Last week, Ben Holtom of RecQuest wrote a clear, practical piece on the new Generative AI performance report inside Google Search Console, and what it means for UK law firms. He was generous enough to reference my work on AI Overview citations. He also made a point most firms miss: AI visibility is not only a client-acquisition issue. It is a recruitment one.
That deserves expanding, because it changes which pages on your website actually matter.
Two audiences now research your firm the same way
Most law firm SEO is built around one reader: the prospective client. The conveyancing page is written to win the instruction. The family law page is written to reassure someone at a difficult moment. That work is necessary, and it is where the commercial return is easiest to see.
But a second audience reads your site with just as much intent, and increasingly through the same AI-mediated search. When a solicitor considers a move, the first thing many of them do is research the firm online. They are no longer reading only your careers page. They are asking an AI assistant what your firm is known for, which partners lead which teams, what the culture appears to be, and how the practice compares with the firm down the road.
The answer they get is assembled from whatever your site makes legible: your people pages, your practice-area descriptions, your news, and the third-party sources that mention you. If those sources are thin, the AI fills the gap with your competitors, or it says very little about you at all. Either outcome costs you in a hiring market where good fee earners are scarce and expensive to attract.
Why your people pages are now SEO assets
For years, solicitor profile pages were treated as a formality: a headshot, a job title, a line or two of biography, an email address. They were rarely structured, rarely updated, and almost never written with search in mind.
That is no longer tenable. Named solicitor profiles with real credentials are one of the signals that AI systems weight when deciding which firms to cite for legal queries. The same content that helps a client trust a named expert also tells an AI assistant who at your firm does what, to what standard, and with what recognition. A profile that reads as a structured record of expertise is useful to a search system. A profile that reads as a placeholder is not.
The implication for recruitment is direct. If a candidate asks an AI assistant about the strength of your private client team and the system has nothing substantive to draw on, your firm does not enter the conversation. The candidate forms an impression of a firm that is quieter, smaller, or less established than it actually is, before anyone at your firm has had the chance to make the case.
The brochure problem applies to hiring too
I make this point often about service pages: if your conveyancing page is three paragraphs of generic reassurance followed by a contact form, AI Overviews have nothing to cite, so they quote a competitor who explained the process, the likely cost, and the typical timeline instead.
Careers and people pages have exactly the same failure mode. A careers page that says the firm is “a great place to work” with “a supportive culture” gives a search system nothing specific to repeat. A page that explains how teams are structured, how supervision and progression work, which practice areas are growing, and what the firm genuinely does differently gives both a candidate and an AI assistant something real to work with. The firms that write their people content as answers rather than reassurance will be the ones surfaced when candidates research the market.
You can finally measure this
Until recently, all of this was theoretical. That changed in the space of a few weeks.
On 3 June 2026, Google launched a Generative AI performance report inside Search Console, showing how often your pages appear inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by page, country, and device. UK sites received it first, ahead of the rest of the world. It is an impressions report rather than a clicks report, so it answers “is Google’s AI quoting us?” rather than “is that sending us work?” — but it is the first real baseline firms have had.
Three weeks earlier, on 13 May 2026, Google Analytics 4 quietly added an “AI Assistant” channel to its default channel grouping, separating visits that arrive from tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude from ordinary referral traffic. Between the two, you can now see which of your pages the AI is citing and roughly how much traffic those tools send you.
Look at the page-level breakdown with both audiences in mind. If your people and careers pages never appear, that is not a neutral result. It tells you the content a candidate would rely on is invisible to the systems they now search through.
What to do about it
- Treat solicitor profiles as primary content, not directory entries. Give each named fee earner real credentials, specialisms, professional memberships, and a substantive account of the work they do.
- Write careers content as specific answers — team structure, supervision, progression, growth areas — rather than culture statements that could belong to any firm.
- Check the Search Console AI report and the GA4 AI Assistant channel monthly, and watch whether your people pages ever appear.
- Make sure the structured, citable signals are in place across the site, not just on the pages that sell to clients. The same six signals that win AI Overview citations apply to the content candidates read.
The recruiter’s view is worth listening to
I work on the search side of this. The people who see the hiring consequences first are the specialist recruiters who place solicitors every week and watch candidates research firms in real time. Ben and the team at RecQuest, who recruit across the South Coast — Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Surrey, and West Sussex — make a point I would endorse without reservation: how your firm presents itself online now shapes who applies, not just who instructs.
AI search has quietly merged your marketing audience and your hiring audience into people who ask the same questions in the same place. The firms that understand that will compete better for clients and for talent at the same time.
If you want to understand where your firm currently stands across AI search, that is the work I do — start with AI search visibility for solicitors, or book an intro call.
