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.
Notes
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David Arato is right. We've all seen lawyers burned by AI errors in court filings. The same risk applies to your bio, your posts, and your social copy: a made-up verdict or credential is a misleading statement about your services, and the rules on that don't loosen because it's marketing. Every fact is your responsibility. Check it, the same way you'd check a filing.
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Google's Lighthouse tool now includes an audit specifically for AI agent discoverability, which means there's a testable standard for whether your site is structured in a way AI systems can actually read and use. If your writing and profiles live on a domain you own, running this audit tells you whether AI search can actually see you.
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If you've been publishing to get found and wondering whether any of it shows up in AI answers, this piece lays out a step-by-step process for checking where AI cites sources in your topic area and getting your content into that mix. The workflow is practical enough to run yourself without a marketing team behind you.
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Google is building features that let people follow creators directly inside search, which means fewer clicks out to your actual site. For anyone building an audience around their name, the implication is clear: your site still matters, but you need to own the relationship, not just the ranking.
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Generic content doesn't get cited in AI answers. What does: original observations, validated claims, and real experience you can only get from actually practicing. If you're writing about your area of law from your own practice, you're already ahead of most. The article lays out how to make that work visible to AI systems.
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AI can produce passable prose, but it can't replicate your judgment, your read on a situation, or your years in a specific practice area. The piece argues that expertise and original thinking are now the scarce resource, and that's exactly where your name, your reputation, and your byline carry weight that generic content never will.
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Google confirmed that GSC (Google Search Console) doesn't measure how often your name or writing shows up in AI-mode answers. If you've been using clicks and impressions to gauge whether you're getting found, you're missing a growing slice of the picture entirely. For now, you need other signals: direct checks in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews by name.
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Bowman's argument: getting cited by AI now depends on your reviews, your reputation, and your operations, not just your content. For you, that means the Google reviews, bar profile, and what colleagues say about you publicly all feed the same signal. Content is table stakes, not the whole game.
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If your site runs on WordPress, this matters. Mullenweg is out at Automattic, which raises real questions about WordPress's direction. No immediate action needed, but now is a good time to make sure you own your content, your domain, and your hosting relationship.
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A federal judge in an active antitrust case called Google's AI Overviews "really unfair" to publishers. If you publish content to get found, that content is now feeding answers that push your site down or out entirely. This case could change the economics of publishing online, and you'll want to watch it.
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