Our Take
Google search rankings are obsolete for legal tech vendors; AI model outputs now determine discovery, and that shift requires a fundamentally different marketing playbook built on earned authority, not keyword optimization.
Why it matters
Legal tech buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for vendor recommendations instead of Googling. If your company doesn't show up in those AI-generated answers, you're invisible to the buyer at the moment it matters most.
Do this week
Legal tech marketing leaders: audit which vendors appear when you ask ChatGPT to recommend solutions in your category, then map which third-party sources (analyst reports, case studies, industry publications) are cited most often in those answers and prioritize earned media placements there.
How buyers find legal tech vendors is shifting in real time
For decades, legal tech vendors optimized for Google search rankings. First page meant visibility. Second page meant obscurity. But buyer behavior has moved.
When potential customers now ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to recommend a vendor, the answer returned depends entirely on what the AI model has been trained on and what sources it deems authoritative. Keyword ranking no longer applies. Position in a SERP no longer exists.
On the latest LawNext podcast, Amy Juers (CEO of Edge Marketing, founded 1997) and Valerie Chan (CEO of Plat4orm) discuss this shift with host Bob Ambrogi. The two firms, longtime competitors, announced a strategic partnership this week and introduced what they call the Trusted Answer Growth System to help legal tech companies adapt to AI-driven discovery.
The core insight: what matters now is who is quoting you, citing you, and treating you as the authority in your category. That means earned media (analyst reports, third-party reviews, industry publications, case studies) carries more weight than paid search or brand websites.
Earned media is now the primary distribution channel for legal tech discovery
Generative AI models train on published content. When an AI recommends a vendor, it pulls from the corpus of material it has ingested. Sources that appear frequently, across trusted publications, in analyst reports, and in third-party endorsements get weighted higher in model outputs.
This inverts the traditional marketing funnel. Instead of advertising your way into awareness and then converting intent, vendors must now build third-party credibility upstream so that when a model is queried, multiple independent sources cite your work as the standard in your category.
The podcast also touches on new marketing vocabulary emerging around this shift: GEO (Google Engine Optimization, now less relevant) and AEO (AI Engine Optimization, the new focus). Practitioners also confront a secondary challenge: when AI tools get your story wrong or omit you entirely, there is no straightforward way to correct the record inside a closed model.
Reorient your marketing spend and messaging strategy now
If your legal tech company still allocates the majority of its marketing budget to Google Ads, brand SEO, and paid search, that allocation is structurally misaligned with where buyers now discover you.
Shift investment toward partnerships with analyst firms (Gartner, Forrester, and vertical-specific analysts), case study and white paper distribution through trusted industry channels, and earned media placements in publications your target buyers read. Each mention in a third-party source increases the surface area a model can see and cite when a buyer asks for a recommendation.
Test your own discovery surface: ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to recommend a vendor in your category. If you don't appear in the response, you have a message problem, not an audience problem. Your message isn't visible to the models.