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The annual Maximum Lawyer State of the Firm survey is officially live and open until November 16th. This is your chance to see exactly how your firm stands up against others across the country. What they're spending, where they're getting clients, what's actually working right now. It's faster and more impactful than ever. And when you complete it, you'll get the full report for free. Plus be entered to win a $500Amazon gift card. Results and winner will be presented live on January 8th at 2pm Central Time in the Maximum Layer Facebook group. Head to MaxLawSurvey.com to be a part of the most influential report shaping the future of law firm ownership.
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Get ready because here's your host, Tyson Mutrix. Welcome to the Guild Live Show. I'm Tyson Mudri and I I've got a really good one Today we're going to be going through a few different things. A new study on clicks being crushed. I'll get into that in a little bit. A newsletters report which is going to be a really an interesting thing for those of you that send out newsletters. There's going to be, there's a YouTube makeover. That's something that is going to be interesting. AI booking has hit, hit the market. So that's, that's a new thing. And then the next thing we're going to go over is smart splits. Those of you that use TikTok, you're going to know exactly what I'm talking about probably already. That's also something that's going to be rolled out in YouTube shorts as well. So good stuff there. All right, the first story what we're going to get to is the is crushing clicks. So Google's AI overviews are actually crushing clicks. That's really kind of interesting thing. So the organic click through rate is down 61%. That's incredible. Paid click through rate is down 68%. Those numbers are, are startling. And there was actually two different articles that were written on this. They're both from it's Search Engine Land. If you don't follow Search Engine Land, I, I definitely recommend that you do so they do a lot of research on this as you might imagine with, with the URL being what it is. And I've talked about them before so. But this one is from Seer New Interactive and the data shows that AI overviews are siphoning clicks across both SEO and ppc. And that's even when the AI overviews do don't appear. So if you're still measuring your success by traffic, you're going to miss the real shift that's happening right now. If that's all you, if you're just focusing on traffic and nothing else, you're missing the whole game. The whole game is, has changed substantially. So there's another recent study that it's from Bright Edge, they found that AI overviews have surged to 26% coverage in September. So the results of this have been delayed by, by a couple months now that we're in November, but it's settling right between I guess 9% in October. So with the, the whole idea is you need to focus on bottom of the funnel conversions because that's where things remain with the classic search. So for example, what I mean by that is, is that if they're doing, if you're doing research. So if the potential client's doing research, that's more of the, the top of the funnel, that's where you're seeing where all the clicks have been suppressed. They're not going to the attorney's website and I'm just using law firms as an example but they're not using the law firm's website as research as much as, you know, finding an attorney near me, an attorney near me, that's the bottom of the funnel. That's where you need to be focusing most of your time. And that's where what they're talking about in these, in these articles there's three key points and I'll give you some takeaways. So expect fewer clicks everywhere. That's one of the things, expect fewer clicks, you're going to expect lower traffic. So informational queries with AI overviews, that's where they're going to be doing all that research. Right. So that's a 61% organic click through rate drop from like just general searches, doing research. And that's where you have the 68% the paid click through rate has dropped. So that is, those are, like I said, those are startling, startling numbers. And it also says that even without AI overviews, even without those organic clickthrough rate fell 41%. So shift KPIs towards visibility, share a voice and then lead quality. I think the reason why you're seeing the organic click through rate falling as well is you're probably seeing a lot of that, that those searches being done inside of the, the LLMs themselves. Another, another key point is about rebalancing the funnel. So since AI overviews are now dominating the research part of it, focusing on that bottom of the funnel. So hire an attorney, focus on words that you're using hire or near me. Those are going to be some, some focuses. So if you're paying for ads, use that. If you're focused on SEO, use that. Because that's going to be still going to convert just like traditional SEO's worked over the years. So you're going to still be focusing on those. And then we're focused on building answer engines in your content. That's a, that's something we've been talking about in the guild for a little bit where you have, you have your general topic and then you build in, into that. We have, we actually have all this posted in the guild, inside the guild in Kajabi where we give the, essentially the, the game plan. Here's the game plan, here's how your pages should look. And one of those key parts is having the answers built in. So the listed questions, traditionally what you'd have is like a Q and A page. But on these you're going to have your general topic and then all of the questions and answers below that, that's going to be built in there. That way it's going to be helping with that, the conversion. And then you're going to want to rethink your pay per click, move the budget around a little bit. Where you're going to go from those broad in inquiries, you're going to move away from those and then focus more on. I would even consider, I'm not telling you you should or shouldn't at this point. You need to do your own research. Consider moving away from pay per click completely. So Google Ads and then maybe more towards like the LSAs. This is where it might make more sense because that is more bottom of the funnel. The LSA is more bottom of the funnel. And that way you're gonna, you're gonna bypass all that click decay. So those are, those are some of the key points and then you know, takeaways. So you know, build, make sure you have those research answers built in more closer, closer to the bottom of the funnel types of questions, not top of the funnel because they're not being used as much unless the idea is that you're going to be showing up more in the LLMs. That's, that's part of the strategy, strategy too. So you should still have that content. So don't go completely away from that content. So focus more on the term share of voice and not just clicks. So you got to make sure you do that. That's a big part of it. And then I would say just as a, just to start testing things out like pick, you know, top five, your, maybe your top five informational topics and then create some concise answer engines on each of those pages. So let's say you're a estate planning attorney and you know, you got a page about trusts, you know, maybe so that's more that, that informational top that one of the top five informational ones and what are like those, you know, top five questions that you get and then get, get some answers put into more bottom of funnel types. Bottom of funnel might be, you know, how do I determine the best kind of an attorney to hire, you know, types of questions. Those are more the bottom of the funnel knowing because you, you know that they're looking for an attorney. Right? They're not just trying to do the will on their own and doing research about whether they need a will or a trust. They're actually, they want to, they want to hire an attorney. So that's more of that, that bottom of the funnel there is a really interesting chart that they show on this that is, it's really kind of incredible. It shows the paid organic click through rates trends over the last 12 months. That's a really interesting one. What it has is you've got from September 2025, it goes all the way back to October 2024 and you can see the shift in the click through rates. I definitely recommend that you check that out. That's something that is, it's, it's quite an interesting thing. But let's get into our next story. I spent, that's our main story. So the other ones I'm going to move through fairly quickly. This next one is from HubSpot. It's HubSpot's 2025 state of newsletters. And the, the whole point of this one is they talk about personalization pays but opinionated content wins. This is one that is if you're doing newsletters you're going to want to make sure you check it out. So they surveyed 400 plus newsletter pros. So these, these are people that are sending out, you know, regular newsletters on a, on a frequent basis and they found that personalization correlates with higher revenue. That's an interesting thing. Notice they said correlate then that causation that's, that's part of this mixed media and opinion. Opinionated content drive the best opens and in clicks 40%, 42% of the people that are sending out these newsletters say that AI saves about one to three hours weekly. And LinkedIn and Facebook lead distribution. That's, that's an interesting thing too. That's an interesting part part about that they recommend that you start maybe doing weekly. One of the things you could do is case insights. I'm. I'm sort of interpreting interpreting a little bit for. For the article. But what you could do for the firm is more of a case insights email with really talk about from the point of view of. Of the. The law firm or you as the lawyer. Personally I think you should focus more on you as the lawyer as the owner is because it's. You can get definitely more personal. But if you do have that type of a firm where your firm culture. I'm Kevin Cheney kind of kind of comes to mind where the. His employees it's. It's almost like they. They have take this approach where everyone owns the firm together and the employees are out front and center when it comes to some of the marketing. That's kind of the. The type that I think of when I think of Kevin Cheney. You would more point of view of those people. Maybe mix in some charts. Make sure you only have one call to action. These are. These are things that I'm pulling from the. The. This. The survey. So you know, only one call to action, not multiple calls to action. And then maybe you segment it by case types. So that's. That's some interesting information. From there use AI to. To draft and but just make sure that your opinion is injected into it. That's another big part of this. And then so make sure that personality plus personalization that's. That's something that definitely beats more of a bland updates kind of a newsletter that's kind of a boring thing. Make sure you're using very vivid visuals. So we're putting out big stats statistics. That's something that. That works really really well when it comes to. To putting these things together. So that is all I have when it comes to that one. You should check that one out. There's. I. I only wanted to point out a few things on. On this in particular. But let's get into the YouTube makeover. This is what's really interesting to me. And there's three different articles that I looked at when it came to this one. They are a big part of this is they're going to upscale what they're calling AI upscale a lot of the videos. So a lot of the. The videos that are lower quality. There is a. There is a caveat to this which I'll get to in a little bit but they're upscaling a lot of the older videos that are not of high quality and they're using AI to do it. That's a big part of this. They're increasing the size limits of the thumbnails. That's another interesting part of this too. That way you can have higher quality thumbnails. It's a really, really important part of this. What I think is the most important part of all of this though is the. There is going to be, it's already started to roll out a massive redesign of the TV friendly YouTube where it's going to look a lot more like Netflix where whenever you. A big part of that too is contextual search. So if you are in, let's say you're inside of a YouTube channel for. We'll just use Mr. Bas because he's the, the most well known. Say you're in the middle of Mr. Beast's YouTube channel and you're searching it while you're inside of that channel. Currently what happens is you search and it'll show you videos from all over YouTube. It is, it's going to shift where it's more contextual and it's going to show you more from Mr. Beast YouTube channel because you're inside that channel. To me that makes a lot more sense. It should have been that way from the beginning, but that's, that's another big part of what they're going to be doing. They're going to make this more of a polished TV experience. That's really kind of an interesting part of this. I do wonder how this is, how this is going to work because you already have a platform that works well and you have a platform that is, you know, people have been shifting away from traditional television for years and I think it's interesting that they're shifting more towards traditional type of tv. I think that makes sense because of some of the things I've noticed where I've been fed more and more, you know, movies on YouTube TV and I don't know if that's or not YouTube, YouTube TV, but on YouTube. And I don't know if that's because I have a premium subscription or not. I actually don't know. I don't know the difference. I don't know what people that don't have a premium subscription show, but I have wondered how long it's going to take them to kind of do this. And so this, that part makes a little bit of sense. But it also makes me wonder why the shift, given that people are already moving to, to YouTube from, from major platforms. So the caveat I was going to talk about when it comes to the upscaling. You can actually opt out if you don't want the upscaling. I don't know why you wouldn't want the upscaling unless it dramatically changes things. To me it makes sense. My guess is they'll probably show those more often anyways if they are upscaled because if it's a lower quality, they may not want to do that. So the, the. Again, the key. I'm going to go over the key features with you. The expanded thumbnails we talked about the 2 megabytes to 50 megabytes. I know mega megabytes, not that much much. But I mean increase by from 2 to 50 is pretty big increase. They're going to have that. A new AI powered feature that automatically generates higher resolutions for videos. The flip through favorite YouTube channels with immersive previews on the homepage. This is going to be where it's like Netflix. That part's interesting. You're going to have the contextual search that I talked about that's on TVs. It sounds like, it sounds like it's specifically to TVs and not on both of the, the, the Netflix change. And then the contextual search sound like that's only going to be on TVs for some reason. I don't know why. It' can be on phones as well. Then you're going to have. Viewers are going to be able to scan a shopping QR code to instantly open the product page on their phone. That's an interesting change too. I have also noticed you all can't see this, but inside of Streamyard, which we stream from, there is a QR code. And so the QR code is. And that's something that they added in the last, I don't know, month or so. And I kind of wondered why that was. But that's, that's, that's something that apparently a lot of these streaming services are shipping shifting too. So there we go. All right, let's move on to another interesting develop from Google. Lots of Google stuff today. And this is where Google's AI mode can now book tickets and appointments for you. And this is from TechCrunch. This is the reason why I find this one relevant to us is because you're going to start to have people booking appointments with us through. If this is an option that you offer. I. This is not an option that we currently offer. I'm not saying we're completely against it, but this is, this is not, not an option that we currently offer. We have no plans to offer this. However, if that's the way people are going, don't be surprised if you start to have AI scheduling appointments for you. Not really for you. I guess obviously you can use it yourself. But this is, I think I, I can see easily in the future you have someone go in, going in and saying, I need a personal injury attorney. Schedule an appointment for me with the best attorney I could. Completely seeing that and then having agents doing it. David Terry, I got your message. Thanks buddy, appreciate it. He says, watching you, looking sharp this morning. Really appreciate it. That's a very nice message. I like to see that during the show. But thanks, David Terry. But I, I do think when it comes to these, this new AI mode, you're going to see this odd shift where people are just going to say, hey, go find me the best attorney. And they're going to book these appointments for us, for them and us sometimes. So some of the details and give some of the details. Google added agentic actions to AI mode and search, letting users request real time options and jump straight to booking pages. So you're, you're skipping through all the other nonsense. You say, this is what I need and it jumps straight to it. I like that. That sounds amazing to me. That way I'm not having to. Let me think about this. How many times have you gone to a booking site? You name it, hotel, rental car, airport or airline, whatever it is. And then you have to re enter the information again. And re enter the information. Oh, you just say, hey, I need tickets from STL to, you know, Phoenix for these dates. So November 8th through the 12th. I prefer to leave in the morning. Yada, yada, yada. It does. It just boom, jumps straight to the booking page. It figures all you give it the details, it might ask you some questions. Boom, done. That's, that sounds, that sounds amazing to me. Sounds pretty good. And then so they did have some earlier agentic tests and those handled restaurant reservations. And I think I did talk about restaurant reservations a few months ago. This however, expands that to more of. And that was more in like the answers part of it to the actual transaction. We're shifting to more of a transactions. Okay. Where they're getting to the point where booking a reservation is one thing, but you're getting to, we're going to make some payments. We're getting to the point where you can make the payments. I will say in open AI, their version of the agent. And I'm, I'm kind of drawing a blank. I'm gonna try to Pull this up and remember what the name of it is. I'm drawing a blank on what they called it, but they had their agent that was. You could deploy from inside of chat GPT and you can actually from it inside of jbt. But I actually had IT book my airline tickets to Hawaii. It actually, I had to give it the credit card information, but it, it actually went through and filled that information out for me and hit submit button. I was monitoring it as it was doing it. It was asking me questions as I was doing it. But that was a, it was an interesting thing. So this isn't a brand new thing. However, they've gone a step further where this is more. It's, you know, on the Google search page, it's one of those things where it's. You can hit AI overview and it's right there. It, it gives you that option right away. So that's coming. So prepare for book consultation directly from AI mode. That's, I think that that's something that's going to probably be coming. So make sure that you, if you're gonna, if you do this, make sure you have, you know, you have your scheduling links there, hours, services, all of that's crawlable and those are ready to go and that there's no issues. You're gonna want to make sure you're testing out all of that. I noticed months ago Google made it and it seemed a little more visible. The booking things for attorneys, the booking options. So, so make sure all of that is updated. But. All right, let's get to our last story. And that is those of you that are big TikTok people, but this is, this is more YouTube and TikTok. There's a couple, couple articles that I was looking at when it comes to this. This one is from the Verge. There was a couple from the Verge that I was looking at, but they, they seem to focus primarily on TikTok, but YouTube has some features as well. So I talked about the YouTube makeover. There's, there's more from them. YouTube and TikTok roll out AI tools for faster content creation and TV style viewing. I did find this one very, very, very interesting because there's already some platforms that offer what they're offering, but they're essentially cutting out the middleman is what they're doing. And what you have here is TikTok's new smart split auto chops long videos into multiple shorts, AI outline, drafts, titles, hooks and scripts. So you have, let's say you upload a podcast. Riverside is something, is a is one of the platforms that already does this. We record inside of Riverside for the podcast whenever we're doing a remote interview and it will cut a lot of the stuff up for us. For social media, it's not always great. It does a pretty decent job though. But it'll draft titles, hooks, scripts, all that inside of TikTok now it says TikTok also boosted subscription revenue share up to 90% for creators who meet stricter threshold. That's an interesting part of this too. For TV screens, YouTube's adding AI upscaling which I talked about before larger 4K thumbnails. I didn't mention the 4K thumbnails, but that is something that they're testing for bigger channels. It's not something that they're doing for everybody yet, but they are testing the idea 4K thumbnails only with the bigger channels right now. The QR shopping which I talked about and then shows format that organizes channels into seasons and episodes. When it comes to the smart split, it automatically slices long videos into short clips and captions and vertical reframing. So let's say you record a show or, or a video or something that you do in more of the portrait view or landscape view, it will automatically reframe it for vertical frame. It re reframing it's interesting. And then like I said, the AI outline drafts those hooks and those scripts which is interesting. So you can turn. What you'll be able to do is turn, you know, those 30 to 60 minute webinars or podcasts or videos into you know, 10 to 15 short clips every week. And then you could use the AI outline to speed your scripting and your calls to action for different, different capes, case types. That's something you'll be able to do. You'll be able to repackage your, your channels into more bingeable shows. That's something when it comes to YouTube you're going to be able to do, you know, maybe, you know, season one is, you know, insurance tricks. That's maybe season one. And so you, you can do things like that when it comes to, you know, personally personal injury or criminal defense. Maybe if you do, I don't know if anybody does, you know, town halls. But the webinars is a really big thing. Some people do, you know, local shows like, like Brooks Derek has his show that he'll, he does that where he goes around and has a meal with a business center or whatever. That's something that can be cut into smaller clips pretty easily. Really kind of interesting. I think I think it's one of those ones that they're trying to there's so many other platforms out there that do many of these things and I think they're trying to cut that out. But that is all I have for you this week. Really appreciate you doing it and really appreciate you all watching. Hopefully I actually have I want to thank Amy. We call her Max Law Amy because I've got my Amy Max. Amy is actually running the she's running everything for me when it comes to the graphics, which is fantastic. So thank you Amy. It makes it a lot easier so I'm not having to click around to a lot of different things. But really appreciate it. Have a great week everybody and remember to go to it is maxwell survey.com that way we can do the State of the Firm survey. We will be doing those, releasing those results in I think January. I may be wrong about that. I'll make sure I get those days. I mentioned it last week, but I'll mention it again. Maxwellsurvey.com it is live so make sure that you are completing that because we want to make sure we get it out out to as many people that we have. We have the absolute best data possible. So have a great week everybody. We will see you foreign.
