Search Is Becoming a Conversation
Search Is Becoming a Conversation— And Law Firms Must Learn to Answer It
By Dave Taillefer, Business Director / ICONA
In the last few years, the way people discover legal information online has shifted more than at any point since Google went mainstream. Search is no longer a linear process where users type a keyword, scan ten blue links, and click. Increasingly, discovery begins — and sometimes ends — with an answer, generated by an AI system that interprets intent, summarises sources, and presents a conclusion before a website is ever visited.
This shift isn’t theoretical. It’s measurable and accelerating, and it is already reshaping how law firms earn visibility.
Major industry studies have documented the rise of AI-mediated interactions in everyday decision-making, from financial services to healthcare. Search behaviour is following the same pattern. People are asking more natural-language questions, relying more heavily on instant summaries, and clicking fewer traditional results than in previous years. At the same time, Google, Microsoft, and AI-native platforms like Perplexity are investing heavily in answer-style experiences that sit on top of their indexes.
For law firms — where visibility, credibility, and compliance intersect — this creates a new competitive landscape. Being “ranked” is no longer enough. You must also be quoted, cited, or summarised within the answer itself.
If the homepage once served as the front door, the legal market is now entering a world where the front door is the question.
The Rise of AI-Mediated Discovery
Across Google, Bing, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, one pattern repeats: users are moving from “searching” to “asking.” Google calls this shift AI Overviews; Bing calls it Deep Search; OpenAI simply calls it Answers. The mechanics, however, are similar.
A user now asks:
- “How is child support calculated in Alberta?”
- “Do I need a will if I own a business in Ontario?”
- “What happens at a bail hearing in BC?”
The model pulls structured responses from authoritative websites, evaluates clarity and context, and generates a synthesized answer. In many cases, the user receives enough information to feel oriented — without clicking through.
This phenomenon, often described as “zero-click” behaviour, is no longer fringe. Multiple independent analyses over the past several years have shown that a significant share of searches now end without a traditional click, and that proportion has been rising as richer answer formats emerge.
Our own analysis at ICONA supports this trend. Practice-area pages, FAQs, and long-form explainers consistently outperform homepages in both entrance traffic and inclusion in AI-style responses. The early data is clear: homepage-first discovery is collapsing. Question-first discovery is taking its place.
For readers who want deeper context from our earlier work, see:
Why Legal Is Being Impacted Faster Than Other Industries
Legal search behaviour is inherently question-driven. Users don’t begin with brand names; they begin with anxieties.
They ask:
- “What do I do now?”
- “Is this serious?”
- “What are my rights?”
Because of this, AI systems gravitate toward practice-area explainers, structured FAQs, jurisdiction-specific guides, and clear definitions — precisely the content that many law firms underinvest in.
Survey research on information-seeking shows that a large majority of adults now turn to the internet as their first source when dealing with serious problems, including legal concerns. Separate work on digital experiences in professional services has found that interactions perceived as frictionless and immediate tend to outperform slow, opaque processes in trust formation. When you combine these trends with conversational AI, a pattern emerges: the firms that answer well — not just rank well — win the first impression.
For strategic background on this shift in the legal context, see:
The Technical Shift: Why Structure Now Matters as Much as Content
Being included in AI-generated answers is not random. It follows patterns that are becoming clearer as these systems mature.
- Structured content. Clear headings, definition blocks, and tightly written explanations make it easier for AI systems to understand what a page is about and where each answer starts and ends.
- Schema markup. Google’s own documentation confirms that rich results and enhanced answer experiences rely heavily on structured data formats such as FAQPage, HowTo, and Article schema.
- Topical depth. Models, like traditional algorithms, favour domains that demonstrate consistent, multi-page authority on a subject rather than one thin overview.
- Clarity and compliance. AI engines respond better to content that is clear, factual, and jurisdiction-aware. Overly promotional language or vague claims can work against you, particularly in regulated fields such as law.
This is why ICONA treats content creation as an engineering discipline, not just a copywriting exercise. We design legal content to be read by humans and reliably interpreted by machines.
Related foundational pieces include:
A New KPI: Answer Inclusion Rate
Law firms have traditionally measured performance through rankings, traffic, conversions, and intake volume. Those still matter, but they no longer tell the whole story.
A new internal metric is emerging: Answer Inclusion Rate (AIR) — how often a firm’s content appears, in whole or in part, in AI summaries, featured snippets, AI Overviews, and conversational search responses.
While this metric is still evolving, early observation suggests that pages optimised for AI extraction tend to see:
- Stronger brand recall, even when the user doesn’t click immediately.
- Lower bounce rates when the user does click, because expectations were set by the answer.
- More qualified inquiries, because the first impression is informational rather than purely promotional.
As more search behaviour moves into conversational interfaces, AIR will become a useful leading indicator of visibility and relevance, especially for firms competing in crowded urban markets.
What Law Firms Should Do Now
The firms that succeed through 2026 and beyond will be those who treat AI-mediated search not as a novelty but as the new baseline search environment.
Three priorities stand out:
- Restructure content around questions, not just keywords. Every practice page should answer the real questions clients ask in consultations, intake calls, and emails — clearly and in plain language.
- Expand topical depth. Multiple focused pages on related subtopics typically outperform a single catch-all page. This also creates more opportunities for AI systems to pull precise, context-rich answers.
- Invest in technical clarity. Schema, clean headings, stable URLs, modern performance, and mobile responsiveness are no longer “nice to have.” They are signals that help AI systems trust, index, and quote your content.
Our work at ICONA across Canadian law firms suggests that firms who adopt answer-focused, AI-aware content structures see improvements not only in visibility, but also in the perceived authority of their online presence — even before direct contact is made.
The Future Belongs to the Firm That Answers
Search is becoming a conversation. In a conversational world, the firm that answers best earns the introduction.
For nearly two decades, law firms won online by ranking higher. Over the next several years, they will increasingly win by being included in the answer, whether or not the user ever visits their homepage.
The homepage is not dead. It is simply no longer the starting point.
The question is.
About the Author
Dave Taillefer is Business Director at ICONA Inc., overseeing SEO, content strategy and digital transformation for Canadian law firms. With deep knowledge of legal marketing, technical SEO, and generative search strategy, Dave helps firms future-proof their online visibility.