Nick Carroll
I've spent 30 years building legal publishing infrastructure. I founded publish.law to help attorneys turn their cases, insights, and credentials into a digital presence they own, built for how clients, referral sources, and AI systems find lawyers today.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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NLWeb is an emerging protocol that lets AI agents query websites directly in plain language, essentially making your site conversational. It's early, but if AI is how clients start finding attorneys, having a site structured for machine-readable queries puts your name ahead of those that aren't.
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Google referral traffic dropped 40% year over year.
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ChatGPT is rolling out ads, which means AI visibility now has a paid lane and an earned lane. The earned side, getting cited because you've published genuinely useful, authoritative writing under your own name, is still the one that compounds. This piece walks through how the two interact and how to measure what's actually working.
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