Posted by Stacey Horrocks, director of Legal Futures Associate BSD Legal Marketing [1]
Horrocks: Firms need to look at search more holistically
For years, law firms have been told that SEO [2] (search engine optimisation) is the long-term alternative to paying for every click.
Build a strong website, produce genuinely useful content, establish authority in your practice areas and, over time, you can earn prominent positions in Google’s organic search results.
That principle hasn’t disappeared; however, the search results surrounding those organic listings have changed significantly.
For law firms and their marketing teams, this creates an important distinction. Ranking well on Google and being highly visible on Google are no longer necessarily the same thing.
The changing face of a Google search
Search for a competitive legal service and the page a prospective client sees can be very different from the traditional list of 10 organic results many of us still picture when we talk about Google rankings.
Paid search has long occupied prominent positions on Google. What has changed is where those ads can appear and how they are presented.
Google now defines its ‘top ads’ as those adjacent to the top organic results. While they will generally appear above the organic listings, Google confirms that they can also appear below the top organic results for certain searches.
In April 2025, Google made another significant change. Advertisers appearing amongst the top ads became eligible to participate in the auction for ads further down the same search results page. In practice, this means somebody scrolling through the results could encounter an advertiser near the top and then again further down.
In October 2025, Google changed the presentation of paid results once more. Text ads are now grouped beneath a larger ‘Sponsored results’ label, which can appear at the top and bottom of the page and around AI Overviews. Google says there will still be no more than four text ads within a single grouping.
It would therefore be wrong to say simply that Google has removed organic search in favour of advertising, or even that every search now contains more adverts than it did previously.
But it is fair to say that the distinction between the paid and organic search landscape has become more complicated.
A number one ranking doesn’t necessarily mean you are number one
One of the things we are paying much more attention to when reviewing law firm performance is the difference between rankings and actual visibility. A law firm could rank first organically for an important search term. On a traditional SEO report, this looks great.
But the prospective client carrying out the search may encounter several sponsored results, other Google search features and potentially an AI-generated answer before reaching that first organic result.
The firm is technically number one organically. But it isn’t necessarily the first law firm the potential client sees. This is why rankings alone are becoming a less useful measure of SEO performance.
They still matter, of course, but law firms should also be looking at impressions, click-through rates, organic traffic and, most importantly, the enquiries and instructions generated from search.
If rankings remain relatively stable but organic click-through rates begin falling, it is worth looking at the search results themselves rather than immediately concluding that the SEO strategy has failed.
Legal services make this particularly interesting
The economics of legal search make these changes especially relevant to the profession.
For many legal services, a new client can be worth considerably more than the cost of acquiring the initial enquiry. That creates an obvious incentive for firms and other legal services businesses to compete for prominent paid positions.
Google itself acknowledges that ads appearing in higher positions tend to receive more clicks and that competition between advertisers is one of the factors affecting cost per click.
The result is a search environment in which an organically successful law firm can find itself competing for attention with businesses willing to pay to appear prominently for exactly the same prospective client.
That doesn’t make the organic result less relevant. It does mean that earning it is only part of the battle.
So, is SEO becoming less valuable?
I would argue the opposite. If anything, the economics of paid search strengthen the case for building a sustainable source of organic enquiries.
Every click generated through pay per click (PPC) [3] has a direct acquisition cost. Stop the advertising budget and, broadly speaking, that source of traffic stops with it.
A strong organic presence is different. Investment in technical SEO, useful content, local visibility and a genuinely authoritative website can continue producing enquiries without the firm paying Google every time somebody clicks.
There is also a danger in responding to a more commercial search landscape by simply spending more on advertising. For some firms, increasing PPC investment will make commercial sense. For others, it could simply increase the cost of acquiring the same type of work.
The important question isn’t whether SEO or PPC is ‘better’. It is what combination produces profitable, appropriate instructions for that particular firm.
AI adds another dimension
The development of AI Overviews [4] makes this more complicated again. Google says advertisements can be eligible to appear above, below or within AI Overviews. Ads appearing within an AI Overview are currently reported as ‘top ads’.
So law firms are no longer competing for visibility on a page consisting simply of adverts followed by organic links.
Depending on the search, there can be paid results, an AI-generated response, local results and traditional organic listings competing for the same user’s attention. That should change how firms think about search marketing.
The objective cannot simply be ‘get us to number one’. It has to be to understand how prospective clients are actually finding legal services and where the firm needs to be visible during that journey.
Law firms need to look beyond their ranking reports
There is a practical point here for firms reviewing the performance of their marketing. If your monthly SEO report tells you that 50 keywords have moved up and 20 have moved down, that information has some value. But it doesn’t tell you whether your marketing is actually working.
Law firms should be asking more commercially relevant questions. Are people clicking on our organic results? Which searches generate enquiries? Which pages turn visitors into prospective clients? What does the search results page actually look like for our most commercially important services? How much are we spending to acquire a client through paid search compared with organic search?
And, perhaps most importantly, are those enquiries turning into the type of work the firm actually wants?
A first-place Google ranking that produces no meaningful work is ultimately less valuable than a lower-volume search term that consistently generates suitable instructions.
Is Google becoming pay-to-play?
Not entirely. Organic search remains capable of generating substantial visibility and enquiries for law firms, and businesses do not have to pay Google to appear in its organic results.
But Google is undoubtedly continuing to develop the commercial elements of search. In 2026, it is also experimenting with new sponsored experiences within AI-powered search products.
For law firms, the consequence is that organic position should no longer be treated as synonymous with search visibility. However, this doesn’t mean abandoning SEO for Google Ads. Nor does it mean every firm should suddenly increase its PPC budget.
It means looking at search more holistically. A law firm might have excellent organic rankings and still benefit from paid search for a particularly competitive or strategically important service. Another might discover that the cost of competing through PPC makes investing further in organic visibility much more attractive. Many will need both.
There is no universal answer because the economics differ enormously between practice areas, locations and firms.
What is changing is the question we need to ask. For years, that question has been, ‘Where do we rank on Google?’ But now, maybe it should be, ‘What does a potential client actually see when they search for our services, and are we visible when it matters?’