... firms that don’t publish or contribute meaningfully online risk being left out of the training data—and thus out of the AI-driven discovery process entirely.
The future of legal marketing isn’t five years away. It’s 18 months out—and it’s accelerating.
A new paper, AI 2027, authored by AI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo (formerly lead researcher at OpenAI) and collaborators, presents a provocative forecast: by late 2027, we may see AI systems capable of superhuman research and autonomous experimentation, with Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) potentially arriving as soon as 2028.
While headlines focus on existential risk and regulation, law firm marketers need to understand this: how people find and choose legal services is about to change radically—and permanently.
1. The Sprint to “Zero Clicks” – How Generative AI Is Replacing Traditional Search
Today, 77% of B2B buyers use Google during their decision-making process (source: Gartner), but this is shifting. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews are changing how people seek answers, often delivering the full response without requiring a click.
According to Similarweb, organic traffic to HuffPost fell by over 50% between 2022 and 2025, and Business Insider saw a 55% drop—primarily due to AI summaries replacing clicks.
This means clients are no longer clicking on your blog post—they’re reading a summary of it generated by an AI model. If you’re not cited or visible in trustworthy sources, you’re not being recommended.
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s Gemini are reshaping how people find and consume information, effectively replacing traditional search engines like Google in many scenarios. Instead of returning a list of links, these AI tools generate synthesized, conversational answers that pull from a wide range of sources. This approach is more efficient for users, especially in professional or research-heavy contexts like legal services, where speed, accuracy, and clarity are paramount. According to Gartner, by 2026, an estimated 30% of all searches will take place through AI-powered chat interfaces rather than traditional search bars.
Google itself has acknowledged and accelerated this trend with the rollout of AI Overviews (formerly known as Search Generative Experience), which places AI-generated summaries at the top of results pages. These summaries often answer a user’s query directly, reducing the need for clicks. Early data shows this shift is already impacting traffic, with publishers like HuffPost and Business Insider reporting more than 50% drops in organic search visits. More broadly, Similarweb and SparkToro have found that over 60% of all Google searches in 2024 ended without a single click—a phenomenon known as “zero-click search.” This trend is directly tied to the rise of AI-generated responses and is especially concerning for law firms that rely heavily on organic and paid search to generate leads.
LLMs do not rank or surface content in the same way Google’s algorithm traditionally has. Instead of rewarding backlinks or domain authority, they prioritize clarity, trustworthiness, and relevance. Content that features named authors, structured formatting (such as headers and bullet points), reputable citations, and expert insights is more likely to be referenced or included in AI responses. This is why firms investing in thought leadership, PR visibility, and structured content creation are outperforming competitors in AI-driven discovery—because their expertise is being cited directly in the answers LLMs provide.
In the legal sector, this shift is already changing the buyer journey. Legal departments and business professionals increasingly rely on tools like ChatGPT to help vet firms, understand regulatory topics, or even summarize complex legal processes. Queries such as “What firms handle SEC investigations?” or “Best legal tech for document review” are now being routed through AI models that draw from training data, not paid listings or directory placements. If a firm’s name, services, or expertise aren’t consistently cited across credible sources, they are unlikely to appear in the AI’s recommendation.
The implication for legal marketers is clear: traditional SEO and paid advertising are no longer sufficient. Marketing strategies must now focus on ensuring a firm’s reputation, thought leadership, and digital presence are structured in a way that AI models can recognize, prioritize, and reference. The firms that succeed in this environment will be those whose content is part of the data foundation powering tomorrow’s AI tools. Being visible to AI is becoming just as important—if not more so—than being visible on Google.
2. Paid Search Is Losing ROI; Earned Media Is Gaining Power
As AI responses bypass traditional search results, law firm ad campaigns risk under-delivering. Legal marketers relying heavily on Google Ads and paid placements are facing diminishing returns–hopefully, your firm is not one of them.
Meanwhile, nearly 50% of CMOs say they are actively reallocating ad budgets toward owned content and earned media to better align with GenAI discovery (source: Dentsu CMO Navigator 2024). This shift is driven by the realization that tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews are not surfacing traditional ads or marketing pages. Instead, they generate responses using trusted, authoritative sources such as expert-authored articles, whitepapers, interviews, and reputable news coverage. As a result, paid campaigns are increasingly bypassed in favor of content that AI models can read, reference, and cite.
At the same time, the rise of “clickless search” is accelerating. Users are receiving summarized answers directly from AI interfaces, reducing the need to click through to ad-based landing pages. For example, HuffPost experienced more than a 50% decline in search-driven traffic, in part due to the introduction of AI-generated search summaries (Similarweb, 2025). As a result, the ROI on paid search is diminishing, while the value of high-quality, structured, and visible content is growing.
Owned and earned media provide long-term visibility, improve brand authority, and are more likely to be indexed and referenced by AI systems. For many CMOs, a single authoritative mention in a trade publication or expert quote is now seen as more valuable than months of ad spend. This shift reflects a broader realization: marketing success in the age of generative AI depends less on buying attention and more on earning it through credible, searchable, and cite-worthy content.
Earned media, thought leadership, and PR visibility are the new front doors. AI tools favor quotes and insights from trusted third-party publications—especially when they follow structured, expert-forward formats.
3. Content Is Becoming “Training Data” for AI
Generative models are trained on publicly available sources, legal news, blogs, and thought leadership. When your firm publishes content with named authors, expert opinions, and clear metadata, it becomes part of the AI knowledge base.
As Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog noted, “Legal blog posts without named authors lack authority—especially in the age of AI.” If your firm isn’t publishing structured, expert-attributed thought leadership—it’s virtually invisible to the next generation of AI recommendations.
Yes, content is becoming “training data” for AI because large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are trained on vast amounts of publicly available text to learn how to generate human-like responses and answer complex questions. This training process includes crawling and analyzing online content—such as blogs, news articles, whitepapers, and social media posts—to identify patterns, extract facts, and build associations between topics, people, and organizations.
When a law firm publishes content—especially if it includes expert bylines, structured formatting, citations, and appears on reputable domains—it increases the chances that this content will be included in future training datasets or indexed for retrieval by AI tools. Even if a piece of content isn’t part of a model’s original training data, it may be used by AI-powered search and retrieval systems that reference live web content in real time (as Perplexity and some versions of ChatGPT do).
In effect, every blog post, article, or media mention becomes part of the digital “memory” AI models rely on to answer questions. If your firm is quoted in an industry article, mentioned in a legal analysis, or consistently publishing insights on complex issues, those signals contribute to how AI understands your authority and relevance. Conversely, firms that don’t publish or contribute meaningfully online risk being left out of the training data—and thus out of the AI-driven discovery process entirely.
4. The Buyer Journey Is Being Compressed by AI
The buyer journey is being significantly compressed by the rise of AI models that act as intelligent intermediaries between questions and solutions. Traditionally, the legal services buyer would move through a multi-step funnel: becoming aware of a need, conducting research via search engines, reviewing firm websites, downloading content, scheduling a consultation, and eventually issuing an RFP. Each step allowed law firms to deploy marketing tactics—SEO, paid media, email campaigns—to guide prospects through the journey.
With the adoption of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews, that process is collapsing. Buyers can now ask a single, conversational question and receive an immediate, synthesized recommendation drawn from a wide range of sources. This eliminates many of the intermediate touchpoints marketers previously relied on. Instead of sifting through multiple websites or reading long-form content, potential clients are trusting AI models to do the filtering—surfacing firms, experts, or solutions that are consistently associated with credible, authoritative information.
As a result, firms that once relied on awareness campaigns and nurturing workflows now face a new imperative: ensuring their expertise is discoverable, trusted, and frequently referenced in the data sources that AI tools rely on. The buyer no longer has to conduct a long evaluation process—the AI does it for them. This means the opportunity to be found, trusted, and chosen is happening earlier, faster, and often without a firm ever knowing it was considered.
Traditionally, law firm buyers followed a funnel:
Awareness → Research → Website Visit → RFP → Engagement
With AI, that funnel is collapsing into a single moment:
AI Query → Recommendation → Direct Contact
A 2024 survey by Thomson Reuters found that 67% of in-house counsel say they would trust an AI-generated shortlist of law firms—if sourced from reputable data. This places a premium on your public digital footprint: thought leadership, quoted commentary, firm reputation, and clear topical authority.
5. The AI Adoption Curve Is Accelerating—Faster Than Legal Is Ready For
According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle, Generative AI reached the Peak of Inflated Expectations in 2024 and is rapidly moving into adoption. Meanwhile, 60% of law firms surveyed by LexisNexis in 2024 reported already piloting GenAI tools, with 84% believing it will transform the legal profession (source: LexisNexis Legal AI Report).
The AI 2027 paper suggests we’re on a 24-month countdown to a world where many current workflows—research, drafting, marketing—are radically changed.
What Law Firm Marketers Should Do Now
- Reframe Your Metrics: Track not just traffic and clicks, but citations, expert quotes, structured visibility, and AI discoverability.
- Elevate Your Experts: Build visibility for key partners and practice leads via authored content, media placements, and speaking engagements.
- Optimize for Machines and Humans: Ensure content includes schema markup, topic headers, author bios, and media mentions that AI can parse and cite.
- Invest in GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): This emerging strategy blends PR, SEO, and structured thought leadership to improve discoverability in GenAI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
Final Word
AI 2027 isn’t just about the future of machines—it’s about the future of how firms are found, trusted, and hired. The firms that embrace this shift now will own the AI recommendation layer. Those who don’t may find themselves invisible—regardless of size, spend, or prestige.
[Read the AI 2027 paper → ai-2027.com]
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Kenneth Gary, J.D., is a founding partner of LIMELIGHT, a growth communications firm for legal and other highly regulated sectors. Connect with him on LinkedIn; follow his additional thought leadership on JD Supra.
