← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
394. The $1 Trillion Shift: Why AI Visibility is the New SEO w/ Austin Hunt
00:29:31
How to Rank Law Firms in AI Overviews & ChatGPT
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- [00:01]
Chris Dreyer
Should your law firm optimize for Google or for AI? The good news is you don't have to choose.
- [00:06]
Austin Hunt
I'm not just tooting my own horn. This is just the truth. The people who are the best at working with language models right now are SEO people.
- [00:15]
Chris Dreyer
If you structure content correctly for traditional SEO, using the right structure and the right trusted signals, you aren't just ranking in Google Search. You are automatically optimizing for visibility inside AI tools like ChatGPT. In this episode, we break down exactly how to make that happen before your competitors know the game has changed.
- [00:32]
Austin Hunt
The law firms that don't do this right now, they are gonna fall behind. And that's just the truth.
- [00:40]
Chris Dreyer
This is personal injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings IO. We help elite law firms dominate the first page of Google and be discovered on the LLMs. Today, I'm sitting down with Austin Hunt, founder of Legal Guardian Digital. In this episode, we break down why firms that think they're late to AI might already be ahead. And what actually determines whether your content shows up in Google ChatGPT or not at all. Then we go deeper. Structure summaries and the technical details. Most firm skips this episode gets technical on purpose because the firms that understand how this works are now the ones that won't be scrambling later. Let's get into it.
- [01:20]
Austin Hunt
The first news that most people heard about AI was a lot of fear mongering. And I went through that just as much as probably the person that's listening right now, just as much as you did. So let's start with understanding that there's a lot of fear around this, and that's okay. Fear is just stepping into a space that we don't know. And my first approach to it was to look for, like, excuses, look for outs, look for, you know, maybe this isn't gonna happen. And for better or worse, this is the direction that the planet is going in. And we should view it as an opportunity, not as a negative. And I'm gonna explain how I got to the space that I don't really have fear around this anymore. I just have a lot of excitement and opportunity and that, you know, if you're listening right now, you should have that as well. And this is not a new construct.
- [02:12]
Steven Willie
First, transparently, of course, did I have fear in the beginning? I think when people don't understand things, and not to say that I have an understanding even to your degree on the AI search discovery, this whole movement. Right. But I'm certainly in it and I Talked on the stage at pimcon, like, if anyone has motivation to learn this, I have a lot of incentive to learn this. Right.
- [02:36]
Chris Dreyer
So it kind of forced me to do that.
- [02:40]
Steven Willie
And look, and I think during that uncertainty period where we didn't know where this was going to kind of shake out, at least from an SEO agency perspective, there were a lot of people in the agency space that sold their business or got acquired. I think if they were being open and honest, I would say many of them, not all of them, made that decision to kind of get out because of that uncertainty.
- [02:59]
Austin Hunt
I agree.
- [03:00]
Steven Willie
I've started to see, even from the lawyer perspective, kind of the sentiment change. I think even on their side there was fear even working with an agency. And I think people are starting to understand, especially when you look in analytics, the amount of traffic these LLMs are delivering now and they're getting cases from AI. So it's kind of changed. So I agree with all that.
- [03:20]
Austin Hunt
So the first and foremost thing that I would say is hire an SEO expert today. The people who have been working with language models and AI the longest are SEOs. We've been working with one specifically really closely since 2018 and every iteration thereof. So the people who were most aptly, and I'm not just tooting my own horn, this is just the truth. The people who are the best at working with language models right now are SEO people. We've been working with it, even though we weren't aware of it at the time, to the level that we are today. And so I think that first and foremost, get yourself an ally in the space if you don't have one, because the law firms that don't do this right now, they are going to fall behind. And that's just the truth. It's going to get really difficult. Really why these other brands sold was because it's. They understand how difficult it's going to get to actually show up in search. Visibility, AI visibility. So talk to an expert in your field. Most experts that are really kind and loving will have a meeting with you to talk about what's going on and they're not going to try and throw a retainer down your mouth. I know Chris operates the same way that I do. We don't take every client on. We want to work with people that we love, like and trust and that we know that we can do a good job for a portion. Sometimes is just sitting into a, like a 45 minute meeting hearing what's going on and maybe it's not the right time, but you Might get some answers and you can start doing research. So stepping into a space of learning. But you have to remember that there's a bunch of scammers out there. There's a bunch of people who are not in the best interest of people who have real legal problems and they can clone a website and throw it out there within five minutes and have a fully vamped up site. That's going to be not the truth and it's not an expert and it's not someone in the space that should be writing about it. And that's been happening for a while.
- [05:14]
Steven Willie
You touched on a lot of things to your point. Some people have been, you know, like there's the big joke of like is it SEO, aio, geo search, everywhere optimization? But the reality is, you know, 90% of traditional SEO can impact discovery on the LLMs. It's the 10% and like your focus of like I'll give you an example just from my perspective, I'd love to hear this. For example, you know, Microsoft has their investment in OpenAI which it's a conflicting investment because I don't want to go in too deep or rabbit hole there. But they also, you know, have Bing and will Bing license Yelp for the review platform. I know, right? And there's a lot of scenarios where now we're seeing Yelp start to pop up on the organic search results. It's traffic has skyrocketed. So then you got to put emphasis on getting reviews from Yelp. Well, you know, you can't solicit reviews, that's against their terms of service. So you got to do Yelp check ins and to rank in these listicles and that right there, like today you got to talk about Yelp like it just is what it is. If you're going to try to be discovered in LLMs, especially for legal directories.
- [06:19]
Austin Hunt
We should talk about it. Guest posting. I know a lot of people do it not as effective unless it's a natural guest post. Right now you might, your site will probably get penalized if you rely only on guest posting. What Chris is talking about right now, which is a great thing to talk about, is some of these bigger companies are signing multimillion dollar agreements to get authority on their website in exchange for the data that they have on their website to train language models. Google signed a $60 million a year deal with Reddit because Google is trying to compete against Grok and Grok is trained on Twitter information or X information, which is conversational in tone and Reddit is conversational in Tone, I think it's the biggest forum in the world. You know, what's going to happen is we're going to see the rise of Reddit and then we're going to see the fall of Reddit and Google's going to drop them just like they do with everyone else once they get what they need. And like, that's kind of what's happening with like Yelp. It would be really smart and advantageous for you to do research on legal niches, legal directory niches, search volume and traffic. I can only imagine what the Google search console data looks like right now are getting a lot more authority in the space. So like something that I'm doing for my clients is I'm looking up every legal niche directory in their niche, like personal injury for example, or brain injury, and getting listed in those for either free or pennies on the dollar and seeing my rankings and my search visibility, but more importantly, you know, my AI visibility increasing. And the cool thing is you can just look to the right when you do a search in your area. It's like, who are the best attorneys for car accidents in St. Louis? And it will show you. Oh, we checked AVO, you know, we checked super lawyers and we checked top 100car accidentlawyers.com. and you me, you know, your audience person listening right now knows those are all just pay to play. But you need to look at where the money's flowing. I think that's really what it comes down to is there's money flowing between companies right now. And if you just follow that pattern, you'll find some really interesting results on.
- [08:26]
Steven Willie
The same line of the directory approach. Like, you know, everybody emphasizes the Google business profile reviews and we understand the importance from an LSA and local maps perspective. And then we talked about Yelp. But you know, the other thing that isn't mentioned as much is like Facebook, you have the do you recommend this business or not? You have the either or option. Well, their recommendations are then aggregated to expertise and trustpilot. So then trustpilot and expertise, they both have listicles. So it's like understanding the shifts and kind of how the web, what's being cited, what's not being cited, I think has changed in terms of emphasis. Just like what you said, like, hey, for a period of time and I still think there's a lot of value in doing it the correct way. Like guest posting was like the best form of link building a contextual body link, you know, a high directory page. It didn't even need to like relevancy wasn't even a thing, right? The groupings. But now it's just kind of shifted and it's like even before this, like things that we weren't capable of doing. So, you know, we downloaded every competitor website, we could find thousands of them, and we plug them into an LLM to analyze their performance.
- [09:38]
Chris Dreyer
And why?
- [09:39]
Austin Hunt
Dude, I have a saying.
- [09:42]
Steven Willie
Yeah.
- [09:43]
Austin Hunt
Then you just read the data and you're like, what's going on here? Yeah, Find some patterns.
- [09:47]
Steven Willie
It's wild. As opposed to like doing, you know, a traditional competitive analysis report, like plugging it into Arous or Semrush. It's like the capabilities there compared to the large language models and their competitive analysis on thousands of URLs, you know, and getting deep with Screaming Frog. It's. It's so wild.
- [10:05]
Chris Dreyer
So we just covered how AI uses traditional SEO signals to recommend your practice. Now Austin is going to get into the details of exactly how to do that. Here's what you need to keep in mind as Austin goes through this. For your content to rank in AI search, it has to do two things at once. It must appeal to actual humans, and it must signal to the AI that the answer can be easily found by a human. That means that the days of the longest article writing in the SEO battle might be over. Let's dive in as Austin unpacks that for us.
- [10:35]
Steven Willie
So talk to me about the content side.
- [10:38]
Austin Hunt
Yeah, informational content is still incredibly valid. It just might not lead to traffic and clicks. And that that's okay because we want to become an authority in a space and we want to see people see your brand name. You know, make sure your OG titles. I know that's crazy to talk about. That's a very small meta field inside of your head file. It's getting a little complex. But make sure your brand is correctly referenced across your entire website. And for all these people who are doing like really broad, like brand name law, personal injury attorneys, you know, I would be really careful of using that too much because you're diluting your brand name. You know, I get it. It works for Google Listicles. Figure out how to make a middle ground between your brand name and a DBA that gets you the exposure you want without diluting who you are. Your name becomes important as an attorney. The associates and the partners and the managing partners become important. Make those pages really, really good. The best pages on your website should be your brand page, which is your homepage, and your actual attorney bio pages, and make them beautiful for content. On the informational side you can increase your exposure as a brand significantly by targeting AI overviews. And we can do this really strategically. So make sure you're still making content each month. And transactional content obviously still works. Informational content. Informational, transactional content, you know, like, with some purchase intent becomes really valuable. But we need to kind of reorganize the way that we do content just a little bit, which is really nice. You can kind of think of it as like a layering. We can go back to first principles, which is the concept of, you know, what we need to do is let's say we take a really complex idea of like how to negotiate after you get denied a settlement from a car accident insurance company. That's a really good concept. Right? And what we've seen in content before and, and is, well, you've come to the right page. And if you ever wanted to learn about denials, like, we can't give you a direct answer, but this is kind of what we might talk about in this content. And you have to go like a hundred, five hundred, a thousand words to find one little tiny piece of information that might be an answer. You know, what, what type of experience is that providing for people? Instead, what we need to do is we need to realize and act accordingly to how we act as individuals. When we use search, we're looking for an answer and we're looking for an answer from an expert in that field. So what I would do is at the top of your, this is all tested, it's, and, and it is working. And I'm going to be disseminating a lot of this information freely on my site over time. What we need to do is build authority, build a hook, build authority. Within 30 seconds, they need to know they're at the right spot and that you're an expert in this field. And then practice first principles and break things down into its most basic and fundamental parts. Take all of that content and condense it down into a summary. And this summary must be really easy to understand and clean. And you know, you have to think about who your audience is and it needs to speak directly to them. And it doesn't have to be. I know there's so much nuance to each individual idea, but that's how people work on the Internet. And then once you provide that really clean summary of an idea towards the top, after you've introduced yourself, what you've done is you've built a significant amount of trust. They understand that you have an answer. That summary is what's going to be pulled up into the AI overview. You know, if you do a really good job and then have all your traditional content that you would normally have underneath that. Because sometimes some readers want to go further into the content. This is a perfect example. Google a recipe for something and how hard it is to get to the point that you actually get to the recipe. Think of that and just do the opposite. I know that you guys are still creating content for all your clients because it's, that's how you build authority on the Internet. You know, you can build content and on Instagram now it'll get pulled up on language models and on Google search. They did a deal with Google. You can build it on YouTube. YouTube is an underused search engine. It's the second largest search engine. I know it's a hassle to do video content, but make it easy. And then I guess the last idea is let's say you get really good content that comes out from your agency or what you've written. What we need to think about is like workflows and frameworks. Let's say you build a really good first draft and then on the top of it you show that you're an expert in the field and then you provide a summary of that idea and then you introduce the content.
- [15:26]
Chris Dreyer
Pimcon is back.
- [15:28]
Unidentified Conference Attendee
Pimcon, I feel like, is really taking approach that no other conference that I've been to does, which is you want a good law firm operationally, but how do you build it out and what is the long term vision for you in terms of when you hang up the end of the day and you're done practicing? Like, what is it that you want to look back on, on what you built? If you want to be a niche attorney or if you have a market you want, or if you had a type of case you're looking for, you have the playbook after being here and it's really, really been great and very different, I think, than other conferences I've been to.
- [15:58]
Chris Dreyer
Catch me Chris Dreier in Arizona, along with some of the best in the industry. Get your ticket today@pimcon.org that's P I M C O N.org. All right, I'm back because Austin and I have covered a lot of ground. But this is a really simple but important tip. The summary is what gets pulled. This is the new above the fold. If you bear the lead or force the user to scroll past 800 words of fluff to find the answer, the AI will ignore you. Remember, imagine reading a recipe online and then do the opposite. Give the summary up front. Before we move on, Austin and I are about to geek out on something called Markdown files and how hyperlocal references like pointing out the building next door to your office, can signal relevance to Google in a way generic content never will.
- [16:46]
Austin Hunt
What I would do is I would build a framework. A framework can be done through an MD file, which is a markdown file on like Cursor Windsurf, you can use it. Markdown is the language. There's two languages that these language models and AIs understand very well, which is JSON. Don't learn JSON, you're going to shoot yourself in the foot. Markdown and Markdown. You can actually ask your language model to do Markdown and you create a framework. And it's like, I want to put my local and knowledge, my expertise, my unique insights into this article without changing the format. Please do this for me. And I guarantee the output will be 10, 20, 30 times better for the user, you know, for the person that's the reading your site. And then in addition, if you're working, you know, if you're one of Chris's clients, reach out to your account manager and start sending them unique insight about your field. They need this and they want this. And they might not ask for it directly out of respect to your practice. But I guarantee if you reach out to someone that's, you know, managing your SEO and you say, you know what? This is what I wish people would know I about car accident claims in my state. And this is what's happening with the government. This is how, you know, get really specific. This is. And then another language that's really helpful is when you call, let's just call it a Dreier law firm, because now you own a law firm, Dreier Law firm. When you reach out the Dreier law firm, you know, talk to their direct issue. You know, we understand that you're stressed and that you were probably stressed when you got into the accident and probably before, because let's be honest, you're in traffic and now you have medical bills that are stacking up and you don't know how to pay for them. One of the first things that we do for you is walk you through, step by step, how you can get your medical bills paid. One of the first things that we do for you, think about the person on the other side of the screen and what they're going through and what they need to hear, you know, and not from a manipulative standpoint. It's just from an honesty standpoint, that's what I've been doing with my content. And I know, like, for example, it's not personal injury, but one of my employment law firms got 500 organic leads last month. Pick and chose the ones that they wanted and then they referred out the other cases. You know, they've been having to hire associates at a rate that they can't keep up. Right. So it's better to speak to the individual than is to speak to the algorithm. And that's. I know it's a repeated message, but I'd love to hear what you guys are doing at rankings and some of the thoughts that you have on content. I know that you guys have, you know, internal content writing team now and you guys have always been such a positive light in the digital marketing world for legal. Like, honestly, you guys do great. Thank you.
- [19:28]
Steven Willie
Thank you. Well, a few of the things you touched on, like we're doing the summaries in content, we've seen that be very effective. One of our services is actually a bio optimization service. Right. To continually optimize for that, that person, that individual. You know, there's a lot of components to it, more so than just the bio on the page, but it's the external component sites that also need that bio information. You Talked about the YouTube stuff, but like a lot of times the self made, you know, the default transcript just isn't good enough. It's not structured properly, you know, optimizing playlists, things like that. So we're doing a ton of that. But to your point, one of the things I speak to a lot is when Google's trying to index things, it's looking for relationships. So like it could be something very simple where maybe your office is near a historic building. Like that should be in your content. You should, you should link to that building and reference and name that building or you know, like we're talking St. Louis. It's like, okay, are you a couple blocks away from the arch? Are you, you know, near this museum or that, you know, so when your people are giving their driving directions, you know, it's very common for people to incorporate know the ERs and the hospitals. But like I would go a step further and say, you know, my office is next to this restaurant that was founded by blah, blah, blah, you know, because to your point, it not only is helpful for the consumer because they're, because like some people are just bad directionally, but they're like, oh, I know where that restaurant is, you know, but it creates a, like a geotagged reference like oh, we're talking about, you know, Fraser's in Suard and that means you're, you're a St. Louis business.
- [21:14]
Chris Dreyer
Right.
- [21:15]
Steven Willie
I think all of that is incredibly important because the other thing too is like now we can, anybody can just go to GPT or Claude. I think Claude's a little bit better writer and, and to create content and it doesn't have those personal elements of your own experiences. And I'm going deep in just some theories and stuff here too is like when you think about what canonicalization was designed for and like what they're going to choose to index or not to choose to index. I mean how many times is, you know, what are the steps you need to take after a car accident been written? You know, like if you're just going to do the basic and not incorporate any personalization or custom or current thoughts that are different, like good luck getting that indexed. Like why would Google like it shouldn't index it? Because your point, it costs money for Google to crawl that page. So I think a lot of those things are just, it's just changing how we do things. I think going deeper on pages, getting those personalization, that personalization into it, it's just more important than ever. So I was at Lawyer Growth Summit. I had the audience, you know, do a GPT search on like who's the best car accident lawyer in Las Vegas? And I wanted to see what the results were and like, did you just.
- [22:30]
Austin Hunt
Have a client out there?
- [22:31]
Steven Willie
We do not. We do not.
- [22:33]
Austin Hunt
They'll take it. They're taking one though. If you call Chris, they'll take one.
- [22:38]
Steven Willie
Well, the case results were mentioned and it's like, okay, how many firms don't update their case results? And I know there's certain states that have, you know, especially with California and the whole SB 37 that's going on right now. But like if your jurisdiction allows it, like you should be updating your website with case results. So because they're, they're custom to you, they're personalized to you and also just think the belly to belly stuff, the human nature, the personal stuff. To me, I don't think any firm should mail out settlement checks or wire out the payment. I think the consumer should come to the office for a number of reasons. It's to really understand their experience and if you could do better, it's to activate it. From a marketing perspective, you can get that Yelp check in that's going to be geotagged as opposed to, you can't solicit reviews, but the geotag will actually, when they leave the office, ask them about their experience. And to me, I just think it's a fail. Like, I understand from a simplicity perspective and you get a lot of volume. Maybe it's just easy to wire, send the checks out. But I think that a lot of firms are losing a big opportunity to market themselves, not only from a search perspective, but just in general in kind of the environment we're in. Batch it, like pick up your check. Like maybe it's a Wednesday where everybody comes and picks up their checks and you can orchestrate an amazing experience, maybe even get some referrals. But that's going down a rabbit hole in a different direction. Let's talk about Legal Guardian. So we've talked shop, you know, we've got in the weeds. Talk to me about Legal Guardian, what you guys do, how you can help firms. Talk to me about Legal Guardian.
- [24:18]
Austin Hunt
Yeah, so we're actually not taking on any new business in 2026. So we're doing a 30% reduction and our current client load actually talking with Steven, Willie, sending some of those to you guys.
- [24:30]
Steven Willie
Thank you.
- [24:30]
Austin Hunt
For those of you that don't know, yeah. For those of you that don't know that Rankings has never had like a referral partner. They've always just been really kind and sent stuff out. So I'd love to return the favor. Chris used to be. He's actually my best boss I've ever had. Former employer.
- [24:43]
Steven Willie
Thank you.
- [24:44]
Austin Hunt
Really kind man. I sat down and I honestly thought about what I want to do in 2026 for legal guardian Digital and I don't want to grow my client load. The message that I'd like to share that's really happening is search is going to change a lot and it won't look the same next year and it won't look the same the year after and it will look very alien to us. In three years. There's still the same number of cases that exist out there, if not more. You know, there's more people on the planet. It's just how we're going to get there is going to be different. So what Legal Guardian Digital is doing is we are having eight clients only. Next year we'll be good. We already have our finances set up. It's going to be, it's actually going to be a better year than year prior, just reducing down to the people I love, like and trust. And we will become the gold standard in AI visibility and how to do it. And then what we're going to do and I have a contract and agreement with all of these law firms is all of the information and education on how to do this in an effective, ethical and honest way will be disseminated for free each week on my website. And I'd recommend that you sign up for my newsletter because. And that will start in January of 2026. And what will happen is the level of attention that we will be giving our clients is a level that most people just won't ever receive. And we need a consistent blueprint for AI visibility. And, you know, it's based off of current data. The generative engine market will be a $1 trillion market, which is three times over the top of what SEO was expected to be in 2034. It will be three times more valuable to be in AI over time than it will be in SEO. And what we're going to do is we're going to position ourselves to provide the information for free because this information needs to be found and we need a better understanding of how to track these things, how to consistently get visibility in AI. So I'm not looking for clients. If you reach out, I'm just going to refer you to Rankings. So reach out and I'll refer you to Rankings. What Legal Guardian is going to be next year is the source of truth on AI visibility?
- [26:55]
Steven Willie
Yeah. That's amazing. Austin, thank you so much for coming on the show. Guys, that's a Legal Guardian IO. Go there, check it out. And Austin, it's been a pleasure having you on the show.
- [27:06]
Austin Hunt
Pleasure's all mine, Chris. Thank you.
- [27:10]
Chris Dreyer
Adapt or die. Austin is all in on AI visibility and has given away his findings for free. Make sure you get the latest from him at legalguardian IO. Executing an AI search strategy takes time. If you want to dominate the search results, whether it's Google ChatGPT or whatever comes next, you need a partner who isn't just guessing. Visit Rankings IO and find out how we can help you own Legal Search and win the best cases. That's Rankings IO. I'm Chris Dreier and we'll see you next time on Personal Injury Mastermind.