ChatGPT launched in late 2022. Gemini didn't arrive until the end of 2023. So when someone emails your firm claiming a decade of expertise in reverse-engineering AI search, the arithmetic is worth doing.

That framing opened this Smith.ai Masters session with Gyi Tsakalakis, founder of AttorneySync and co-host of the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing podcast, who has been doing digital marketing for law firms since 2008. Hosted by Maddy Martin, GM of Legal at Smith.ai, the session covered how legal consumers actually behave in AI surfaces, why firm attribution data has become actively misleading, and which investments are worth making right now.

Key takeaways

• It is still a mostly-Google world for law firm lookups. Allocate budget in proportion to where your audience actually is, not where the loudest pitch says they'll be.
• AI Mode links to Google itself more than anywhere else, often opening a branded search rather than sending a click to your site — which inflates brand queries and deflates non-brand organic.
• Before you cut a channel because traffic dropped, check whether your brand search volume went up. Firms are cutting the channels that actually drive their cases.
• Qualitative intake attribution is now the most reliable data you have. Ask every caller how they heard about you and read the transcripts — the quantitative data can't see the referral or the ChatGPT session.
• Citations are the lever: Google Business Profile, YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit account for most of what gets cited. Legal directories have quietly become relevant again.
• Trust over visibility, always. Astroturfing Reddit and publishing AI slop are both losing plays — and the former likely violates professional conduct and FTC rules.

Being found is not the same as being chosen

Gyi's central theme: visibility has become table stakes, and it stops short of the thing that actually produces clients. AI surfaces increasingly present firms as feature comparisons — years of experience, accolades, what each firm is “known for.” If your competitive differentiators aren't in the training data, there's nothing for the machine to surface.

Being chosen is the real value, not just being found.

His practical suggestion: open AI Mode, run the prompts you think your clients are running, and read what the tool says distinguishes each firm. Then go make those things true and visible — on your site and around the web. He noted, wryly, that it has turned law firms into SaaS products doing feature-by-feature comparisons in the search surface.

Your analytics data is lying to you (and it's not your fault)

This was the most operationally urgent part of the session. In Google's AI Mode, the listings look like local packs and are powered by Google Business Profiles — but the links frequently open a new Google search on the firm's name rather than sending a visitor to the firm's site.

The result: firms that have never invested in brand see brand queries spike, non-brand organic fall, and conclude their SEO is failing. Gyi's warning was blunt — before you fire your marketing team because traffic is down, understand what's happening in the surface.

It gets worse for call tracking. ChatGPT surfaces Google Business Profile listings, including the GBP tracking number. A call that originated in ChatGPT arrives labelled as a Google Business Profile call. Both touchpoints are real; only one shows up in your dashboard.

You've got to have a very holistic view of this stuff, or you're going to optimize yourself into a box and make really bad decisions about where to deploy resources.

Three free things to do this week

Gyi's short list of fixes, all of which cost nothing but attention:

• Configure analytics to segment generative AI traffic so you can see which visitors arrived from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the rest instead of lumping them into referral noise.
• Collect qualitative attribution at intake. How did you hear about us? Who do we thank for the referral? With click data thinning out, the intake conversation is where the real source lives.
• Monitor brand search demand in Search Console so you can tell an actual reputation lift apart from Google's contextual-link behavior.

He also made the case for social listening — Google Alerts at minimum — because Reddit threads and social conversations about your firm are feeding the training data these tools reason over.

Where the citations actually come from

If Gyi had to reduce the whole strategy to one instruction, it would be: increase the number of citations. The most-cited domain in Google and AI Mode is google.com — largely Google Business Profiles — followed by YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit.

Which makes Google Business Profile the highest-leverage asset a firm has. Claim it, keep it current, add images and video testimonials, fill in service information, and send happy clients there. Gyi expects consultation booking to move directly into Google, so how your intake connects to your profile matters more over time.

He also flagged the return of the directory. Yelp, Avvo, Justia, Super Lawyers, Martindale, expertise.com and the recognition sites show up constantly in citation data. You don't need to buy premium placements — but the organic profiles you can claim should be complete and accurate.

On effort allocation: Reddit and YouTube, neck and neck. Record once, caption it, distribute everywhere.

Ask Maps, and the questions the machine already knows matter

Google Maps' Ask Maps feature lets users hold a conversation with your Google Business Profile — and Google seeds the suggested questions. How is customer service? Who are the main attorneys? Is this firm reputable?

Gyi's point: those seeded prompts are free content strategy. If Google is telling you which questions users care about, answer them explicitly on your site and in your profiles, and check which sources the tool cites when it answers them today.

Making content retrievable — and the AI slop trap

Much of the “GEO” playbook, Gyi argued, is a reprioritization of SEO fundamentals rather than a new discipline. What matters more now:

• Explicit answers early on the page. These tools read chunks, not carefully structured arguments. Put the answer up front, use headings properly, and keep content in plain text the model can tokenize — not hidden behind JavaScript.
• Information gain over content churn. What can you publish that nobody else can? Local data, your own analysis, publicly available statistics with your expertise layered on. Everyone can generate AI slop; the tools are trying to filter for what's genuinely new.
• Connect your entities. Author pages, bylines, links back to attorney bios, consistent firm names and addresses. Gyi sees law firm sites publishing under the default admin user — telling the machine nothing about who wrote it.
• Freshness, honestly done. Community involvement, speaking engagements, news items — signals of an active business, not content for content's sake.

It's not so much whether or not to use AI, it's how we use it. That's the competitive differentiator.

He was equally direct about what not to do. The pitches offering “community mention” Reddit placements and GEO guest posts are not this. Astroturfing reviews is, in his read, a clear violation of the rules of professional conduct and probably FTC rules too — and readers see through it anyway.

Hyperlocal is having a moment

Maddy raised local Facebook groups — private community groups that surface in search results, where the searcher is often already a member. Gyi agreed emphatically. For direct-to-consumer legal services, proximity matters enormously to the searcher; the radius on a “near me” query can come down to about a mile.

Both made the same point from different angles: your standing in those communities is earned by participating before you need anything. Recommend the tree service. Answer the unrelated question. Then, when a legal question comes up, you're a trusted voice rather than someone who only shows up when it serves them.

Investing in these communities, yes, it is going to improve your online visibility — it's also going to improve your bottom line, because people are going to be more likely to refer to you.

Where Smith.ai fits

Gyi named intake as part of the marketing stack, not downstream of it — because when click data thins out, the intake conversation is where real attribution lives. Smith.ai's virtual receptionists and AI receptionist capture how every caller heard about you, with call transcripts you can actually read back against your analytics.

This session is part of the Smith.ai Masters series, our ongoing webinar program hosted by Maddy Martin, GM of Legal at Smith.ai, where industry experts share practical playbooks on marketing, intake, operations, and practice growth. Follow us on LinkedIn to stay in the loop on future sessions.

Full webinar transcript

This transcript was auto-generated from the webinar recording and lightly edited for readability. Speaker labels mark the main turns in the conversation.

Recording begins shortly after the introduction.

Maddy Martin: Tips for positioning your firm to stay competitive in this new AI world, and how AI fits into your marketing mix. So those aspects that you are controlling, and, you know, maybe sometimes not so much controlling. In your marketing mix, whether paid, organic, or otherwise. So, without further ado, Guy, thanks so much for joining me for another one of these. Take it away.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Maddy, thank you so much for having me. Thank you all for attending. As Maddy mentioned, I would love... I have some slides, but I would love to hear if you have specific questions or issues that you're dealing with. I always think these are more valuable if I can answer something specifically, but as Maddy mentioned, we are going to talk. AI and legal marketing, and I... when I do these talks, I always like to get a little bit of perspective, kind of where we are, because before we get into tactics, I want to arm you with some information so you can protect yourself from some of the more nefarious AI.

SEO-type pitches. Oh, can I turn up my mic? Let's see if I can turn up my mic. Let me try. I don't know if I can turn up my mic. Let's see... Yeah, see if you could maybe control it on your computer or your device as well. Yeah, it's probably apologies for that. But I'm wondering, how do I sound to you, Maddy?

Maddy Martin: You sound fine. I do have my audio up a little bit extra, though, so I I think that feedback was correct, but I was able to turn it up on my monitor.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Okay. Okay, I am pretty loud. Maybe I just need to hold my mic a little closer. Okay, sorry about that. Thanks for the heads up.

Maddy Martin: Yeah, that... that's better.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So, this is a... from a deck I did for LocalU, but the reason that I'm bringing this up is because this is all very new for everybody, well, for most people. And so, you know, there's folks out there that are claiming expertise like they've been doing this forever, and I just want to give a little bit of perspective about you know, it's really only since, 2022 that we're talking ChatGPT launch. Gemini didn't launch until 23, end of 23, almost 24. And, you know, there's been a bunch of updates, in the meantime, but this is all still relatively new for anybody in this space, whether they're a consultant, whether they're an agency person, whether they're an in-house person, and I think that's really important to start from this kind of framing, because nobody has been doing this for 10 years.

Nobody has been doing this for that long, and I think that they're. You know, having... you know, I've been doing digital marketing for law firms since 2008, and a lot of this is, like, similar to the messaging that we heard early on about trying to game some of these systems, and I just want to make sure that people keep that in mind as they're out there and they're... because I get the emails, too. And be careful about what you're signing up for, and we can talk specifically about that, but my focus, I just want to give some of that framing here. If this is all brand new to you, if you haven't really dug deep, this is a great video about large language models.

I think it's important to keep context that, like, large language models are only part of the story here. You know, there's all sorts of other technology, RAG, and, you know, grounding in search results, and it seems like every day there's this new breakthrough. But this is a this video Andre Kaparthy from, He's been at a bunch of these... he was at OpenAI for a while, he's been at a bunch of, like, the major players, does a great... it's a 3-hour video, but if you want to go deep, it's one of the best videos, I think, on the web, to... that explains, like, kind of how this stuff works.

But it also helps contextualize what the tool's actually doing, because I think a lot of times. We have this, tendency to anthropomorphize these tools, like, it's actually like a human being, and it's really... it's not a human being. And you know, we, this is the founder of Anthropic, you know, he talks about like, hey, yeah, we don't really exactly know how some of this stuff is working. There's emergent behaviors in it. Same thing for Google. It's black box. Sam Altman saying the same thing about OpenAI and ChatGPT, and so. You know, if the people who are making this technology are like, yeah, there's some questions here about what's actually going on under the hood, I would have a little bit of a healthy skepticism for people that are talking about, you know, reverse engineering.

The whole subject here is mechanistic interpretability. That's just basically understanding how these tools work. But, you know, I get the emails too, you know, and folks that are talking about reverse engineering this stuff, I would just, you know, be wary of that as you go through your day. So that's my warning. Let's talk about a little bit about how we can actually improve this. And really, I want to start with the big... the biggest things that are going on that are relevant to law firms relate to legal service consumers and their choices and their behavior in interacting with these tools, because. If you're going to do something to market to your next client using these tools, you've got to understand what it looks like for them, and, like, what they're actually doing with these tools.

And so, the first thing that I'll say is that they have more... they have a lot more choices, right? It used to be... pretty much a Google-only world from an information retrieval search standpoint. You know, we... social media, everything's AI. Everything AI is baked into everything. Meta's got AI, social platforms have AI. There's a lot more choices for consumers to do research about both, you know, their specific legal issues and to find lawyers. And so that impacts where you might think about how to deploy marketing resources. So, we partner with this company called Near Media. They do consumer research. They also do user behavior testing.

So they actually like watch people use these tools and observe their behaviors and see, like, what they're actually typing into the tool and, you know, what their follow-up prompts are. And so I just kind of want to level set here that first, it's still a Google-mostly world, you know, and I think this is part of the narrative of the GEO, the Generative Engine Optimization space. They're like, hey, you know, Google's dead, SEO's dead, everybody's on ChatGPT, and while we're definitely seeing the growth of those tools as both a legal research, You know, platform as well as a lawyer lookup. It's still a largely Google's taking most.

And so, when you're thinking about, like, your total marketing resource budget of both time and money, you know, keep that in mind, that you want to be spending time investing in the platforms that your audience is actually using proportionately to where your your investment is, right? So I wouldn't suggest you to just dump everything you've been doing in Google and then turn it over to, like, hey, we're just going to focus on, you know, ChatGPT or anything else. And so and so, you know, the other thing that we see a lot, you'll see it on here, is like, you know, YouTube, social networks, like all of this stuff plays a role, and we're, as we talk about in the age of AI, those types of things become even more important, because that's the information that the tools are using to as part of their training data.

Sorry, it looks like my camera went off.

Maddy Martin: Yeah, I just lost it for a few seconds.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I don't know what happened, maybe it overheated. Let me see if I can switch cameras. All sorts of technical problems today for me. If this is any better. Okay. There I am. All right. Different cameras are different angle. But we'll at least we'll have my face on here.

Maddy Martin: Great. Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So anyway, point is here, still a largely a Google world, and these tools work together. The platforms work together. The training data is being used from social platforms. Most of the people that do research on this will get into deeper on this. You see YouTube show up a lot, you see Reddit show up a lot, and we're also seeing that consumers are turning to these channels for choices, and so, in the past, we're like, you know, people have been heavy indexed on, you know, search, non lower funnel, non-brand search, like, you know, car accident lawyer near me, or divorce lawyer near me. People have a lot more choices, and I think that's an important thing to think about.

And then... and that's just in terms of, like, the top level, kind of, like, how people are actually, where they're going, but how they're actually engaging with these platforms is also a lot different than historical search, because, you know, historically, we've thought about things like keywords. Well now, because it's conversational, the nature of prompting is totally different than traditional search has been. And while there's still, you know, we've been trained so long on this, and so keywords are still part of the conversation, but they're not nearly the core user behavior, and so that shift also is important. You know, folks that are talking about prompt tracking and rank tracking, they're, you know, as of today, these tools, the platforms like ChatGPT, there's not, like, a Google Analytics or an OpenAI analytics for ChatGPT.

And so we don't really have as much robust data on user behavior on platform. Sure, we can still. Track people when they go between platforms, if they land on your website, you can get referral data, and we'll talk a little bit about how to configure your tools to do that. But it's really important to keep in mind that, how people are actually using these tools is undergoing a massive change as we speak. This is just some research on this, I'm not going to go. Through it, you can search for this on your own, but you see that there is a much different way that people are using these tools, and it's not just like a do a search and be done.

It's much more deep contextual prompting and follow-up prompting. With nudges from the tools themselves, and so what you find is that they... you work hand-in-hand with the tools, it's not just a, like, I'm entering, like, the tool is actually impacting how users, interact with it, which I think is an important thing. The other thing that I really wanted to emphasize here, too, because again, we've been we've been talking about this, like, this idea of being able to, like, know how people are landing on your web pages. You know, I've been doing SEO for a long time, we talk about Search Console data and impressions and average positions.

And these... in the age of AI, a lot of these tools, like, they are very variable. This is some research from Rand Fishka, who's now at SparkToro, but short version of this research is that if you do 100 searches, 100 prompts. You're gonna get a lot of different answers, and this is particularly true in local business spaces like law firms. So if you're in an area where there's a bunch of other law firms, you're going to see that it's even more variable in those spaces than it is in some of these, you know, bigger brand type queries. And so I think legal is one of the places that you're going to see even high.

And we see this all the time with our own data, that it's even more variable and legal than it is in a lot of these other verticals that people talk about. And so again. The concept of, like, rank tracking that we've talked about forever is really upended because it is just so variable, and so I want to keep that, folks keep that in mind as well. All right. Finally, this is some great research from search engine ranking, and the other big behavior change here is that the platforms tend to not link back to websites, or if they do, the citation is very small. And the behavior is, is that they see a list of law firms, and they go somewhere else to actually do a lookup to get contact information.

So the journey here for a legal services consumer might look like research on ChatGPT, get a list of firm names, but they're not really clicking through anywhere. They're going to Google, that has an impact on your attribution data, it has an impact on your marketing data, and I'm gonna call that out in a little bit, some of the things you can do to mitigate that. But the idea of clicks, right, and everybody's seeing this, you know, people have called it clickpocalypse, where you're getting the zero-click experience. A lot of that has to do with how the platforms are actually surfacing firms. And so, this research shows that in AI mode, which is Google's AI version of Google.

Google links to itself most, and so the links, like, so a traditional query of, like, car accident lawyer or divorce lawyer will just populate a contextual link to a new search on Google, so instead of going back to a law firm website, it just creates a brand query, and so we've seen a lot of. Oh, inflated brand queries for firms who really haven't been investing in brand, all of a sudden, people are coming to the website, and it looks like someone searched on their brand name, and it's really not, and so this data can be very deceiving if you're not understanding, you know, how these tools are working, and actually looking at.

The underlying ways that people are arriving at your firm. And really, one of my big takeaways from all of this is that it's so important to remember that being chosen is the real value, not just being found, right? We've talked in the past about visibility. And, like, don't get me wrong, like, you've got to be visible to even get chosen, but you can't stop at just, like, oh, I'm appearing, you've got to be actually doing things to motivate people to contact and hire you, and, you know, so my theme here is always that no matter what these platforms do. Putting forth your competitive differentiators, like your expertise, the things that make you unique, that's really, really important in this age of AI, because consumers are going to be making these choices based on what these machines show them.

And if you're not... if those competitive differentiators aren't showing in the surface. There's nowhere to click. And so, and I'll show some examples of this, but it's a really important point that you're understanding, like, what it truly... it's back to, like, marketing 101, like, what are the things that you truly do that are different or unique about your practice that the practice down the street is not doing? So, oh, that's a little scary, my data's broken, this is hard. Let's talk about some things that you can do. And again, this stuff is free, you know, if you work with somebody, and if someone handles this, your IT or your marketing in-house, I would send this stuff kind of stuff over to them.

If you do it yourself, the good news is there's great, explanations and tutorials about how to do this stuff, but these are kind of my quick 3. The first thing is is that you got to configure analytics tool to segment generative AI traffic. You know, Google Analytics and the limited data that we do have out of the box doesn't segment. AI traffic as well as you can with this additional configurations, so you want to be able, where you can, where you have data available, you want to be able to see, oh, these visitors to my site came from ChatGPT, these came from Perplexity, or whatever the platform is, because that, again, that's going to help you.

Decide where to deploy resources based on where your audience is actually, finding you now. The second thing, and this is really important, and this is important, this has nothing to do with AI, but it becomes even more important in the age of AI because of all these things we're talking about in terms of attribution. Being even more limited than it's ever been, is collecting this qualitative attribution intake data. How did you hear about us? How did you find us? Who do we thank for the referral? And I think this is a really, you know, this is a selling point for Smith, you know, not to make this a pitch about Smith, but you know, using an intake system that can actually record and have transcripts and be able to use that data to inform your marketing strategy is so, so critically important.

And so, you know, a lot of our... we're a customer of Smith, and you know the. Just to be transparent, there are other ways to do this, but using your intake or your receptionist service as part of your marketing stack is so key, because you should be able to say, when you have qualified consultations in cases. You want to see these touchpoints that might only show up as part of your intake conversation, right? Because you don't have the click data that you used to have. And so, you know, again, if you hear somebody... someone... your quantitative data, like your clicks, might say like. Google Organic.

But when you listen to the call transcript, the caller said, referred my friend, or referred by my family member. And so, understanding that data is so important, or else you're going to be misled, and you're gonna deploy resources in a way that's actually not what's driving the business. And worst case, what we see often is that because they can't see it in their attribution data, people will pull back marketing investments in certain channels, and they actually cut off the flow of leads because they didn't realize that that was actually the real source of business. So that's really, really important. And then I would monitor changes in brand search demand.

There's lots of ways to do this. An easy way is through Search Console. Search Console is Google's tool to show you, like, the number of times that someone might be searching on your name or your firm name. And so, a lot of firms, if you're not a big brand building firm, you know, you're not doing a lot of offline media buying or traditional media buying. You'll notice an increase in brand queries for that behavior that I talked about, which is someone's doing a research on ChatGPT, or even on Google, but they don't click through, and they find a place to go to actually do a search on Google for your name, and so you see an increased number of clicks on, or excuse me, searches to your website from Google.

That are on your name, and that it all relates to this. It's not that, like, that your reputation's actually growing, it's that Google's actually surfacing a SERP that's a branded search query for your firm, and so I think it's an important thing to keep mind of when you're making these decisions about where to spend money. Another thing that's really important, it's always been important. I think it's even more important in this age of AI, is social listening. So, just a shout to alert mouse, there's a lot of different ways to do this. Google Alerts is a free way to do it, although Google Alerts isn't very robust.

But basically, like, it will tell you anytime that someone mentions your name or your firm name anywhere on the web. This is particularly important on places like Reddit and social media platforms, because, again, these tools... all of these, you know, LLMs. This stuff gets sucked up in their training data, and so they're using Reddit subreddits and conversations about you, and so listening to what people are talking about and participating in those conversations is really, really valuable in terms of improving your visibility in an AI surface. You want to know where these conversations are happening, and worst case, if there's somebody that's saying something negative about you, you want to go in there and defend your...

be able to defend yourself, it allows you to do that, and, you know, in that defense, it can impact how the tool actually understands, prompts that relate to your firm name or your, your actual real name. Okay, so let's get tactical. Again, a lot of people are... there are some fundamental differences between what, the marketing people would call GEO, or generative engine optimization, or agentic engine optimization and SEO. But the way that I think about it is that it's just really a lot of it is a reprioritization of a lot of the things that we've talked about for a long time. Some of those, though, I think are more important than they've been in the past, and so we're kind of in this...

back in this world of, like, citations, getting people talking, and all around the web, so it's this idea of digital PR and sentiment. That's really always played a role in SEO. But I think, it's playing an even larger role now that, based on the way that these technologies work. So, what are we really talking about here? We're talking about Google's AI overviews. If this stuff's new to you, I just kind of wanted to, like, give you a lay of the land of, like, the major players here. So it's AI overviews, which are the little snippets that show up, the AI-generated snippets that show up at the top of a search result.

Google's AI mode, which some people are anticipating that Google will make the default surface or will largely change their current. Surface in Google, but it's basically their generative AI version. It's their ChatGPT version of Google. Gemini, which is actually the LLM that powers all of this stuff, and you'll start to see Gemini is embedded in Gmail, it's embedded in YouTube. And, you know, again, if this isn't the subject of this conversation, but if I had to bet, like, Google's got the data, they're gonna be tough to dethrone, especially when you start talking about, like, the super personalization they're able to do based on your Google Drive, your YouTube usage.

And Gmail. But, just wanted to call that out. And then, ask maps. Like I said, AI is being baked into everything. Google Maps products, just recently launched Ask Maps, which allows you to basically, for users to have conversations with your Google Business Profile, so they can ask specific questions about your firm. The obvious ones are things like hours and driving directions, but, you know, it gets really detailed, and it pulled... the AI pulls from different sources, sometimes sources that you don't control, and so understanding what's showing up in those responses to Ask Maps, you know, you'll see users will click Ask Maps and ask questions like, does this firm have a good reputation?

Is it highly rated? Do they have experience with this specific thing? That's happening in the maps experience now, so it's another thing that you really want to keep in mind of, and largely, it's going to relate to, are you providing great service that's causing people to leave reviews on Google Business profiles and talk about you around the web? Chat Gpt, I mentioned, and of course, Claude. But again, but most of our research really shows that it's still a largely Google game, at least in this context. When you're talking about business lookups, law firm looks up, and it makes sense, because. Law firms are local businesses, and so the people are already trained to go to Google to look for local businesses and to use Google Maps to do research on businesses, and so we expect that this will continue to play a large role in how people find and hire lawyers.

Okay, so if I had to boil it down to one thing, I would say you've got to find ways to increase the number of citations. You know, call it digital PR, or whatever you want, but this, again, is from research from search engine ranking. The number one cited domain in Google and AI mode is google.com. It's largely going to be Google Business Profiles, and it's those contextual links that I talked about earlier, where it opens up a new search surface from the, you know, based on the query that's actually linked to. So, in this example, it might be, like, a contextual link for your name that opens a new browser window.

Of a search on your name. Then it's YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit. I mean, honestly, if you just focused on those, you're 90% of the way there. I also recommend people understand what citations these tools are using for prompts that might be relevant to them. But be careful, because, again, we don't actually have the underlying analytics data. You don't really know what prompts people are using in ChatGPT, and so a lot of these third-party tools, they're trying to create these synthetic prompts to help you, like, oh, you're showing up for these types of prompts, but you don't really know that they're being used. And so I would just be wary of that.

But focus on citation sources that are showing for prompts that you might believe are relevant, or that someone told you they used in the prompt. I think that, again, back to the intake data, you know, if someone tells you, I used ChatGPT, and this is what I prompted with, that's extremely valuable, because that's actual, real data that from someone that became a potential client for you. And how they use the tool, and you want to be thinking about that, where to prioritize resources based on what they said. So again, I don't want to belabor this point, but it's mostly a Google world on Google. It's Google Business Profiles, and even in the organic search results, there's still Google's links back to Google a large percentage of the time.

And so, you know, what's old is new. Like, Google Business Profiles. In this particular space is still probably the most important thing for you to be focused on. If you haven't claimed a profile, if you're not sending happy clients there, like this, I would have done this yesterday, but more than ever, it's really important that you're adding images there, adding video testimonials, keeping that information updated. Adding service information, adding... I think where we're headed to is that people are... eventually, they're going to be able to actually just, like, book consults right through Google, and so exploring how your appointment setting and your intake connects with your Google Business Profile, all really important stuff.

As we move into this more AI mode world. So another misleading thing that I wanted to bring up, because I think it's really important, but this is a, this is an AI mode here, and so when you when you're when you see these listings, you know, in the past we've talked about local packs, and they look similar. These listings in AI mode, they look similar to local packs. They're powered by Google Business Profiles, but they have additional features, like this Ask About, you know, I talked about the Ask Maps things, but as you can see, like, these are links into Google, and so if you click that STG divorce law link there, that would just populate a.

STG divorce law search, and so that really confuses your marketing data, and I think it's a really important thing for people to be mindful of, because right now, everybody's freaking out about, hey, I don't understand are, you know, our non-brand organic search, numbers are down. Go check your brand search numbers. Are they going up because the way that Google is surfacing responses here, it's not clicks back to a website through a GBP URL, it's oftentimes a search to a brand query, and so... before you go and fire all your marketing people, because your traffic's down, make sure you understand what's actually happening in the surfaces, because that's playing a big role in it you know, and we're getting new features, and I think that's another thing to keep in mind, is that the way these technologies work, it's not a uniform result.

Like, sometimes they'll show maps, sometimes they'll show these kind of pack listings, sometimes it's just a list of firm names without any kind of link at all. And then sometimes they show these little check boxes where you can actually do things like compare these two firms. And so, even if you're not... if this isn't a big source of business for you, it's not a huge investment, I think it's worthwhile for you to go open a browser window, go to AI mode, do relevant prompts that you think people might be using, and see how you compare. And see what the AI tool calls out as competitive differentiators, because that's the thing that people don't realize.

The tool will say, this firm is known for this thing, this firm is known for this other thing, and you can influence that by making sure that you've got. Those kind of competitive differentiators, both on your website and also around the web, and also motivating and inspiring people to say those things about you. Like, I loved this firm because of this thing, whether that's because of your responsiveness, your service. You know, anyway, but you get that. It's the marketing 101 stuff, but you need to get it around the web more so than ever. And because of this, it's still a local search world, right? Because, you know, we know that Google is still a big player here, Google's still surfacing local business data, and if you think about a big picture, one of the things that Google has that's extremely valuable that its competitors doesn't have is this local business data and this local business ecosystem and maps data.

Trust me that they understand that that's part of their moat, and so they're not going to get rid of showing these local businesses, and so I would... this is a list of the, white spark local search ranking factors. I'm not gonna go through every factor there, but there's all sorts of things you can do to your Google Business profile, to your website, and around the web. To help influence your local search, you know, the traditional local search stuff. Not new, but I think even more important than it's ever been in this AI world. This is an example of ChatGPT showing a Google business profile. Link.

And so, I mentioned this earlier, but I wanted to call out a specific example. In your analytics data for this firm, if someone clicks on that website link in ChatGPT, it's going to trigger Google Analytics to track this as a Google Business Profile, Google organic query, and so this is just really... to really drive home this point that your analytics data has a lot of new issues that it's never had before, and you need to be mindful of those in understanding how this stuff works and where URLs are showing in ChatGPT and these other surfaces. And guess what? Chatgpt also pulls in your Google Business Profile tracking number, so even phone calls.

So, you know, you've got it set up. Where you're trying to track sources and phone calls it's going to say Google Business Profile. This call came from your Google Business tracking number, and it's actually from ChatGPT, and so again, it goes back to this idea, you've gotta ask people, and when you see... when you have an attribution system that shows multiple touchpoints, so your quantitative data, your analytics data is saying, and your call tracking data is saying, hey. This is a Google Business Profile call. If you're listening to the intake, and the intake's saying, no, I found you on ChatGPT, you want to make sure that you understand that both of those touchpoints played a role in that person coming to you, but you've got to have a very holistic view of this stuff, or are you going to optimize yourself in a box and make really bad decisions about where to deploy resources?

No question, review platforms will remain really, really important moving forward. These tools, like, they're sucking up all of the positive sentiment that's being said about you. The more times people are talking about your firm in a positive light, the more likely you're going to be showing up. And not to mention, you know, showing up's half the battle. You need this stuff to actually persuade people to call you, you know? Bezos and his teams trained everybody to make every hiring decision based on reviews, and our user research shows the same thing, like. People, a lot of people... certain segments of your next clients, they're making decisions based on the quality of the reviews that you have on these different platforms.

And and I've also been calling this kind of the return of the directory. So we see Yelp showing up a lot. We see a lot of the legal directories showing up a lot. We see a lot of the lawyer review sites showing up a lot in citation data. And so, again, I'm not telling you to go out and buy every premium profile on all these platforms. But if you've if you've kind of neglected your legal directory profiles because you're like, they haven't really been generating business for you, it might be time to revisit some of those. Make sure your information is correct there, make sure you've got, you know, it's completely filled out with as much of that competitive, unique competitive differentiation as you possibly can, because that's the stuff that's getting sucked up that's being regurgitated back out by the machine in a response to prompts.

I'd go heavy on YouTube right now. Obviously, Google owns YouTube. If you think about how these tools work, they want to train them on real human conversations, real human language. That's why Reddit's such a priority, because. At least in theory, there's a vast treasure trove of human-generated content. Same thing with YouTube. And so we see, like, YouTube's heavily linked to and cited in a lot of different, AI surfaces. And again, it's owned by Google. Like, Google is... it's only in Google's interest to surface YouTube content because they make ad money when YouTube ads are shown to users on Google. Profound is a great company that does a lot of research.

They do... they're a prompt tracking company. They tend to, you know, focus on enterprise, but they put out all this great research on, you know, what types of AI are surfacing different URL domains and different responses, and so... You can see Perplexity and Gemini, YouTube shows up a lot. Reddit shows up all over the place. And I would take this same kind of thinking and try to identify those domains that you see show up the most, both in citations in your AI surface. As well as contextual links. So if you're using... if you're in AI mode in Google, and Google's actually linking to something, like, make sure you understand where they're linking, because it's likely that Google thinks that that's a priority domain to be linking to.

I mentioned this earlier, this ask about feature. I think this is going to become more and more relevant as we move forward. Users want to be able to dig deeper when they're doing research about law firms, and so, you know, do a search for your own firm's name, click Ask About, ask questions, you know? Is this firm reputable? Is this firm highly rated? Would you trust this firm? All that kind of stuff that you think that users might use, or that, ideally, you know from your intake transcripts important to them. See what shows up, and see what the tool is citing for that information, and then see what you can do to influence that.

Sometimes it might be a, you know, a third-party listing, like a directory, sometimes it might be a subreddit, might be a page on your website. Make sure you're identifying where you can add that unique. Competitive differentiation, because it really, really makes a difference in terms of motivating people to contact and hire you. Just another example, again, we see a lot of Yelp, we see a lot of Avvo, you see a lot of Quora, you see a lot of these business directories and legal-specific business directories. Find out what's unique to you in your neck of the internet. And see what sites tend to show up, and what they're sourcing for searches and deeper conversations about firms like yours, and your firm specifically.

And again, I said earlier, you know, sometimes the response is not a list. It's like these comparison charts, where it's like it's all these features of your firm lined up. And so things like years of experience and key accolades, like... If you've got those kind of... like, you really have to marshal the evidence of your reputation, both on your website and around the web, but try to understand what it is that you have competitively. Make sure that stuff's getting into the training data, because that's what's showing up in these comparison charts and these feature charts. I mean, it's... it's funny, because, like, it's turned law firms almost into, like, SaaS products, where, like, they're doing feature-by-feature comparisons, right in the surface, and so that will play a huge role in whether or not you get chosen, let alone actually just show up.

This is an example of, deeper into this Ask Maps. So again, in the Google Maps interface, users are prompted with ask a question, and they actually seed these certain questions. So the machine is like. These are some common questions that we might ask about this, and, you know, you want to make sure that your firm has that information. So, you know, questions like, how is customer service? Who are the main attorneys? You know, is parking available? Like, make sure that you're answering those questions everywhere that you can. And see what questions are actually being prompted, right? Because that should inform your content strategy, right? If the tool is saying, these are things that we know are important to the user because it's prompting it as a question.

I'd be adding that stuff to make sure it's very clear on my website and in my profiles, that that's true of my firm. Legal directories, you know, we could spend a whole day talking about legal directories. I would identify the leaders that are showing up for prompts that are relevant to yours. These are the ones that we tend to see a lot, just the super lawyers. Martin DeLavo. Again, I'm not saying you need to go pay for the premium domain listing. There's definitely diminishing return there, and some of these directories, the price can get very expensive very fast. But for the organic profiles that you can claim there.

I would make sure that you've got that as completely filled out with as much detail information as you possibly can. I think this has been good practice forever. Like I've been saying, it's kind of like the return of the directories. If you haven't looked at your Justia profile in a long time, it might be time to kind of pull that out and see, you know, is it up to date? Does it have all the correct information? Are there any... you know, sometimes these platforms or directories, they'll add fields that you might not have known about, so service area fields, maybe they've got, like, additional links, maybe social profiles.

Make sure you've got all that stuff filled out, because that's the way these machines are consuming this information to be able to understand, like, how frequently and how connected all of these different entities are. And so that's how you tell them is more data across the web makes that information more reliable. So again, just an example. What I really want to call out here is for people that haven't really used ChatGPT yet, those little you know call outs there where it says superlawyers.com. That's what we're talking about with the citations. And so you see those. That's where you want to make sure that you're showing up on there as well.

And you can run these prompts all the time and get all sorts of different results, but you start to see patterns where it's mostly directories, business directories. Sometimes it'll be... it gets... it'll be weird, and it will just, like, source the same directory for all of the different results. We see expertise.com come up a lot, but you should do that for your own prompts, like the things that are relevant for you, because it is different for different prompts, different locations, different practice areas, and all that kind of stuff. Now, here's an example of the expertise.com. So, you know, again, sometimes you just see it's got,It's a single source for all of these places, but if you're seeing this pattern show up where it's, like, expertise.com is cited for many of the relevant queries that are relevant to your practice, you might consider either investing more into expertise.com for visibility.

But at the very least. Make sure your information is all accurate there. And again, just to show once again. This is ChatGPT interface and it's pulling Google reviews, right? So these tools, they rely on each other. Like ChatGPT is scraping Google results, and, it's just been really important to understand that it's not... you can't be in, like, a single channel. You can't just dump everything you've done from a Google standpoint because you think ChatGPT is the future of your firm. Prioritize all these listed sources. You know, the same ones I've already talked about. I'm not going to belabor that. A lot of these firms, too, have, like, a...

there's these recognition sites, like Best Lawyers, Chambers & Partners, and Law360. Again, some of them cost money. I'm not sitting here telling you to deploy all of your marketing resources, but if you're seeing these show up in the prompts, you've got to put them on the table, because they are,you know, they're sourcing information. The machines are sourcing information from here, and I think it's an important thing to reconsider, like, what's your visibility is on these platforms, and certainly to make sure that your information is correct there, because that can... that reliability of information is really critical to, showing up in these, responses and then forms and social publishing.

You know, again, this is another subject we could spend a whole day on, but for professional service queries, a lot of the research is that like Linkedin is a is a very heavily relied upon source in that context. Certainly, Reddit is. We see Quora and Avvo showing up a lot. Even publishing on Substack and Medium, you know, and we talk about, like, well, what do you publish there? You know, even if you're doing, like, if resources are limited, I'm very much in the, like. Do interview style of yourself, record the video, dice the video up for short-form social, and if it's a topic that you can write more robustly about, maybe you put that on Substack or, you know, put it on a, you know, a more long-form social, or publishing site.

But being visible, having your expertise visible on these different domains and these social publishing sites, participating in conversations when people are like, you know, a lot... most major cities have, like, primary subreddits that are relevant that you might be able to have conversations in. Again, I'm not saying to go there and Astroturf or to, say, free consultation, but having your name, your firm name. With content around your expertise, gets sucked up by these tools, increases your likelihood of showing up in responses. This is the opposite of what I would recommend, so I get the emails too, and you see these, like, you know, GEO guest posts with a do follow or community mention Reddit.

I'm not talking about this, folks. And again, you know, not... this isn't an ethics conversation, but. Clearly, to me, if you have people going out and astroturfing Reddit with, like, try this lawyer, because they were great for me, and that's not real, that's a clear violation of the rules of professional conduct. It's probably a viola... it may actually be pretty confident it's a violation of the FTC rules. It's just also really bad luck. And so I would avoid all this kind of stuff. I know this is, like, the new hotness. I get the emails too, but it's not worth it. Again, it's all about trust.

I mean, people can see through this stuff, too. It's so obvious when you see the same comment over and over again, and then, like, what are you saying to your next client? Like, basically that you're a scammer. So trust over visibility, always. Forum sites. Again, this is an example to call it out. We see reddit's all over the place. It's a big site. They've got a deal with Google that they, you know, there's not a secret that they... why they show up so much. But we see YouTube also. So that's where I'd be deploying most of my resources. And again, if you're in a limited resource environment, record once.

It's very easy to put captions on your videos and distribute. Like, distribution across the web, like, that's really the name of the game here. This is just an example showing the LinkedIn thing. Go ahead. He just one thing. You know.

Maddy Martin: I've been noticing also that, like, there are Facebook posts from private groups that show up in those search results. So you know, if local is the name of your game, then what's the likelihood that that searcher is already in that group? you know, maybe it's also worthwhile investing in those local neighborhood Facebook groups, considering, you know, the tone of your particular group, you know, as as one factor. But what do you think about including those in that mix?

Gyi Tsakalakis: 100%, you know, again, I think of Facebook as just another social publishing opportunity, and the groups, because they tend to be so hyper-localized and active, remember, especially Google. Their data supports that in the legal services for direct-to-consumer legal services context, so personal injury, family law, criminal defense proximity matters a lot to the searcher, and so they make it... like, if you go to any kind of lower, like, car accident lawyer near me, the radius of firms that they're showing, it really is, like, down to a mile, and so I would double, you know, double down on hyper-local, double down on community. You know, we could do a whole talk about that, but, like, the lines between the real world and your local community and the digital world are, like, super blurred, and we have found that, by investing in those community relations, you're getting people talking, because, again, you can say.

Hey, I'm a great lawyer, and I've been doing this for 500 years, and I went to an awesome law school, and we provide great service. That's not as powerful as people in your community doing that in those groups, on social publishing sites, and so being active there, like, that's what's going to motivate people. To have those conversations and to talk about you, and of course, like, you gotta provide great service, and not just great service to clients, but great service to anybody who has an interaction with your firm. And so, you know, getting out in the local community and doing events, we'll see people that will say, you know, hey, so-and-so lawyer was doing, you know, whether it's a back pack giveaway or whatever it is, that positive sentiment matters, especially as, you know, these tools, like, they're using sentiment, essentially, to decide who to surface in these responses.

Maddy Martin: So that's a really good point. Well, yeah, not not only that, but I'm thinking also, you know, your clout in these groups is, you know, factored by how much involvement you've had in that group, like the whole concept of top fans and things like that, right? Which is more for pages and groups, but. And those things always change. Facebook's always tinkering, right? So if you're in those groups, and, you know, even someone's asking for a local tree service or gardeners, or other services that you use, even making recommendations so that when the opportunity arises. For you to contribute something about your legal services, you don't just only come in when it serves you, you're also, you know, a regular participant in that community.

And I think that that helps to surface your answer when it is particularly helpful, you know, for business growth.

Gyi Tsakalakis: 100%. Trust over everything. Trust over getting found every day of the week. And again, you know, we're talking about this in terms of the context of AI and visibility and AI services, but, like. This is the place that referrals are being made, too. I mean, investing in these communities, yes, it is going to improve your online visibility, it's also going to improve your bottom line, because people are going to be more likely to refer to you because you're a trusted voice in the group. You're active, right? I mean, what a great signal that is. Exactly. Yep. Just another example. This is from a search result page that, you know, there's discussion forum sites.

If you see discussion in forums popping up for searches relevant to your practice, like, those are some of the forums that you should be participating in. Like I said, most major cities have some popular Subs. If there are affinity groups, like say you're into cycling or there's a cause that you're passionate about, there's all sorts of subreddits and groups, as Maddy suggested even on Facebook. Get active in those different groups. They're really, really valuable in this context of appearance in these different surfaces. Again, if I had to, you know, if you twisted my arm and, like, do one, it's probably Reddit, but Reddit and YouTube right there, neck and neck.

That's where I'd be deploying, most of my resources from a participation standpoint. This is just... again, this is all available from Profound, but this is overview of overall citation percentages. You want to do this kind of research, but be doing it in your world of prompts, because again, it's very hyper-local. You might find that instead of Reddit, YouTube, Quora, maybe it's, you know, next door, Facebook, and something else in your community, but figure what those, citation sources are, and be active there. The second half of this is, like, what can you actually do to your content to actually make it more? And the term here is retrievable.

Again, Profound has a lot of good stuff on this. A lot of this is traditional SEO stuff, URL architecture. I think, if anything, this idea of more explicit answers earlier on in the page, because. Instead of, like, crawling full... crawling and indexing full pages, a lot of these tools, like, they kind of just, like, they read the page as a chunk, I mean, it's not really reading it in the way that we think of reading it, and so having very explicit answers earlier on, you know. FAQs, if you've got a... maybe you have a short summary description of a page that happens very early on in the page, making sure that you're using headings appropriately.

I think this is good traditional SEO, but I think it's even more important, as we go into this AI. Remember, if they can't tokenize the words on your page, they can't... these tools can't understand it. Like, if you go back to that video and watch how this stuff works, they've got to be able to tokenize it, and that's largely going to be actual text on your page that it can actually. Read, if it's hidden behind JavaScript, if it's hidden behind other kind of features that these tools can't actually understand, none of that content is actually going to be a part of their data set. You saw the Reddit, thing here, too, again, Profound saying, you know, Reddit's essentially, like.

10x the value of anything else, that might be a little bit overstated, especially if you're specific to legal, but it can't be said without... it can't be said enough that, like, that's a good investment of time, if you've got, the resources to participate in there. Like, you know, think of Reddit as another social profile. And then freshness, you know, I think that... I'm always cautious about freshness, because people think, oh, I can just go out there and just, like, publish every day, and, like, that's fresh. Not quite that easy, but I do think that there is,it's reasonable to conclude. That you do need to be actively adding new content to your site, whether that's, you know, if you're a blogger, great, but I wouldn't just be adding content for the sake of content, but news items, things going on in your community, your community involvement, speaking engagements, organizations that you're participating in, if you're taking on leadership positions.

If you're doing things in your local community, like maybe you're speaking at your local high school, getting that kind of information as it's happening as fast as you can, I do think that that is a good signal of, like, hey, this is an active, healthy business that's adding new things, and that's going to be rewarded. Again, just another example of some of the responses that you see in an AI overview. Ideally, your site's getting sourced, but in order to do that, you want to make sure that you're making your content as retrievable as possible. And where you see competitors that have the citation, go to those pages and see how they're organizing their content, and leverage the things that they're doing.

So if you're seeing that they're answering specific questions, or they're using H2s in a certain way, if they're putting explicit answers at the top of the page. That is one thing you can actually reverse engineer, is you can go see what your competitors are doing, the ones that are actually showing up, and taking that consideration in designing your own content. Google has a whole bunch of, creating helpful people-first guidelines on that. I'm not gonna go through all of them, but the key seems to be this idea of original information reporting, research, and analysis, and so... Firms have got to be thinking like their research, like, cover your local community.

What is in your CRM data that might be interesting that you might be able to share? What do you know through your experience and your expertise, that you can publish on your website? Of course, you still have to be mindful of your rules of professional conduct. I'm not sitting here telling you to breach client confidentiality, but if you have data points, if your firm has data, or there's publicly available data that's actually not, you know, no one's really, like, taken it a step further in a certain context that you can add your expertise to, that's the stuff that these tools are looking for, because remember.

AI is going to be ubiquitous. Everybody's going to be able to create AI slop. Everybody's going to be able to copy and paste from ChatGPT. These tools are trying to suss that out, and so where they can identify something that's, like, a unique thing, a unique data point, a unique research that you're publishing, I think that that is, that's where the lion's share of your strategy should be. So again, if you're a divorce lawyer, like. Publishing divorce statistics, causes of divorce, like, get publicly available data. Maybe you're taking state data that's available, get that on your site, add your expertise to it. Don't just copy and paste it.

You've got to add your experience to it, but I think that that's the kind of stuff that these tools are trying to surface and makes your content more retrievable. There's all sorts of stuff about expertise and things that you can do. I think that just a kind of a no-brainer of connecting the dots for this machines. Remember, these machines are still machines, they're not people, but making sure that you've got author pages, and you've got bylines. That have your name in them, that may be linked to other things that you're doing. Maybe it links back to an attorney bio page, but, connecting the dots for these tools so that they understand, like, oh, hey, this is the author.

I mean, so many law firm websites I see it'll be, like, the default admin user is the publisher, and I'm like, you're not telling the machine anything about who wrote this and you're not getting the benefit of your name being associated with that content and tokenized in the training data. And so,again, Google has all sorts of best practice. If you go to their helpful content guidelines of how to do that. Just want to call out a couple examples, you know, Forbes. Say what you will about their whole, you know, advisor platform, but they're SEO people, like, really know what they're doing. I would just go to, the Forbes advisor section and look at their content and see how they're marking the content up, see how they're organizing internal links, it links back to author bios.

It's, you know, it's reviewed, peer-edited, stuff like that is really powerful in signaling to the machine. So again, explicit answers, who you are. Don't be presumptuous that everybody knows who you are. Be very specific and intentional about talking about who you are, what you do, where you, you know. The communities that you serve, all that unique competitive differentiation, like why you're the right choice, what do you do that's unique that other firms don't do? Make sure that your name is consistent, right? Like, you might have a nickname, or you might have a trade name, you might have a main firm name. If you're not connecting those things.

You're not gonna get credit for them because the machine's not gonna understand, like, that you're actually the person who published this expertise, or that this is... you're connected to this firm, or you're connected to this trade name. Make sure it's consistent, especially addresses, biographical information, anything, any information that you. That you can tell the machine about yourself to make it more likely that they're gonna surface you, the better. One sentence answers jurisdict jurisdiction specific answers and explanations, you know. Think hyperlocal. If you work in a certain county, or if you, you know, you work in a certain court include that kind of language everywhere that you are.

It's not enough just to be like, you know, in the past, people would just create, like, you know, what they would call doorway page or location pages, where it's just like, you know, car accident lawyer in my city. Get hyperlocal and really talk about, you know, who you help, how you help them, where you serve them, the problems that you solve, answer common questions, talk about the process, right? This is also just good for users in general, also good for surfacing, but. People have questions, you know, they don't know about working with lawyers, and all that kind of stuff. So this idea of information gain versus content churn.

What can you publish that others cannot? Do you have unique insights or analysis on a particular topic? Do you have research data that's not widely available? That's the idea of this information gain that you want to try to do the best you can to get that out there, create custom GPTs from firm data. So again, this idea of using your intake data to create a custom GPT and then query the custom GPT about your intake data that's like having a conversation with your potential clients, ask them what's important to them. The custom GPT, the knowledge is only being used on your intake data. You know, again, there's privacy things, you gotta do this the right way, but this is a very, very powerful tool in terms of being able to interact with firm intake data that will inform your content strategy.

Quick word on AI slop. Don't do it. It's not worth it. It's the erosion of trust. Remember, even if you show up in these surfaces, if someone lands on your page and it's obvious AI slop gobbledygook. It's not going to make them inclined to trust you to hire you. So just remember that it's not just about visibility, it's about, you know, publishing things that are going to instill trust in somebody, inspire them to be like, I'm gonna trust you with potentially, like, the biggest decision of my life in choosing a lawyer in a really hard situation. It's trust over everything. People ask me all the time, like, does do these things rank AI content?

The answer is that they do. But again, it's not... I'm not... and I we use AI, and I use AI for publishing, and I look at it like this. It's not so much. Whether or not to use it, it's how we use it. Like, that's the competitive differentiator, and firms that are using, you know, they're doing the things like creating custom GPTs, and they're using it to brainstorm content ideas, or find blind spots in content to add additional expertise. Really, really powerful. But the point is, is that the AI... Google is not just... is not trying to actively get rid of just AI content. It's the AI content that's sloped.

That's what they're trying to, you know, reduce the visibility of. So I don't want you to be scared to use AI, or if someone's telling you, don't use AI. It's just a matter... it's more about how you use it than whether or not you use it. So fun, resistance and futile. This is where we're headed. And again, above all everything else, remember, it's all about trust. No matter what signals they use, weights they use, this is the front edge of this technology. It's still very young. It's going to continue to evolve, but as long as human beings are involved in the process of hiring a lawyer, it's going to be about trust, and so think about everything you do.

Does it increase trust, erode trust, or is it trust neutral? Put your faith in trust. That's it. Feed the machines. Do what the bots cannot. Be explicit early, get people talking, and remember to always remember how it impacts trust. That's all I got.

Maddy Martin: Okay, thank you so much. How can people reach you if they want to tap into more of your expertise for their firms?

Gyi Tsakalakis: You can... well, I'll give a plug to... I'm a co-host of the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing podcast, go subscribe to that. We talk about that all the time, but I'm on LinkedIn, you can just search for, you can go to AttorneySync, Attorney SYNC is my company, and I'm very happy to answer questions and talk shop anytime, so don't be afraid. Reach out on LinkedIn, too. You can use my... Long Greek name, and I think I'm the only Gisakalakis, so it's pretty easy from an SEO perspective. Yeah, thanks, Mom.

Maddy Martin: Great. Well done. Good branding by your parents. Well, thank you so much. If anyone has any questions, feel free to post them now. Otherwise, you know, let's just direct them to Guy afterwards. Yeah, find him on Linkedin and send him a message, and definitely check out his marketing firm attorney sync. S-Y-N-C. And yeah, Guy, if I get any other questions, I will send them your way. But thank you so much for that really rich presentation. I think everyone has plenty to chew on and a lot of resources for them to review and read and see how it fits into their practice. Will you, be sharing that deck so that I can share it out with all the registrants?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Absolutely. Okay, wonderful.

Maddy Martin: Well, I will send that over to everyone, and we'll have the recording up on YouTube shortly.