Is AI Replacing Google for Legal Search?

Karin Conroy (00:01.71)
Before we jump in, I just wanted to let you know about this authority tour that we’re doing. It’s a new package that we have. And if building authority and visibility is a priority in your law firm, and it should be, we have this new package called the authority tour that I just mentioned, where we position firms to help them pull their expertise across all these different platforms. We handle all the details and you just show up for podcast appearances and things like that. So take a look at

conroycreativecouncil.com slash authority dash tour. So today on the show, we have Pete Everett for the third time. It feels like many, many more times than that because we, I feel like we pull the quotes and the clips and whatever, and we’re always referencing back to these episodes. So Pete, welcome back for the round three. The first time you were on, we talked about GA4, which that feels like a lifetime ago and how law firms should kind of understand their data.

Pete Everitt (00:58.254)
Mm-hmm.

Karin Conroy (01:02.102)
Then the second time we, actually I think that the GA four was the second episode. And the first time was where do you start with SEO? But now we are in a different world where everything just kind of feels different. Nobody knows like how to rank and what the rules are and whether their rankings and the things they were doing even work anymore. So we’re seeing these like AI overviews and everybody’s thinking like, how do I get in that? And the zero clicks we’re seeing people.

ask ChatGBT legal questions instead of typing them into Google. And some firms are noticing a significant drop in their rankings and they’re freaking out. So here we’re trying to kind of be a nice calming bandaid to at least some of that level of freak out. And we’re not saying don’t freak out. We’re just saying maybe freak out to a different extent. So today we’re gonna dig into the big question, which is,

Is A actually replacing Google for legal search? And if it is, what should law firms do about it? Okay, so Pete, thank you for being here.

Pete Everitt (02:11.232)
all right. I feel like just answering no to that question because it’ll make this podcast so much easier. No it’s not. It’s not. We’re done. It’s great to be back.

Karin Conroy (02:15.539)
my gosh, we’re done. Yeah. See you next time.

Pete Everitt (02:22.04)
Yeah. Boom.

Karin Conroy (02:24.086)
Okay, so why are you saying AI is not replacing Google?

Pete Everitt (02:28.876)
No, I mean, this is one of these, this is one of these really awkward questions because of course, AI, AI, Google is obviously adopting AI in a big way. you, I mean, by saying he’s AI replacing Google, I mean, you know, that’s a bit like saying, I can’t think of an example quick enough, it’s, it, yeah, exactly. It’s, it’s, they’re not, they’re not, the equation is, is imbalanced.

Karin Conroy (02:35.106)
That’s what I’m here for.

Karin Conroy (02:50.486)
Are apples replacing oranges? Yeah.

Pete Everitt (02:58.882)
The reality is that people are using the internet differently. People are finding their sources differently because AI allows them to find things easier. And what that means is that whereas before SEO, traditional search engine optimization was very much based around clicks and traffic to your site and time on page and this, that, and that stuff is still important because you still need an organic element to what you’re doing.

The reality is that now impressions are far more important. Whether you’re appearing in AI overviews, which we’ll get into what all this stuff is in a minute. But whether you’re actually appearing in it or not is more crucial. And what terms you’re appearing for, whether your authority is set correctly, whether you’re tagging stuff, all that kind of thing. So it’s not really an easy question. It’s just a

It’s not really a topical question. It’s more, you should really be doing both. If you want the exposure, you need to start considering them both.

Karin Conroy (04:02.87)
Okay, so let’s figure out, because it sounds like what you’re describing is there is sort of this background of how it all works. And then there’s a lot of this very technical details of the measurements that the measurements it feels like have changed. But the background core part of what you need to do in terms of like your marketing strategy and your content and

in order to be found and for that to be sort of validated, let’s kind of take it into those two avenues, I guess, where like the core part of your plan and your strategy and what to do, and then how has the measurement changed? Because I know, according to everything I’m reading, the measurement is a whole different ballgame.

Pete Everitt (04:56.94)
Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, let’s let’s start with let’s start with let’s put the part of the measurement for a minute. I’m trying not to make it one, but I mean, we’ve only been going about four minutes. Right. the the the the origin. So AI is based on something called LLMs, which are large language models. They are the.

Karin Conroy (05:01.646)
Is this gonna be three hour show?

Yeah.

Pete Everitt (05:21.91)
like iteration engines, if you like, they’re the things that actually ingest stuff that’s on the internet in order to build their own knowledge, their own working knowledge. So that when somebody asks them a question, they’re not, there’s this misconception that, you know, you ask chat GPT a question, what it actually does is go and Googles it quickly and then kind of recompiles it into an answer. And that’s not how it works. They do have their own, they’re called entity maps, their own knowledge bases that they draw from in order to generate their answers.

Karin Conroy (05:49.292)
Okay.

Pete Everitt (05:52.034)
Now, in their most simplest forms, what an LLM actually does is it’s really a next word prediction engine. That’s what it is. It says, right, if I write this word now, what’s the most logical one that comes next, and then the one that comes after that, and so on and so forth. It’s just doing that really quickly. in order for you to kind of play that system, there are some certain things you need to do, some of which…

are very much like organic SEO, particularly how organic SEO used to be, and others of which are a little bit more technical. Certain things need to be structured on your site in a particular way. You need to have the presence of certain code. Yeah, so you’ve got that. The other thing that you then add into the mix with this, which makes it a little more blurry, is that for decades, Google has been the most authoritative sort of

influence on search engine optimization, which essentially SEO means you get it right for Google and everybody else, Bing and Yahoo and whoever else, know, Ask Jeeves if you go back far enough, they kind of all fall in suit. Fall in… I have no idea. You know, I think, I think, I think if you look at it, I think he got bored and set up KFC is he’s the Colonel. They look very, very similar. Anyway, but the yet so.

Karin Conroy (06:54.146)
Yeah. Ask Jeeves. Is that even a thing anywhere? I used to love Ask Jeeves.

Karin Conroy (07:12.59)
Totally.

Pete Everitt (07:13.844)
Because of, because of, so you, but with AI, it’s not like that with AI, you’ve got maybe half a dozen big players. You know, you’ve got chat GPT, you’ve got Claude, you’ve got perplexity, you’ve got Google’s Gemini, you’ve got Elon with his new XAI or Grok. So you’ve got, you’ve got a, you’ve got multiple players, all of which kind of work in nuance, different ways. So there isn’t this hard and fast like with SEO. Okay, right.

Karin Conroy (07:27.246)
Croc. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (07:39.373)
Mm-hmm.

Pete Everitt (07:42.85)
you do it like this for Google and everybody else follows, you’ve now got to do a bit of this for one and a bit of that for the other. it was still very much in a, a phase of those of us that are working in this area are doing our best intuition of we see results if we do this rather than having a fixed formula at the minute, which is kind of adds a bit of more uncertainty into it.

Karin Conroy (07:45.208)
Right.

Karin Conroy (08:08.494)
Yeah, so describe for me, you were talking about how it has, it’s not just this kind of simple search that Google used to have. There was this, it’s more of an entity thing where it’s pulling the information from all these different sources. I have been talking a lot about the Google Knowledge Panel, just because for me, visually, that sort of represents a visual of how that sort of entity works. And the Knowledge Panel,

When you pull mine up, for example, it’s got my appearances on other podcasts. It’s not going to necessarily lead with my own podcast. It’s going to lead with other sources and other places that are sort of voting for me as the type of person that it’s claiming I am. So how do we visualize that sort of entity sourcing when we’re thinking about planning out a strategy and a plan?

Pete Everitt (09:08.246)
Okay, entities, entities work in that there’s two sides of this coin that you need to you need to get your head around. The first is the entities themselves. So what is an entity? So Karen Conroy runs Conroy Creative Council is based in California. I’ve already mentioned three entities who you are, what your company is and the state that you operate from. So in theory, if, if I’m, if I’m looking at the entity, I

If I look at the entity of Conroy Creative Council, I should also find the flag to Karen Conroy and to California because of that one sentence that I’ve just written out. So you have to balance the entities themselves alongside the way that they relate to each other. Now that’s a massively simple example, but if you then think about you’re writing a blog on your law firm website about, I don’t know, family law.

Karin Conroy (09:54.701)
Okay.

Pete Everitt (10:06.334)
And maybe one area, let’s say it’s a, I don’t know, we call it probate in the UK, know, wills or whatever in the States, you have probate. So actually you can, you’re writing this blog about this. Okay. So the first thing is what is probate? Well, actually there might be like a, you know, an authoritative source. We all hate it, but an authoritative source might be Wikipedia, for example. So actually in the, you don’t have to write this in the blog, but in the schema code, the code that the, determines the entities, you can have an.

Karin Conroy (10:11.596)
Yeah. Yep. We have probate. Yep. Yeah.

Pete Everitt (10:36.032)
is like, so probate is like, and then a link off to the Wikipedia article. So that then instantly ties this into the wider theme of probate. then I’m not an expert in probate, but you might then have, well, this is actually about, I don’t know, will writing, for example. So then this might be like something else that happens over there. And then ultimately this comes down to a partner in your firm. So that partner can be the author.

That author has a name, has social profiles, a, you know, experience, has qualifications, et cetera, et cetera. So you can declare all this stuff in code and by, putting all this together and it sounds quite long-winded and complicated. It isn’t when you’ve kind of mapped it out, but when by putting all of this together, you start to actually build a knowledge. It’s called a knowledge graph that lives and it’s.

It’s a bit like a sort of subset of code that isn’t visible to the viewer on your website, but that sits in the background. And that’s the thing that the LLMs actually pick up on to determine the entities you have and how they relate to each other and to other entities that are out there on the internet.

Karin Conroy (11:50.274)
Now is this, so, I feel like that knowledge graph was there under different formatting or was it there before and it was what we were calling like tags and categories and things like that. And we’re just sort of shifting the definition or is it an entirely different thing from what we were doing before?

Pete Everitt (12:10.124)
Right, so all of this stuff has kind of spawned out of stuff that we already know about. So the whole AI, way AI sort of ranks content is very much based around EEAT, which I think we spoke about last time. That’s Google’s Experience, Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trust, EEAT. And that has been the way organic search has worked for like the last three or four years, particularly, and that’s become more prevalent.

Karin Conroy (12:16.247)
Yeah.

Pete Everitt (12:39.266)
Well, know, AI kind of adopted that because the first content it was ingesting was based around around that. the, the, you know, the, next thing is to do with the entities and how things, how things are mapped and tagged. Yeah, you’re right. know, websites that were categorizing things properly, that were tagging authors in things that had those profiles already in place. They’re the ones that initially did very well when AI kind of started taking over because they.

They already had that structure in place. Now, of course, more and more people are doing that. You have to optimize that. have to, you know, it’s no longer a case of, this site’s doing it and that site isn’t. It’s lots of people now doing it. So it’s how well are they doing it as the thing’s missing? How is it being applied over the whole site? Do they have author pages? Do those pages explain the expertise of the author themselves, et cetera? You you can take all of these things to the nth degree.

Karin Conroy (13:11.491)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (13:36.578)
And how much does it matter if there’s that structure, there’s obviously that internal structure on the internal site and what, you know, we were historically calling more organic SEO versus the backlinks. And cause I keep seeing all this stuff about how big of a deal Reddit is for whatever reason, Reddit’s got some massive domain authority and

If you’re showing up on Reddit, like I’m seeing all this stuff and maybe it’s because I’ve clicked on some of it. So like I’m, you know, that’s part of my algorithm, but where Reddit is now this whole new strategy and it just feels like we are the plans and the things I’m seeing are more external pulling, getting sort of authority and establish on external links to pull back to your own site. Is that more or the same or is it, I’m just seeing that because it’s randomly mine.

Pete Everitt (14:29.24)
mean, backlinks have always been a key part of any SEO strategy. thing with this is that…

We had a conversation not that long ago. This was before this before like even before the pre-chat, which we’ll probably get to mention in a bit. but the, we, had a conversation a while ago about, you know, can you do kind of AI SEO or do you have to do normal SEO alongside it? And the reality is that in order to the, the way that the LLMs kind of ingest new content,

Karin Conroy (14:58.712)
Yeah.

Pete Everitt (15:08.59)
They ingest so much new content, they have to find a way of ranking it. So one of the ways that they do that is to look for external sources. if you can have now Reddit, I’ve seen that thing about Reddit as well. Yeah. Reddit does seem to have a, yeah. Now I’m not saying it’s a tactic I use. It’s not saying it’s anything I’ve tested, but I’ve seen that as a theory as well. Reddit seems to have maybe a larger sway of influence than others, but

Karin Conroy (15:12.482)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (15:20.361)
good, okay, so it’s not just my algorithm.

Pete Everitt (15:34.744)
You can perfectly successfully do this without Reddit. mean, this is like, you know, we’re talking maybe a swing of one or 2%, not kind of half 50. Yeah. So, you, so you’ve got to work on that side of things, kind of getting, getting external sites to link in, getting your stuff mentioned around the internet that helps, that helps the LLMs notice your content appearing in more places. And of course the more cited those places are, it’d be the same if you could get mentioned in forms or the

Karin Conroy (15:42.164)
major. Yeah, right.

Pete Everitt (16:03.384)
you know, New York Times or something, they would have that kind of impact. But you also need to be demonstrating that your website is active, is current, is up to date. So you’ve still got to be doing the on-page stuff. And if you can do that successfully and get your organic content onto page one, whilst you’re not going to be getting the same number of clicks because it’s now more about impressions and you’re not going to be getting the same amount of traffic.

Having your website ranking on page one for these terms that mirror people’s prompts helps that content appear in the prompts. you can’t separate them. They’re too intrinsic. unfortunately, yeah, essentially. And of course, the problem with that for people like me is that AI is a very different discipline to SEO, but we’ve got landed with it, whether we like it or not, because they’re…

Karin Conroy (16:37.496)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (16:42.86)
Yeah, it’s like the snake eating its own tail thing. Yeah, yeah.

Karin Conroy (16:53.912)
Yeah.

Right, exactly.

Pete Everitt (16:59.321)
One is an evolution of the other. but you, it’s very difficult to take one without the other.

Karin Conroy (17:01.292)
Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, okay, so that’s a good transition into, okay, so I’m a law firm, not the partner, I’m like right underneath the partner and he’s asked me to look at all the reports and the partner who’s my boss is freaking out because the numbers are tanking. So let’s talk about like what’s actually happening there. Is it something we should be worried about? Is it happening across the board? So does it really?

matter is this just sort of a reckoning of AI? And like, what should we be looking at now? Because I feel like there’s the measurements, like I said earlier, the measurements have changed. So let’s start with what should we be freaking out? Just a little bit.

Pete Everitt (17:51.448)
Maybe, just a little. Right, so as I said, the way that people use the internet has changed. However, there’s certain things that AI can’t do, which of course is be that lawyer, be that firm, be that support that you need when you’re buying a house or somebody’s died or you’re getting divorced or whatever.

Karin Conroy (18:19.32)
You got arrested. Yeah.

Pete Everitt (18:20.482)
Yeah, you got arrested, whatever it might be. You, it can’t do that. So the first thing I would, always say to my clients is that we need to hook. We need to focus. Yes, we need to keep an eye on this stuff. We have to make sure that the efforts that we are putting in are making a difference. But actually the only difference that really matters is how many inquiries are we getting? Cause ultimately no matter where people find you, when they actually need you, they still need to get in touch.

Karin Conroy (18:44.813)
Okay.

Pete Everitt (18:50.552)
So hooking something as a tangible metric into your business is the first thing I would say. And that has to be the reality check all the time. That has to be the reality check.

Karin Conroy (18:59.948)
Okay, so your actual measurable KPIs now, I mean, for a long time, there was a lot of everybody just looking at the Google reports and looking at the numbers that were within that report, not necessarily tying them back to phone calls or new cases or whatever.

They were just kind of looking at the numbers and you know, from, was kind of like day traders who, or people who are trying to invest and they go look at it from day to day, like a day trader. so, you know, like it’s, it’s a bad idea. I took one finance class and that was what I learned.

Pete Everitt (19:40.132)
Fair enough.

Karin Conroy (19:40.75)
Yeah, I’m an expert. So now you’re saying, now it just seems to me, this is the thing that just keeps coming up over and over. Now it seems like we are actually coming back to some sort of core marketing ideas. Like, yes, you’ve got these numbers and you’ve got these ways of measuring and you’ve got the reports and all of that. But at the end of the day, is your phone ringing? And like, are you actually getting emails and calls and cases? Yeah.

Pete Everitt (20:06.532)
That’s it. I have said to my clients for a long time, long before AI was a thing, that actually getting a hundred thousand people to view your website isn’t actually that difficult. It’s maybe a bit more difficult now with AI, but getting a hundred thousand people to see your impressions on search isn’t that harder thing to do. The far harder thing to do is find a thousand people that want to buy your product or service at the time that they…

want, you know, at the time they need it and get them to your website at that moment. That has always been the far harder challenge. And in many respects, that hasn’t changed. Where this all happened was in March, 2025, when Google ran two updates on their algorithm two weeks apart. And what the first did, the first was it cleared out all AI content. So you had these people that had written their entire websites using chat GPT.

Karin Conroy (20:49.624)
Okay.

Pete Everitt (21:04.42)
And they just vanished in a matter of about 10 days as this update rolled out. Because what Google did was they went and removed all AI content from the search results, or from the top 100 anyway. So you were as good as dead and buried. Then two weeks later, what they did was they then released their own AI overview. So they removed

Karin Conroy (21:24.504)
Okay, so can I just pause really quick on that part?

Pete Everitt (21:29.101)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (21:30.446)
I’m sorry, like it kind of got over kind of overlapped, but how did Google determine whether it was AI content? And was, there content that was removed that was actually not? Because we’ve had conversations about this where it falsely claims that it’s AI when it’s not. so we’ve had this experience where we know it’s human written and there’s some kind of

AI checker thing that’s faulty.

Pete Everitt (22:02.069)
they used AI to do it. I mean, this is also meta that they used an AI bot to process the results in the top 100 and if the computer said it was AI, bang, there it went.

Karin Conroy (22:17.302)
Okay, so if it was false, if that was like a false positive, too bad. Yeah, okay.

Pete Everitt (22:21.55)
Too bad, too bad. If it was a false positive, it meant that you basically sounded like AI and you have to try harder. That’s the, basically. So that was the first thing it did. And then the second thing it did was two weeks later, it went and put its own AI overviews at the top. So the irony with all of this is it goes and removes competitors’ AI content in order to replace it with its own.

Karin Conroy (22:28.738)
Yeah. Too many dashes. Okay. Sorry. Okay.

Karin Conroy (22:47.363)
Yeah.

Pete Everitt (22:48.18)
What happened with that is that instantly people could start to get the content that they initially would have had to click through to the pages beneath for without leaving the search results. And this is where the zero click era started.

Karin Conroy (23:01.582)
So this is where the zero click result and the zero click freak out began. And I mean, as an internet user, I use it all the time. I mean, we all use it, you know, like when we’re just standing there talking like, what’s the name of the XYZ thing that da da da da? And it’s like, there it is. Okay, I’m not gonna click on it. You know, there it is. Why would I click on it? I’ve got my answer. Yeah.

Pete Everitt (23:07.906)
Yeah, but crucially.

Pete Everitt (23:24.548)
Yeah, we were watching a thing on Amazon Prime at the minute. My wife and I were watching it each night. And we were like, was that woman in suits? So of course, you Google it and it gives you the answer. I don’t have to go through to a site or look through her Wikipedia filmography anymore. It was there. It’s just we all do it. Yet we all, on the one hand, we all do it and we all find it really handy. it’s we have changed the way we use search.

Karin Conroy (23:36.746)
Yeah, yeah, right.

Pete Everitt (23:52.974)
but then we don’t understand why people still aren’t clicking through to our websites. Well, hang on, because they’re just doing what we do over there.

Karin Conroy (23:56.066)
Right, right. Yeah, you just did that five minutes ago. I will say it’s usually very basic stuff though. It’s not something that’s an elaborate search where I’m actually looking to purchase something or whatever. If it’s a more complicated question or decision, I may look at the AI overview and then I’m gonna dig in for more.

for whatever it is I’m looking at. Even if it’s like, I’m looking for a hotel, I’m not gonna just take the AI overview, because I do not trust that Google knows what kind of hotel I like. Right? So.

Pete Everitt (24:37.204)
Listener if you hadn’t figured out Karen has particular tastes

Karin Conroy (24:40.268)
I especially when it comes to hotels, I like a nice hotel. Okay. So, so we were still back at the, we freak out question when it comes to numbers and whatever. And the answer, I mean, I feel like I I’m not super freaking out because it’s kind of removing some of the garbage. It’s removing some of these low level searches that

weren’t necessarily like intent to buy type people. But what should be, is there anything we should be worried about in terms of looking at our numbers now versus a year ago?

Pete Everitt (25:23.214)
So the big difference with this is that however you appear on that page, you still get the impression. actually, when we were talking about those SEO reports that we all used to look at, you’d get your Search Console report, which is how you’ve appeared in Google. And that would give you an impression number and then a click-through rate. And a good click-through rate would be 7%, 8%, 9 % as an average across everything that you rank for. Now we’re getting click-through rates of 0.6%.

So that’s the thing you’re going to notice. And everybody is thinking, why is this so bad? Why is this so low? But actually, when you thought about all the traffic you used to get before, your phone wasn’t ringing 10 times more than it is now. The traffic was having to come to your site to find out some of the basic stuff, some of the long tail stuff that you were pitching for previously.

Karin Conroy (25:59.106)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (26:07.34)
Yeah. Right.

Pete Everitt (26:20.514)
And then just bouncing off again and going to, well, that’s a good article. I know about that now. Right. Off we go. The danger that we really have with AI now, however, is that not so much the AI overviews like we’ve just been talking about. So the AI overviews fall into a part of this that’s called AEO or answer engine optimization. I have a close question. It’s going to provide me with an answer. Where this

Karin Conroy (26:43.126)
Okay, and what’s the difference between AEO and GEO?

Pete Everitt (26:46.602)
Right. So GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. And that is your chat GPTs, your perplexities, the things that will, you can actually have a conversation with and develop a narrative with over time. It’s a generation of a response to you rather than an answer to a closed question. So there’s, there’s the difference. The issue with that, of course, is that you can now have people that will think, well, I need, I need to understand about, I don’t know, DUI claim.

Karin Conroy (26:58.84)
Okay.

Pete Everitt (27:16.82)
And so I’m going to go and chat GPT and see what it tells me. all of a sudden you start ending up with somebody that’s, know, chat GPT might have been one degree off at some point right at the start of the discussion, but a hundred miles later down the thread, they are a long, long way off course because of something. And chat GPT isn’t intelligent enough to say, hang on, we’re too far away from this.

You see that a lot of these, anybody that’s used chat GPT, perplexity, Gemini, whatever, you will see that a lot of them are designed to please you. And actually, you’re listening to this and you haven’t done this before, try this. Go and start a new chat and chat GPT, Claude, perplexity, Gemini, you name it, go and pick one, whatever is the one that you use most. But in your first prompt, give the GPT permission to disagree with you.

Karin Conroy (27:52.216)
Yeah.

Pete Everitt (28:09.868)
So you don’t have to agree with me on this, but I would like to know how X works and pick anything and then see the difference in the response. Cause the minute you can say, actually let you can think for yourself. It starts to become a bit more unbiased and you can, it becomes tangibly different.

Karin Conroy (28:29.056)
I have actually gone into the personality settings because I cannot stand sycophants. so I get irritated if it’s like too complimentary. I’m like, no, that wasn’t that good. Like, let’s be real here. And you can go in various places. I don’t know where it is on all the platforms, but for sure on ChatGPT, you can go into the kind of personality settings and tell it, don’t agree with me so much.

contrary. Tell me where I’m the things I’m missing. Tell me the things I’m getting wrong and don’t just every single time I say, we need to change this. Don’t say that’s a great perspective and like, you know, like that’s a great idea. Whatever. Like after a certain amount of that during the day, I just, it’s like, it’s too much. It’s like eating a bowl of sugar. You know, it’s just, I can’t, I can’t do it. so exactly. Seriously, it’s, it’s too much.

Pete Everitt (29:22.596)
Couldn’t agree more.

Karin Conroy (29:28.584)
And my kids, I actually have a 13 year old who will use chat GPT to study. And she was just doing this where she had a test to study for and she’s having this conversation with this chat GPT with a British accent, of course, because it sounds so much more interesting. And I’m in the other room listening and I’m like, no.

Pete Everitt (29:45.112)
What? Of course.

Karin Conroy (29:55.886)
First of all, that was just wrong and Chat GPT is trying in a nice way to tell you that you got that part wrong. Like we need to change those settings because it needs to come back and just say, no, you got that one wrong. Let’s try that again. Instead of being like, that was a great try. No, it wasn’t. You didn’t get that right at all.

Pete Everitt (30:07.288)
Yeah. Yeah.

Pete Everitt (30:12.12)
Yep. No, Henry VIII definitely wasn’t on Tinder. just, it’s not… that just wasn’t the way he had six wives. You know?

Karin Conroy (30:16.302)
Yes, exactly. Right, exactly. We do not have Putin on a horse with his shirt off in your history book. This is not part of what we’re doing in eighth grade history.

Pete Everitt (30:32.45)
And welcome to the pre-chats.

Karin Conroy (30:36.718)
I said I was gonna find a way to get Putin into the conversation and there we go. Like I’ve been waiting for that for an hour, like a half an hour in.

Pete Everitt (30:38.232)
You did. You did. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (30:46.306)
I’m not a very patient person. I’m sure there was going to be a better place that I could have dropped that, but we needed the visual.

where this just got off track because I feel like you were talking about kind of how it all works and the numbers and these reports and kind of where you’re gonna see like the pain points. But what should we be noticing? And I feel like we should be measuring totally different things now, right? We’re not even really looking at traffic and in the middle places, not like in the phone calls or in just the sort of

impressions. What in the middle should we be looking at and caring about in terms of evaluating whether certain pieces of content were successful or whether we should continue doing a certain type of content and put that in our plan?

Pete Everitt (31:43.79)
So in terms of the platforms like ChatGPT and Claude and whatever, there’s actually a massive hole in the market at the minute where you can track where you’re appearing, but you can only track queries or prompts that you determine. So how are you possibly going to be able to guess all of the prompts that you may or may not appear for? So there’s a big gap when it comes to that. From the AEO side of things, appearing in the AI overviews,

a lot of the SEO tools do now feature tracking for those. So there is a logic. It’s not an exact science, of course, but there is a logic that says, well, actually, if you’re doing quite well in the AI overviews, then you’re naturally, you’re being picked up by the engine, essentially. So you should be doing quite well over in ChatGPT or the generative platforms. So there’s a logic there. So really, it is about understanding

Karin Conroy (32:17.741)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (32:29.698)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (32:33.454)
Whichever.

Pete Everitt (32:41.252)
the AI features that you are ranking for, but that is going to be more on the search side of things. Hence, we still can’t separate this from SEO. is understanding those terms, understanding how seeing your impressions, your impression count now counts for more than it used to. Before, we were always about click-through rate, whereas now actually impressions, getting those impressions, sites that still have those click-through rates of like,

Karin Conroy (33:01.75)
Okay. Yep.

Pete Everitt (33:11.054)
four, five, 6%. We almost need to, that’s not now really a measure of success. That’s a measure of you’re not appearing in AI. So you’re kind of doing something wrong, but that one’s completely flipped. then, then ultimately you then, there’s a bigger question now about, what’s the user experience like on your site for those clicks that you are getting the intent for those has now increased because people are more people are only coming to your site nearer that purchase decision. So.

Karin Conroy (33:19.383)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (33:22.775)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (33:35.511)
Yeah.

Pete Everitt (33:40.95)
What is it that is, or that inquiry decision? So what are the trust factors you’re showing on there? What’s the user journey like regardless of where somebody comes in? I have a client that insists that they have to, their user journey has to start from their homepage, regardless of how much I tell him that 74 % of his traffic comes in somewhere else. If we haven’t addressed the homepage, he’s not happy. But how do people come in?

Karin Conroy (34:03.468)
Right. I’m guessing he’s of an older generation.

Pete Everitt (34:08.098)
Yes, yes he is. He is, bless him. And I do treat him with a bit of care and attention and, you know, I don’t quite put it like that.

Karin Conroy (34:13.268)
Yeah, but I think this is something there’s times when I have these conversations also and that has not stopped being a kind of a mind blowing moment for a lot of my clients to think that people don’t necessarily that first homepage is not necessarily going to be the first stop. So let’s and it’s more and more often if your blog is doing well, it shouldn’t be the first stop because if it

everybody’s coming through the homepage, that means that your blog sucks, right? Like they should be coming probably from a search that ties up with some piece of content you’ve written that’s not on the homepage. So I’ve spent a lot of time talking to a lot of clients about how you need to optimize all of your pages, assuming that hopefully your blog is set up in a way to

Pete Everitt (34:47.214)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (35:11.692)
be that first impression and kind of say, okay, now you go here and now you go there. And if you want something related to this and have that whole like user experience journey, start at a blog post.

Pete Everitt (35:23.202)
Yeah, has to, it has to a blog, a blog is a brilliantly complicated place on your website because it’s, it can be, you’re dead right. It can be and should be in many people’s cases, the first thing that they see on your website. However, there’s also just as much chance that that’ll be the, the one thing that somebody needed to think, yeah, this firms for me. So they also need to be able to convert on it as well. It’s

Karin Conroy (35:49.932)
Right.

Pete Everitt (35:50.508)
It’s not like it’s a bit like an ads landing page in that respect. It has to, it has to be judge and jury all at the same time to pick up the legal, the legal, metaphor. it’s, it’s got to do both. So yeah, there, there, there’s really an art form in terms of getting your blog. Right.

Karin Conroy (35:59.15)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (36:08.514)
Yeah, and it has to not come across too salesy because like, you you have to come across as you’re sort of sitting down with this person and giving them this great piece of advice that answers this question. And I’ve also got some information over here, but I don’t want to sound like a used car salesman. And like, there’s such a balance there that, you know, I’ve seen, we’ve all seen it be done very well and not so well.

To go back to your point about the leads that are coming in from these LLMs are way farther down in that decision process. And I’ve seen this personally. I had to change my intake form to add a, you know, where did you find us option? Where I said, you know, did you find us on chat GPT or some other LLM? And I can tell from those leads that choose that as an option.

all of a sudden it’s like a different conversation. We could kind of skip over the first few minutes of what we would have normally talked about, because they’ve already figured these things out. So how do we address, how do we either kind of address that differently? Like if they’re coming in from the LLM, knowing that they’re farther down the path or kind of prioritize, is there anything we should do differently?

for those types of leads that are coming in from those LLMs, recognizing that they’re like a warmer lead.

Pete Everitt (37:41.7)
Um, that’s a tough one. I mean, for law firm, it’s going to be very different for law firm that is from marketing agency. Um, you know, in our world, that means that people have understood a bit more about what their brand message is, or maybe got their core values or the unique selling point put together or this, that, and the other. With a law firm, that could mean that they know a lot of incorrect detail about how a DUI works. Um, so it’s the, yeah, the

Karin Conroy (38:07.032)
Right.

Pete Everitt (38:10.428)
I guess there’s a point to maybe understanding that. But just as much as I can say, well, yeah, you should be more forthright and give them an easier path to convert, you might also find that there’s people there that need a bit more de-education before re-education. So that’s a difficult one to kind of give a hard and fast answer to.

Karin Conroy (38:27.565)
Right.

Karin Conroy (38:32.758)
Yeah, I suppose it depends on where, what your practice areas are and the, the kind of general information that they might be finding on chat TPT before they actually make that conversion. If they’re doing all this research about, you know, I just got arrested and what do I need to do in this state? And chat GPT could be pulling information from various States and giving them all this bad advice. Or is your practice area something that’s generally.

you know, like this, this is going to be a smoother process and you don’t need to worry as much and you’re just trying to get them on the phone. So.

Pete Everitt (39:07.384)
Yeah. I think that ultimately, mean, this is where all inquiries, this is where the practice area, practices and agencies like ours kind of have a similar thing versus e-commerce sites where you make an online sale. businesses like ours, law firms, et cetera, ultimately the sale is made

on a person to person basis. So it really comes down to the person on the phone answering the email. It’s the squidgy human organic element that can make or break it at that point. And that’s maybe where you need to have a touch of grace, but also a touch of spontaneity about you in order to lead that conversation based on who it is you’re talking to.

Karin Conroy (40:00.354)
Yeah. Yeah. And just knowing what you know about your firm and what that typically means. Like what does that meant in the past and what does that mean going, you know, for potential future clients. But I think that’s a big piece that people are missing that we’ve got all this AI, these leads that are coming in are potentially warmer, especially if they’re coming from an LLM. But at the end of the day, we’re still talking about the main measurement is being a phone call or an email or some

Pete Everitt (40:05.902)
Mm.

Karin Conroy (40:29.112)
point of contact that’s not like this obscure number buried in your Google report and that that sale needs to happen person to person. think, you know, like let’s not take that part out of it. This is not going to be replaced by AI and your work is not necessarily going to be replaced by AI. We’re trying to come out at all, just kind of expediting it and making things a little bit more efficient.

Pete Everitt (40:50.712)
Yep, that’s it. That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it.

Karin Conroy (40:53.294)
Okay, so what do people need to be doing now in terms of, know, I just keep coming back to my content plan. Like that’s where I kind of think things out. Like what do I need to think about differently? How do I need to structure my thoughts or even the content itself? What changes do I need to be making in order to…

kind of speak more to those warmer leads coming from the LLM.

Pete Everitt (41:25.056)
right. Well, there’s two halves of that question. One is the, first is what do you actually technically need to be doing on your website? So you need to make sure you have author pages set up. You need to make sure that you have this scary thing called schema set up and that you’re building that knowledge graph and that those entities are being mapped and the relationships to other entities within your website, but then also entities, where they linked things on the internet that they’re being done and they’re being done consistently.

So that is a fair, depending on the size of your website, that’s a fairly big technical piece of work. And then as you are producing more and more content for every piece of content that you create, you should then be adding to that schema graph. That schema graph should have, there should be schema on every blog post that you publish, for example. And over time that starts to build things up. So that’s technically what you should be doing. From a,

What should you be doing with these warmer leads that come through? I think that there’s now an answer to say that you need to… The whole process of you demonstrating value has now maybe gone up a level or two. Whereas before value could be a fairly general explanation of a topic and then you… And that’s enough to sway somebody to contact you. Actually…

people now may be finding that general stuff in chat GPT in the AI overviews, whatever. So you need to now be going the next level. You need to be, you need to be, you know, it’s not just good enough about being about DUIs or probate or whatever the other examples are we’ve used. It’s, now about, okay, so, so this is how a business owner, this, if your husband’s or your partner’s estate was, he was a business owner. This is now, you know, we need to get down into that level and what are the tax implications and inheritance tax and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

people far more qualified than me listening to this. But you get the idea. You can’t stay at that what was kind of surface level. You now need to be going the next level because if somebody just sees on your site what they already know from ChatGPT, they’re just going hit the back button and go and find the next one.

Karin Conroy (43:22.594)
Yeah, right.

Karin Conroy (43:36.492)
Right. What about being kind of contrary and saying, okay, here’s some of the typical answers that you’re seeing out there. I actually think the opposite in terms of that. Does that rank well or does that tend to drop to the bottom?

Pete Everitt (43:53.25)
No, no, that can rank well. That can definitely rank well. The thing you’ve got to bear in mind with that, though, is that if you put decisive content out there, you’re naturally going to repel some people who disagree with your contrary view. So.

Karin Conroy (43:54.872)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (44:05.025)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (44:08.748)
And that could be a strategic reason, that could be a strategic plan. Like if you have a certain kind of brand and you are trying to be sort of prestigious and high level and repel these very, know, penny pinching, you know, bottom, like people do, they don’t have the budget to work with you. You could potentially do, you know, do some content around that.

Pete Everitt (44:32.078)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So if there’s a commercial reason for you to do it, even more so, yeah, go for it. But that’s a decision that’s obviously contextual based on the firm that you’re working with, how long that firm’s been in business, whether it needs every case to come through the door or whether it can be a little more selective. So that’s more of a commercial question than a technical one.

Karin Conroy (44:57.44)
Okay. All right. So it is time for the book review and I know you have a good one. So what is the book? So now we’re at three books. seriously, it seems like we’ve done at least four or five episodes, but what’s the book that we’re going to add to the library for this episode?

Pete Everitt (45:13.924)
so for this episode, it seems like we’ve done four or five episodes. Just what’s talking to me is like carrying. just, I obviously waffle on for hours and,

Karin Conroy (45:19.63)
No, it’s value. It’s all the valuable content.

Pete Everitt (45:27.372)
So this time’s book, and I did have to check the other books that I recommended actually before I did this one. Well, I can’t do the same one again, but this one’s a…

Karin Conroy (45:32.206)
good!

I’ve had people try to do that. And they’re like, I just really liked that book.

Pete Everitt (45:41.412)
Yeah, what can I say? This one’s Atomic Habits by James Clear, which is a very, very well known book, but I can hand on heart say I’m not a big reader. I spend so long reading stuff at work. I don’t generally read for kind of relaxation or for my own stuff. But this is genuinely a book that I have read more than once. So hence it deserves a place on the list. But I mean, ultimately, I probably don’t need to go. It’s such a well known book. I probably don’t need to go into it too much.

Karin Conroy (45:47.97)
Yes.

Pete Everitt (46:10.818)
I think that the core thing behind it is that if you’re trying to do anything, if you’re trying to make any improvements in your life, if you’re trying to make improvements that are too big to become a habit, then they’re probably too big for you. You know, it’s probably too much of a big step and actually you need to break it down a bit further. You’re going to get stuck.

Karin Conroy (46:30.828)
Yeah, you’re going to get stuck and you’ll just be sitting there stuck, not making any progress.

Pete Everitt (46:35.956)
I have a 14 year old that’s currently revising for exams and on the same week his revision schedule started has decided he wants to take up running and we’ve had to say to him, look, you know, his name’s Isaac. Look, Isaac, we completely support you in both of these things. They’re both very, very good for you, but let’s just get the revision shed. You’ve started that already. Let’s get that locked in before we worry about your PB for a 5k. Okay. Let’s just.

Karin Conroy (46:47.276)
you

Karin Conroy (46:53.322)
Right?

Karin Conroy (46:59.347)
Alright.

Karin Conroy (47:03.616)
Right?

Pete Everitt (47:04.836)
Let’s just be there. And that’s exactly what I mean. We all want big change, but actually big change happens by making lots of small steps. So let’s make the steps achievable. then rather than trying to race to the end, another quote that I, this has nothing to do with James Clear and Atomic Habits, but another quote I do quite like is Gary V said that it has this…

Karin Conroy (47:11.491)
right.

Karin Conroy (47:15.83)
Yes. Yep.

Pete Everitt (47:31.928)
thing that he put on blind a while ago about he doesn’t understand why people are so focused on being a millionaire. They get so focused on earning that million that that’s all that matters. And actually the difference between it between being a millionaire and not is just earning $1. It’s that dollar between 999,000 and a million. So what you need to do is start enjoying the journey. Start start.

Karin Conroy (47:41.26)
Yep. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (47:46.615)
Yes.

Pete Everitt (47:54.381)
Yeah, start focusing on enjoying that. Obviously keeping an eye on that target, but don’t make it the focus. The focus has to be the journey that’s in front of you. And it’s very similar with this.

Karin Conroy (47:58.818)
Right. Yeah. It totally freezes you up if you’re only focused on that and all you’re thinking is I’m not at that million instead of I’m on my way to that million. And this one step is going to get me one step closer to that million. for me, I’ve read Atomic Habits a couple of times, I think now too. For me, the takeaway is how to get unstuck.

Pete Everitt (48:10.83)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (48:28.002)
you know, and how to make those tiny little kind of baby step process. But he gets into like the neuroscience of it, which is that’s the part I like, because it didn’t feel super self-help sort of, you know, like going back to how much I can’t stand the sycophant side of chat, GPT, I can’t stand those kinds of books where it’s like, yay, we’re going to sit here, clap while you basically do nothing. I want someone to tell me, okay, here’s how to get off your butt and make this thing happen. And here’s how.

how to time it out and how to be realistic about it. And this one step is gonna feel like nothing at the beginning, but to actually make the progress that you need to make, you gotta just recognize that this is what’s realistic and a year from now, one step is gonna feel like a lot. And just to get that one step done over the course of a year and to be consistent about it is what you really need, is the plan for consistency.

Pete Everitt (49:22.564)
Yeah, the plan for consistency is absolutely key. I don’t know whether this is the same in the States. In the UK, we have this expression that a thousand miles starts with the first step. And that’s what you’ve got to focus on. What’s today’s And then you worry about tomorrow’s step tomorrow.

Karin Conroy (49:31.842)
Yep, yep.

Karin Conroy (49:38.86)
And I think this does come full circle back to this conversation just of SEO in general. And first of all, what are we gonna be calling this going forward? Is it SEO, AEO, GEO? Is there gonna be a broad term for all of it, like all of it combined? Because I think, you know, this is maybe a different conversation, but when we pull back and look at this chunk of work that is done, whether it’s…

SEO, AEO, GEO, this combination of this work together, it’s going to be one big plan for all of that that needs to be working, know, all of those parts need to be working together. And is, what are we going to be calling that? Search?

Pete Everitt (50:20.974)
Well, yeah, I guess. The most sort of accepted term, global accepted term, I suppose, at the minute is AI optimization. So AIO, which wasn’t one that you mentioned. I think the people that came up with GEO very quickly hit, because there’s geocaching, geography. They very quickly hit a brick wall with that one. So yeah, it’s a…

Karin Conroy (50:32.0)
Okay. Okay.

Karin Conroy (50:43.564)
Yeah. Right.

Pete Everitt (50:48.416)
AI optimization seems to be the most widely accepted term at the moment.

Karin Conroy (50:51.15)
And that’s gonna encompass SEO at some point. Like that’s all gonna be part of the same, I don’t know. Okay.

Pete Everitt (50:58.702)
Probably, probably. At the moment, can do, still successfully do SEO without having AI optimization on the top. But you can’t do AI optimization without having SEO underneath it.

Karin Conroy (51:13.454)
Yeah. And, but I mean, to come back to the James Clear book, think all of this, whatever we’re calling it, it still comes back to this consistency. Like you can’t just throw out a blog post and have like three blog posts on your site and be like, why am I not showing up wherever Google chat, GPT, wherever you’re thinking that you should be showing up. Um, why is that not working? And it’s just, it doesn’t work that way. And none of them do. And never have.

And so like what we’re talking about is change, but it’s degrees of change.

Pete Everitt (51:46.776)
Yeah, absolutely. the same goes with, you know, okay, so you listen to this podcast, you think, Pete said I need to put some schema on my blog post. You go and ask ChatGPT to generate you three lots of schema. You took it on three blog posts and in a week you tell me that you’re not in ChatGPT. Of course you’re not. It’s got to be, you have to layer this up and build it consistently across your entire site, across your entire presence. It’s not…

Karin Conroy (52:01.55)
Yep. Yep.

Pete Everitt (52:15.588)
Unfortunately, what seems to be quite a simple thing is quite complicated. That’s the honest truth behind it. It’s not impossible, but it’s… yeah.

Karin Conroy (52:21.836)
Yeah. So what’s the big t- But it’s complicated and it feels like it’s, it seems like people have wanted this to like simplify things, but it’s got more complicated. It definitely has not simplified things.

Pete Everitt (52:35.874)
Yeah, no, no, it hasn’t simplified. It’s muddy the waters more than we can imagine. And likewise, as I said, you know, rather than just having one set of rules to follow, you’ve now got kind of half a dozen. Some things work in some, some things work in another. There’s some crossover, there’s not in others. Are you really going to do… Measuring’s a mess. Are you really going to do six lots of work just to make sure you appear in all of them? It just, it’s, it’s not, it’s not a nice, neat package. But, but…

Karin Conroy (52:51.094)
And measuring is a mess. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (52:57.678)
You’re right.

Pete Everitt (53:05.656)
the people that are bossing it are the people that are getting those warmer leads. So is it worth it? That is a very different question to is it easy?

Karin Conroy (53:10.69)
Yeah, yeah.

Karin Conroy (53:16.876)
Yeah. Well, I feel I was going to ask you for the big takeaway. I feel like that’s it. Whether it’s worth it or easy are two totally different questions and with two different answers. And that’s what it comes down to. It’s not going to be easy. The AI part is not going to just hand you a number one ranking site that, you know, it just turns that out for you when you just graduated from law school yesterday. And it shouldn’t be that way.

It should be, and this is what I keep coming back to on other podcast episodes too, where if you are the honest authority and expert on a certain topic and you’ve spent 20 years developing that expertise and the authority and you’ve got all of these signals out there, you’ve been on CNN and you’ve been on, you’ve got all these external signals pointing to you as the authority.

It shouldn’t be that someone should graduate from law school yesterday, slap up a website that is AI generated and should be able to overtake you in whatever those rankings are. truly, feel, I keep saying, I think this is good news for the people who are true authority figures.

Pete Everitt (54:29.582)
No, you’re right. You’re right. However, there’s a, there’s a complete flip side to that where you’ve got the firms that have been around a hundred years, maybe three or four generations that have never had more than a one page website. They’ve lived completely on referral business from the local community or the town where they live or whatever they operate or whatever it is. And they should be these massive authorities, but because they don’t have anything online. So the LLMs can’t

Karin Conroy (54:38.85)
Yeah.

Pete Everitt (54:58.724)
can’t validate that they’re essentially now level pegging. If you think this is more like a bell curve than a, than a, than a straight line graph. So you have, you have the bell curve is, is based on how, how your presence is reflected online and your experience is reflected online versus time, time experience or qualification.

Karin Conroy (55:20.738)
Sure, yeah, that makes sense because I’ve seen plenty of those too. We both have where it’s like, you’re just kind of riding this wave of all these years of experience, but your online presence is garbage. And I’ve described this too as the sort of reckoning of the AI search as the Wizard of Oz curtain and the curtain is garbage. so if you are, the garbage is being pushed away

And if your marketing plan or you’re in whatever way, whether it’s your brand new and you’re pretending to be somebody that you’re not, or you’ve been around forever and you have a garbage marketing plan and online presence, whatever it is, if it’s garbage, it’s even worse news for you now. But if you’ve got a solid, true authority and you’ve done any amount of work over a bunch of years and you’ve got a somewhat decent presence and it’s true,

then I feel like this is all good news for you. You just have some work to do. Yeah. Pete Everett, I have so many different versions of a title for you. I’ve got digital strategist, agency owner, all these things are true, but we’ll link to all of those on our show page. And also you are a collaborator on the Council Cast Podcast now. So,

Pete Everitt (56:22.766)
Yeah. Yeah, you just got some work to do. That’s it.

Karin Conroy (56:47.102)
all of our previous episodes, all of you’ve got a new badge.

Pete Everitt (56:51.714)
Wow, can I stitch it on? Can I put it on? Yeah.

Karin Conroy (56:53.698)
Seriously, yeah, you could. I’m not gonna pay for that, but I could send you the artwork.

Pete Everitt (56:57.348)
And there we are, back down to reality.

Karin Conroy (57:00.334)
Exactly. But the collaborators are all of these guests that I’ve decided to have kind of shown this light on them because I just keep coming back to the expertise and it’s like, why would I go look for someone else to talk to about SEO and all of this stuff that’s changing over time when I already have this quality person that we can sit and talk about Vladimir Putin.

Putin over and over. You know, it’s just going to be a great episode. So there is a whole page now on the site with the collaborators and the collaborator episodes too. So take a look at that. Pete Everett, thank you so much for being here.

Pete Everitt (57:40.216)
you for having me again. It’s been a pleasure. It’s the third time.

Karin Conroy (57:42.35)
for the third time or however many times we want to think of it is in our head.

Pete Everitt (57:48.036)
I think we’re getting-