In this episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR, host Ray DeLorenzi sits down with Jillian DeSimone, the firm's Vice President of Business Development, to examine a line item almost every plaintiff firm carries: tens of thousands of dollars a month to an SEO agency, paid out for years. For most of the last decade that spend was defensible. Search meant ten blue links on Google, and a firm that ranked on the first page reached people at the moment they went looking for a lawyer. Firms that invested early built a real advantage over firms that did not.

Ray and Jillian walk through the three shifts that ended it. People stopped starting at Google: consumers who said they would use LLMs to research an attorney went from 9% in 2023 to nearly 42% in 2026, while Google's share of that research fell almost fifteen points in a single year. The systems answering those questions barely read law firm websites at all, and when one agency asked ChatGPT which personal injury lawyers to call in a real American city, the number of firm websites cited was zero. And the work an SEO vendor can still do has become a commodity any firm can handle in house.

The conversation turns to what these systems do trust, which is what other people say about you. Earned coverage, third-party validation, and a public record consistent enough for a model to rely on are the inputs that decide whether a firm shows up in an AI answer, and none of them come out of an SEO contract. Ray and Jillian lay out how firms should be reading the latest AI search data, where the marketing budget goes instead, and what it takes to build the kind of authority and reputation that holds up no matter which system is doing the answering.

Read the full report: https://www.rebuttalpr.com/ai-guide/