're going to get a differentanswer from all the different lumps
because they're all built.
They're all built differently.
So, you know,that's probably where I would start
is you're going to get a whole bunchof information and you're going to start
actually using the toolthat you should be using to,
you know, as you're as you're venturingwith all of us to figure out
what this new world of world of worklooks like when we're all AI enabled.
(28:57):
That's right.
So I appreciate your time, as always.
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