Your Law Firm’s Content Is Competing With the Entire Internet

Why Clarity, Structure, and Depth Decide Who Gets Seen

By Dave Taillefer, Business Director / ICONA

Law firms often look at a competitor’s website and think: “Why are they showing up, and we’re not? We have similar content.” But similarity isn’t the problem. The real issue is scale — your pages aren’t competing with one or two nearby firms. They’re being evaluated against thousands of high-authority sources across the entire internet.

AI-driven search doesn’t think in terms of local competitors. It thinks in terms of clarity, structure, and trust. A practice-area page from a small firm isn’t only compared to another small firm’s. It’s measured against government websites, legal information institutes, media explainers, academic pages, and well-established nonprofit resources. That’s the new search environment, and the firms that understand it early will shape how clients find legal information in the years ahead.

This shift has been forming for several years, accelerated by answer-based systems like Google’s AI Overviews, Bing’s Deep Search, Perplexity, and OpenAI’s conversational responses. In The Zero-Click Reality and Search Is Becoming a Conversation, we explored how discovery is moving into environments where the “click” is no longer the main signal of visibility. This article goes a level deeper: why your content now competes with the entire internet — and what it takes to win.

Search No Longer Compares You to Other Firms — It Compares You to the Best Answer

Traditional SEO created a narrow competitive lens. Keywords, backlinks, and domain authority painted a picture of ranking competition that felt local and manageable. But answer-based search uses a different logic. It looks for the best possible response, not the best-optimized local page.

When someone asks:

“How do I file for divorce in Alberta?”
“What does reasonable doubt mean in Canadian law?”
“What happens at an immigration hearing?”

the AI system scans across education portals, government sites, legal nonprofits, high-quality publishers, and structured reference materials. It then compares your page against these sources — not just the other law firms in a 50-kilometre radius.

This means content quality is no longer relative to your peers. It’s relative to the entire internet.

Firms that treat content as a commodity — a few paragraphs, a light overview, a bulleted list — are being outranked not by competitors, but by more structured, more readable, more complete resources elsewhere.

What AI Systems Reward: Clarity, Structure, Depth

Most firms assume AI ranking is mysterious, but the patterns are consistent. Across our work with answer-focused search and generative engines, three themes repeat.

Clarity wins more than creativity

AI systems favour plain language. They look for clear definitions, well-framed questions, and concise explanations. Pages overloaded with legal jargon or decorated with metaphors are harder for models to parse.

In Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), we argued that content which reads like a well-structured reference entry — rather than marketing copy — performs best in AI environments. That’s even more true today.

Structure signals trust

Headings, subheadings, definition blocks, Q&A sections, and clear segmentation help AI engines understand where answers begin and end. A person might skim a long paragraph and still catch the meaning. A model is less forgiving.

This is why two pages with similar wording can perform very differently in answer-based search. Structure is now a competitive advantage.

Depth beats breadth

Many firms still rely on one-page summaries of major practice areas. But AI systems favour domains with topical depth — multiple, focused pages that build authority over time.

A single page on “family law” will not compete with layered content such as:

“How separation works in Alberta”
“What happens at a family case conference”
“How parenting time is decided”
“What to know about support calculations”

Depth signals experience, consistency, and reliability. It also gives AI engines more surface area to retrieve from.

Why Lawyers See Competitors Outperforming Them

Lawyers often ask: “Why does their page show up in the answer instead of ours? We said the same thing.”

In practice, several quiet advantages stack up:

• Their writing is clearer. Even small differences in readability can decide which page gets included in an answer.
• Their structure is cleaner. AI engines favour content where questions and answers are easy to isolate.
• Their content is deeper. Five focused pages on a topic routinely outperform one broad overview.
• Their page is more machine-readable. Schema markup, stable URLs, and clean headings make it easier for systems to trust and reuse their content.
• Their tone is informational, not promotional. Models tend to pick up on neutrality. Sales-heavy pages are often ignored.

In Law Firm Marketing in the Age of AI Search, we noted that users increasingly expect direct, answer-first interactions. AI search doesn’t change that shift — it accelerates it.

The Hidden Competition: Government, Academia, and Nonprofits

Law firms tend to benchmark themselves against other firms. But in AI search, you’re competing with:

• Government legal information portals.
• Provincial justice and court resources.
• Academic references from Canadian universities.
• Large nonprofits and public legal education sites.
• High-authority national publishers and reference brands.

These sources often win because their content is:

• Highly structured.
• Neutral in tone.
• Jurisdictionally explicit.
• Edited for readability.
• Updated on a consistent cadence.

The takeaway is simple: winning isn’t about beating another firm’s blog. It’s about matching the clarity and rigour of the best reference material available online.

What Wins in a World Where Everything Competes With You

Across hundreds of pages analysed in AI-influenced environments, four attributes consistently correlate with better retrieval and answer inclusion.

Start with the real question users ask

AI systems respond best to natural-language questions, not keyword blocks. Use the phrasing clients actually use in consultations, intake calls, and emails.

Provide the short answer first

A crisp, jurisdiction-specific explanation near the top establishes clarity immediately. Longer interpretation and context can follow.

Segment the content with precision

This isn’t only for SEO — it’s for machine interpretation. Each key idea should live under its own heading so it can be understood, quoted, or summarised cleanly.

Build architectures, not isolated pages

Clusters outperform standalone pages. A coherent group of related articles signals topic depth and reinforces your position as a reliable source. The same principle sits behind our work in The Science Of First Impressions Online: clarity and predictability shape trust, for both humans and algorithms.

The Strategic Shift: From Rankings to Retrieval

Traditional SEO is still necessary, but retrieval-based visibility has become a second layer of competition. Law firms that win in AI search do three things consistently:

• They think in questions, not just keywords.
• They write for clarity, not cleverness.
• They build depth, not thin volume.

Firms that treat content as a long-term asset — instead of a box to tick — gain steady ground as AI systems cite, summarise, and reuse their work across answer experiences.

Where Law Firms Go From Here

Law firm websites are entering a phase where the goal is no longer to publish the most content, but to publish the most usable content. Usability now applies to two audiences:

• The human reader, who needs reassurance and direction.
• The machine interpreter, which needs structure, clarity, and context.

Your content competes with the entire internet — but that doesn’t make visibility impossible. It raises the bar on clarity, structure, and depth. Firms that meet that bar will be the ones included in tomorrow’s answers, even if fewer users ever click through.

If earlier years rewarded firms for ranking, the next decade will reward firms for answering.

References

Note: Statistics and findings from third-party sources may change over time as Google, AI platforms, and user behaviour evolve.