By John Anderson, founder of Legal Futures Associate Somuna
If you run a law firm in the UK, you’ve probably noticed declines in enquiries and website visits in the last year or so, but this has accelerated in the last few months.
You might have assumed it’s seasonal, or that your SEO needs refreshing, or that your PPC agency needs a harder conversation.
It’s probably not that, and it´s not just your firm.
Something structural has changed in how people find solicitors and most firms haven’t caught up with what that means, because the changed happened faster than anyone predicted.
AI is now sitting between your potential clients and your website. And for the vast majority of UK law firms, it’s already making you harder to be found.
This isn’t ‘AI replacing lawyers’. It’s AI replacing your website.
There’s a persistent narrative that AI is coming for lawyers’ jobs. It’s not – at least not in the way the headlines suggest. Only 17% of the public would trust AI to help with a divorce. Just 11% would trust it for criminal defence. In high-stakes, emotionally complex matters, people want a human being. That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is how people start looking for that human being.
A growing number of potential clients now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI to recommend a solicitor before they ever type a query into a search engine.
By late 2025, 28% of consumers were already using ChatGPT to research solicitors. When they do still use Google, they increasingly get their answer from an AI-generated summary at the top of the page – and never scroll down to your website.
The data on this is no longer speculative. An Ahrefs study published in February 2026, analysing 300,000 keywords, found that AI Overviews correlate with a 58% reduction in click-through rates for top-ranking pages.
Pew Research found that only 8% of users click on traditional search results when an AI Overview is present, compared with 15% when no overview appears. SparkToro’s most recent analysis, published in June 2026, found that 68% of all Google searches now end without a click – the fastest acceleration of this trend in a decade, driven primarily by AI features.
This matters for law firms specifically because it’s not evenly distributed. It doesn’t hit all practice areas equally and it doesn’t hit all firms the same way. That unevenness is what makes it so easy to miss – and so dangerous to ignore.
Where AI is biting hardest – and where it isn’t
Our own research into UK legal services, looking across seven practice areas, paints a picture that’s more nuanced than the ‘AI will replace lawyers’ headlines suggest. The real risk isn’t about AI doing legal work. It’s about AI intercepting the moment when a potential client goes looking for help.
The full breakdown, with sources, is available here.
Family law is one of the most AI-active practice areas in legal search. AI Overviews now trigger on the majority of family law queries, which means that when someone searches for help with a divorce or a child arrangement dispute, Google is increasingly answering them directly on the page.
Yet consumer trust in AI for family matters remains remarkably low – only 17% would trust AI to help with a divorce. That gap is what makes this so counterintuitive: family law clients are being influenced by AI in how they find a solicitor, even though they’d never let AI handle the case.
Wills and probate sits in a more uncomfortable position. AI Overviews trigger on a high proportion of queries, and nearly half of surveyed adults – 47% – say they would trust AI to draft a will.
That’s a practice area where AI isn’t just changing how clients find you. It’s starting to compete with you for the straightforward work. Firms that depend on high-volume, low-complexity wills should be thinking hard about how they differentiate.
Criminal law, by contrast, remains structurally protected. Only 11% of the public would trust AI for criminal defence, and AI-generated summaries appear far less frequently on criminal law queries. The work is too serious, too personal, and too consequential for people to outsource to a machine.
Personal injury faces a different kind of pressure entirely. Cost per click for injury-solicitor keywords already sit between £15 and £50, driven by claims management companies and aggregator platforms bidding aggressively. AI is accelerating this by compressing the available ad inventory and making automated bidding favour larger budgets.
Unless firms differentiate on specialist expertise for complex or catastrophic cases, the cost of acquiring leads will keep climbing, while the volume of simple claims shrinks into self-service systems like the Official Injury Claim portal.
Employment law, conveyancing and immigration each carry their own specific pressures – from AI-generated grievances flooding tribunals to government chatbots intercepting simple visa queries.
The common thread is this: AI is most disruptive where the work is transactional and the consumer feels comfortable handling it without a human. Where the stakes are high and the emotions are real, human expertise still wins.
But even in those areas, AI is changing how clients find you – and that’s the part most firms are missing.
What I’m seeing when I look at law firm websites
I’ve been reviewing a number of legal services websites recently and the pattern is consistent. Firms that had stable or growing traffic 18 months ago are seeing meaningful declines – not just in raw visits, but in the queries that used to bring them new clients.
The drop is often sharper than the published research suggests, because industry-wide studies deal in averages. Individual firms, particularly those in competitive local markets, can be hit much harder.
The firms that aren’t seeing this yet tend to be the ones that aren’t measuring it properly. Checking your own Google results by hand gives you a distorted picture – your search history, your location, your logged-in status all bias what you see.
The firms that are genuinely on top of this are monitoring their visibility systematically, using dedicated rank-tracking and SERP-feature monitoring tools that show whether AI Overviews are appearing on their target keywords, whether they’re being cited in those overviews, and how their click-through rates are changing month by month.
That kind of monitoring matters because it lets you respond. When a new AI Overview appears on a keyword you depend on, you can adjust your content – or write something new – specifically to earn a citation in that overview.
When you can see that your click-through rate on a particular query has dropped, you can diagnose whether it’s an AI issue or a ranking issue and act accordingly. Without that visibility, you’re flying blind in a market that’s shifting under your feet.
The good news: the foundations are familiar
Here’s what I’d want every managing partner reading this to understand: the work required to perform well in AI search is not a completely new discipline. It overlaps significantly with good, traditional SEO – the kind you may already be investing in.
AI systems like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT draw their answers primarily from content that already ranks well in organic search. They favour pages that demonstrate genuine expertise, that are clearly structured, and that answer the questions real people actually ask.
If your SEO foundations are solid – if your site is technically healthy, your content is authoritative and your practice area pages are genuinely useful – you already have the raw material that AI systems need to cite you.
What you may be missing are the specific signals that help AI systems trust your content enough to recommend you by name. Three stand out.
The first is named authorship. An article on employment law attributed to a named, qualified solicitor with visible credentials is significantly more citable than an anonymous piece attributed to ‘the team’ or carrying no byline at all.
AI systems are looking for evidence that a real expert wrote the content. If your blog posts don’t have named authors with professional credentials, that’s one of the simplest and highest-impact changes you can make.
The second is structured data. Schema markup – specifically LegalService, Person and FAQPage schema – tells AI systems exactly what your firm does, who your solicitors are, and what questions your content answers. Think of it as a machine-readable summary of your expertise.
Most law firm websites either have no schema at all or rely on whatever their SEO plugin generates automatically, which is rarely detailed enough.
The third is review quality. Not just volume – context. AI systems read reviews for specific mentions of practice areas and locations. A review that says “handled our conveyancing in Bristol brilliantly” carries more weight than a generic five-star rating.
Encouraging clients to leave detailed, practice-area-specific reviews on Google and platforms like ReviewSolicitors is one of the most effective things a firm can do for AI visibility, and it costs nothing but a consistent habit.
None of this replaces your existing SEO investment. It builds on it. The firms that will perform best in AI search over the next two to three years are the ones doing both: maintaining their organic foundations while adding the specific signals that AI systems use to decide which firm to name in an answer.
Where this leaves you
For firms that depend heavily on PPC to fill their pipeline, there’s a longer-term benefit to getting this right. Every high-intent keyword you can rank for organically – and get cited for in AI answers – is a keyword you no longer need to pay for.
Over time, that reduces your dependency on paid campaigns and builds something more durable: owned visibility that doesn’t disappear when you stop spending.
The gap between the firms that are visible in AI search and the firms that aren’t is widening. But the work to close it is identifiable, and much of it builds on what good firms are already doing.
The firms that will struggle most are the ones that assume their current SEO agency is already handling this. In most cases, they’re not – because AI visibility requires different monitoring, different signals and a different way of thinking about what ‘being found’ means.
Ask your agency what your AI citation share is across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity. If they can’t answer that question, you have a gap worth understanding.
If you’re not sure where your firm stands, that’s worth finding out before the gap gets any wider. At Somuna, we offer a free 30-minute website review called The First Look – we open your site for the first time, live, and give you honest feedback on what’s working and what isn’t, including how your firm appears in AI search. No preparation needed. No sales pitch. Just a straight conversation about where you are and what might need to change.
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