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
- Nick Carroll
Great post @angus...
"As AI tools increasingly summarize information for users, generic marketing content has become less and less valuable. Using a personal publishing site, one that connects an otherwise unorganized online presence, for orginal analysis, expert commentary and unique insights—the same qualities that make journalism valuable—is more likely to stand out."
- Nick Carroll
Researchers found that tiny, planted phrases in online content can steer AI agent recommendations toward specific brands. The flip side for you: your own content, your reviews, and your directory profiles can be optimized the same way. Small, deliberate wording choices in the right places carry more weight than you might expect.
- Nick Carroll
A tool called QueryFan surfaces the actual web searches ChatGPT and Gemini run when generating answers. That means you can now see whether your practice areas are showing up in those hidden queries, and adjust your content accordingly. It's one of the more concrete ways to understand why your firm does or doesn't get cited.
- Nick Carroll
Google's own patent describes how its AI builds entity profiles by pulling from reviews, your website, and public data. For your firm, that means your scattered online presence, your bio, your bar profile, your reviews, all of it feeds the picture AI builds of you. Connecting those dots is now part of getting found.
- Nick Carroll
Google gave direct guidance at Search Central Live on how it reads your content: how it breaks pages into chunks, how your whole site's reputation affects individual pages, and how AI Overviews affect click behavior. This is straight from the source, and your site-wide signals matter more than you might think.
- Nick Carroll
Ahrefs lays out the ten SEO shifts they're actually seeing in client data this year, not just predicting. It covers traffic pattern changes, E-E-A-T signals, and how AI is reshaping what ranks. Good annual benchmark to check your own content assumptions against, especially if your site has been flat or sliding.
- Nick Carroll
AI search engines don't just retrieve pages, they retrieve answers to specific decision moments. This piece covers how to map your content to those moments, which Semrush calls 'category entry points.' For a practice-area page trying to get cited when someone asks an AI a legal question, this framing is more useful than traditional keyword targeting.
- Nick Carroll
These numbers for the March 2026 update are worse than I thought they'd be. Just another reminder that relying on one source of organic traffic isn't very prudent. Firms should always be considering ways to increase the surface area of where they can be found. And launching individual attorney sites is the simplest way to do it. Especially publish.law sites 😉
- Nick Carroll
Kratom post from @jed. First published to The Legal Examiner, and archived at jedcain.com...
- Nick Carroll
AI agents are increasingly the ones 'visiting' your site and deciding whether to surface your firm in answers. This piece walks through a five-layer framework for making sure your content is readable and citable by those systems, not just by humans on Google.
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