There’s a new audience reading the thought leadership produced by attorneys and legal industry executives. The sooner they realize that and plan accordingly, the sooner they can take advantage of the opportunities this new audience offers.
Attorneys and legal industry executives write their thought leadership for human readers.
Makes perfect sense, right?
Even with search engine optimization (SEO) driving how certain types of online content are written, attorneys and legal industry executives write thought leadership because it’s an effective way to position themselves as authorities. Thought leadership is about demonstrating knowledge and wisdom, and providing insights, to other humans. It’s not about writing content around specific keywords to try to get to the top of Google search results.
But times have changed. Today, the readers of thought leadership are no longer just humans. AI systems are now consuming thought leadership content at a scale that no human audience ever could.
They’re evaluating our expertise, ranking our authority, summarizing our insights, and deciding whether our names and perspectives should appear first, fifth, or not at all when someone asks an AI platform to tell them who the “best” people are who do what we do, or asks questions that our published content could answer.
And because of that, the legal industry’s traditional approach to publishing thought leadership is no longer enough.
AI platforms are a new thought leadership middleman
One of the reasons thought leadership is and has been an effective marketing and business development tool is that no middleman filters its substance. Whether the thought leadership came in the form of an email newsletter, a blog post, or a contributed article published in a third-party publication, that piece of thought leadership was discoverable and digestible in its original form.
When clients and referral sources discovered and digested thought leadership, they used it to evaluate the author’s expertise.
They used it to determine who was knowledgeable and wise about the topics they covered in that thought leadership.
They used it to decide whom to trust.
They used it to decide whom to work with.
But now AI sits between the authors of thought leadership and their audiences. It’s the new thought leadership middleman.
It decides which content gets surfaced, which content gets summarized, and which content gets sidelined. AI platforms are shaping the visibility of attorneys, legal industry executives, and other professionals in the eyes of people using those platforms to find them.
But many law firms and organizations that serve the legal industry don’t seem to realize what’s happening.
They need to wake up. If they don’t, they might be invisible to AI platforms, leaving them invisible to clients, referral sources, and other target audiences.
To be fair, searches on AI platforms pale in comparison to searches on Google. As of when I’m writing this, Google processes roughly 16.4 billion searches daily, while ChatGPT handles roughly 800 million AI searches. The latter’s share of searches is small (i.e., 4.9 percent).
But an October 2025 Pew Research study found that users click links in search results 47% less when AI Overviews appear in Google results (8% click rate with AI Overviews vs 15% without). More concerning is that 26% of users end their browsing session after receiving AI-generated answers. That’s 63% higher than the 16% who end their sessions after a search when there are no AI Overviews.
And therein lies the rub. Even though AI searches account for a relatively small (but growing) share of online searches, they often provide answers without citing the original source.
Compare that to Google’s results, which, even when they display an AI overview at the top of the search results, will show a user links to other websites. If the user is searching for an answer to a question that’s answerable by thought leadership, the user could visit the websites where particular pieces of thought leadership live, consume that content, and find “new to them” thought leadership content creators whom they then follow on social media, subscribe to their email newsletters, and/or generally become a new fan of.
A new AI-imposed structure on thought leadership
Much of the thought leadership published today is not structured in a way that AI will interpret as expert-authored. That’s not because the ideas in the thought leadership are weak; it’s because traditional thought leadership wasn’t designed to be evaluated the way AI platforms evaluate it today.
AI penalizes vague structure, shallow analysis, and recycled summaries—traits that plenty of thought leadership has.
AI rewards clarity, original insights, organized reasoning, and signals of genuine authority and expertise. In other words, AI is rewarding attorneys and legal industry executives who produce true thought leadership content—content that’s clear, original, organized, and shows that the author knows what they’re talking about.
When we talk about structuring thought leadership for AI, we need to discuss AEO, GEO, and AIO briefly.
AEO is “Answer Engine Optimization.” It’s the process of writing and structuring content so it’s easily understood by search engines’ built-in AI, which then summarizes it in the “AI Summary” section of its search results and, hopefully, includes a citation so users can see the content’s source.
GEO is “Generative Engine Optimization.” It’s the process of writing and structuring content to increase its visibility in AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude.
And finally, AIO is “Artificial Intelligence Optimization.” AIO is similar to GEO. It’s the process of writing and structuring content so AI platforms can more easily digest and understand it, and serve it up in answers to users’ questions.
AEO, GEO, and AIO provide opportunities for law firms and organizations that serve the legal industry to be first movers. The firms and organizations that produce thought leadership that appeals to both humans and AI platforms will be the ones that AI models reference in their results.
The models will recognize the firms’ and organizations’ attorneys and leaders as trusted experts, cite their content more frequently, and recommend them as leaders in their fields more frequently.
Time for attorneys and legal industry executives to get in the game
Thought leadership today has two audiences: humans and AI platforms. If an attorney’s or legal industry executives’ thought leadership doesn’t speak to both, they’re leaving visibility, credibility, and new business opportunities on the table.
But these attorneys and executives can’t play the AEO, GEO, and AIO game, let alone the “produce thought leadership for humans to consume” game, if they’re not consistently producing thought leadership.
They need to understand that, in today’s world where AI is increasingly becoming a part of our everyday lives, building their authority—and perhaps a book of business—requires being seen as authoritative by both humans and AI platforms.
The most effective path to getting there is by regularly publishing thought leadership, whether by taking the time to write it themselves, working with an associate or another colleague, or hiring an outside ghostwriter.
Thinking about bringing on an outside writer to help your law firm strategize and create compelling thought-leadership marketing and business development content? Click here to schedule a 30-minute Content Strategy Audit to learn if collaborating with an outside writer is the right move for you and your firm.