The Sterling Family Law Show

ChatGPT Atlas: Law Firm AI Search Explained - #175

• Jeff Sterling Hughes

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Law firm AI search changed overnight. ChatGPT Atlas just killed traditional SEO. Here's the framework.


Atlas delivers 3-10 results instead of 40. AI ranking factors prioritize specialization over generalist practices and aggregate review quality across platforms. Keyword-stuffed lawyer pages vanish from AI search optimization—conversational, intent-based content wins. Most family law SEO strategies are 3-4 years behind, still writing salesy pages instead of comprehensive educational resources.


We break down the exact ChatGPT Atlas browser ranking system, schema markup optimization requirements, and offsite SEO citations that will help you get on every shortlist. 


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đź“ť Schedule a FREE Family Law Firm Audit: https://rocketclicks.com/schedule-a-family-law-quick-audit/ 


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đź“„ CHAPTERS  


0:00 - Law Firm AI Search: ChatGPT Atlas Changes Everything

0:49 - What is ChatGPT Atlas Browser and Why It Matters

1:52 - Zero-Click Search Results Explained

2:38 - We Tested Divorce Attorney Searches in Atlas

3:23 - The Three AI Ranking Factors for Law Firms

5:16 - Off-Site SEO: The Strategy Most Firms Ignore

24:16 - Why Service Quality Determines AI Visibility

24:32 - Five-Year Outlook: Your Complete Digital Assistant

28:02 - Google vs ChatGPT Atlas: Market Share Predictions


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The AI landscape is shifting. ChatGPT just released its first browser called Atlas, and it is going to change the game for family law firms. You are not going to want to miss this episode. Welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show. We have a very special episode for you today. Very timely. If you've been following along yesterday, which was Thursday, October 23rd, ChatGPT released its Atlas browser. I have a few experts in the room Tony Karls and Casey Shea, both who are, deep diving into our AI experience here at our agency, along with our law firm. Casey, give us the rundown. What what is this new browser? How is it impacting, daily usage today? Yeah. So the new one is going to be ChatGPT Atlas. Earlier this month, perplexity released their own version of it as well. I think it was around like October 2nd. So now it's like now we got two of them that are in the playing field. It's going to be completely changing. Not necessarily search altogether, but how people are searching and how they're finding your stuff. It's just completely changing the game. This is something that's been talked about for a couple of years now. We're more so predicting this would be launched next year, but a little bit early. And so if you have ChatGPT Atlas and you go to the search bar, like in Chrome, for example, you search for, Nike Air Force ones, you're going to get links to Amazon and Nike and everything else. Well now an atlas, it's going to give you a rundown of the particular item with, with different options to buy, for example. So basically eliminating the list, the ads, the maps. You're seeing the same thing, right? Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's turning into they keep calling it the zero click because it's like you're getting all your answers, you getting all your your citations. You know, a lot of people are getting every all the information that they need. And what we're already starting to see is like a lot of people, their direct traffic will start to come up. So they're utilizing this as like their agent to do all of their research. I mean, you can pop up 20 browsers and then just like within one of those browsers, can you compare all of these services that I'm looking at? It'll look at all of your tabs, analyze it all, break it down, simplify it, and give you what the best pick is out of that. Tony, let's think about this from a family law perspective. I know you and I were doing some some testing yesterday. You know, searching for our own firm, searching for some other competitive firms in the marketplace. You know, specifically if you search, like, divorce attorney near me, it kind of auto selected a firm, preemptively. It didn't didn't give you options. How do you how do you foresee that happening in the future and even today, as as this rolls out. Well, it's not going to be. It's not going to be a ton different than. Historically. Search because it's going to. It knows where you're located. So it's going to basically proxy the results based on your location. And then it's going to display results based on a couple of different factors. The things that we we feel like we are seeing consistently is kind of relevant to the topic. So we're we've coached clients historically. You need to be in one vertical. They're biased towards expertise. The AI results are very biased towards expertise. So like what does that mean? If you say you do criminal API, you're not going to show up in AI search results because it doesn't see you as an expert of anything. So it's looking for specialty and expertise. Secondly it's looking for quality. So it's going to aggregate your reviews across the internet in terms of its terms of your quality of service. So if you're not, if you're, if you're the smartest lawyer in the world, but you don't deliver good quality service, you are going to see your, you're going to see your visibility online go down because service is going to become more and more important. Third is, reputable like certifications, badges or recognition. So, it's not just what you say and the quality of the service that you give. So basically, it's not just what you say on your site and the reviews that you've gotten. If you are also not mentioned on other sites that validate your expression of expertise. You're likely not to show up in AI search results, because what AI is doing is it's looking at all of the information online. It's looking at your site and cross-referencing all of that review information and places where you can get badges, certifications or mentions on industry specific blogs. And then they're aggregating that all together, and then they're displaying it in in order of priority. And those three are probably the most important ones that we've seen. Pretty consistent. So, I think it changes the space pretty considerably because it's it doesn't change the need to do SEO. It actually enhances the offsite SEO that a lot of lot of SEOs actually ignore. They don't do a lot of offsite SEO. They typically just focus on the content of the site. They don't think about what is also represented about them offsite. So typically that, you know, in old school world that's that's called PR. Like how is your how is your brand being represented in the world in reputable places? And there's, you know, there's a lot of evidence that, that those types of strategies are, are really winning. So if you're not doing SEO currently, well, you're not serving your clients well, you're not explaining expertise, and you're not actually going out to the marketplace to get references to other places that are reputable. You're likely to not be part of this shift that's occurring online because, you know, the main thing it's doing is it's removing the research. It's removing the need to do research because it's doing it for you and just displaying you. The results. And it's just a lot easier from a user perspective. I think what's going to be really interesting, particularly in the family space and something that we know is that, you know, if you're if you're thinking about getting a divorce, you're going to be doing a lot of incognito search, you're going to be doing research on your own that you don't particularly want people to to find or, you don't want your spouse to find it. But the Atlas Perpendicular is is a personalized search, right. Who knows your search history and, and is going to personalize those results to you. And so does that. Compound your point about having to have your law firm's website be that much more authoritative and that much more specific? In some ways, in some ways I'd say yes. Like it's going to be preferential to things that you've, you've looked at consistently in the past. So like, you know, just this morning, I was doing some testing with, one of our team members and, they were seeing consistently the firm that they work on show up and I results when I went and did it in a couple of my different instances, and I've never looked at that category or that firm before through the islands. They were non-existent. So, there's very much the personalization thing that is included. But that's going to be that's going to be more. I don't know how like it's kind of a chicken and egg scenario there because like your personalized results are going to be based on what you've interacted with and you're going to interact with what they show you. So it's just going to be a continuous cycle. There. Yeah, I just I think overall it's going to be really important that firms do a good job of, putting themselves in a position where they're seen as experts and not jack of all trades, because those are those won't show in results. I just had this thought, for agencies like ours, reporting is going to become interesting. And attribution is people are getting personalized results, being able to communicate that to clients and to help them understand where the searches and users are coming from might pose a challenge in the future. I don't think any different than today because Google does personalized search currently. And you can see like what traffic's coming from, you know, the different, chat platforms as well as different browsers to your website through analytics. So like that's not hidden currently. And but like I said, if you're if you're a consumer in the space especially like our in the more space like that we're in the the likelihood that you're going to have a highly personalized search results in a divorce space unless you're getting divorced every month, which is not the case of how it works. It's going to be like, it's you're not going to get a whole lot of personalization there. Because like, there's you are you are this is your first instance into the marketplace. So it's just going to give you here's what the year of the naked results are. And then based on your interaction with them and you continue to research, then it's going to personalize just like Google does. I think that in the future though, too, it'll get even more personalized just with the way that it's it's headed. So right now, like there's so many behavioral elements, you know, Google when the leaked documents came out, like how Google like what they, what signals they really look for is like long clicks, you know, stopping on pages, things like that. Well, now it's just takes it to a whole different level because now, like if you've used any kind of, you know, AI interface, it starts to like learn your habits and understand like this is the type of thing it wants you to to see and hear. So even if someone is just looking at divorce for the first time in their entire life, they still understand, like, is this a compassionate person? Is this a person that just wants to get stuff done? Like do they just want, you know, the best of the best and they don't care how much they spend, you know, and they're looking at like historically like the things that they purchase and where they're looking and they really like develop a persona for each individual. So it's like, that's really where I see it heading, especially like next year as this evolves. Well said. I want to pivot a little bit and talk about what family law firms can do today. What do they need to be thinking about? How should they be reorienting their agency or their internal marketing staff to get their website in a position to be able to dominate for the next few years as this, revolution continues? So, Casey, why don't we start with you? I know we came up with a few items for this podcast, the first one being like, content. How can family law firms really double down on, on content to help their sites be authoritative? Yeah. So, you know, as Tony touched on foundationally, you know, those citations, all that linking, all that offsite stuff is that's your foundation. But then it's like, okay, you have all of these I always call them neighbors. You know, your Yelp, your directory, stuff like that. You want your neighbors saying good things about you, but when they come to your house, is your house in order? Like, do they understand, like how to get to the bathroom? So like with when it comes to content, especially like this is what I'm always passionate about is just, you know, get reached out by, clients constantly where they're just like, are we ready for AI? It's like, oh, we've been writing. That's why we've been optimizing your content this way. It's like developing your content in a way that I understands it, and specifically what it wants to see, which is a huge shift compared to where things used to be, even like two years ago. The way you wrote content is like pack in as much keywords, phrases, as much information as possible so that you can get authority in that area. Now they want it. So it's like you're having a conversation with the person. So if you're reading a page and it doesn't sound like you're having a conversation about divorce with like a friend or someone you're not going to rank on, I so like the way you develop content is going to be very different. It's going to be very skippable. And it's less about the keywords and all about the intent of the page. Like the content is king now rather than keywords. Days are gone. And the keyword stuffing landing page with bullet points. I want to pull my hair out every time I hear, like, keyword, this keyword that no matter the intent of the page, is what's aligning. And this is a lot of like, what I've been discovering early on because that I'll test out a page and I'll be like, well, why did this page pop up? And they're like, well, because the intent of this and that and whatever, like it gives me a list of reasoning behind it. And I'm like, well, that keyword wasn't even present on that page. Why did you give me that page? And they'll give me five other pages that link into it. So it's like structure. Is that another piece that that people don't really focus on? Tony, our second point is, is real time search engine, results pages and schema checks. What? What a family law firms need to think about here. I mean, the I was just back up on the topic that we were just talking about with Casey. I think the other another relevant piece here is, I think we're building content for and this is just this applies to any sites, not just family law, but it's it's pretty bad in the legal space because at some point, in the past, like just jamming lawyer into every title tag and H1 worked. It doesn't work anymore. It hasn't worked for a while. And you're really set up poorly to win. Like, your site needs to be a book. Like one of your pages should be about what you do, which is like your a lawyer or divorce or criminal defense or whatever the topic is. That's one page the rest of your site should be describing what you do as that thing. And like that is like, honestly, that is just basically missing in the whole industry. But but a few sites and those sites dominate the SERPs. So like Sterling Lawyers, we have about 3000 pages on our website. There are very few that have lawyer in the title tag. We don't just have a whole bunch of spammed up content. That's just lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, lawyer. That's not how it works, because that's not how you rank in, you know, the testing that we've done since the the Atlas browser came out like we're first in almost every search that we search for. And it's not because we did anything unique or special. It's just like we've been playing by the intent of the rules for a very long time, not trying to spam our way to the top and like, so let's just really important because, you know, just to add some, Weight to what Casey was saying, you know, a lot of, a lot of the sites we work with, they don't even have, like, basic things like how to get a divorce in the state that you're, you're working at. It's a process. Like is it it's slightly different in every state. Like what is the process? Oh, you don't have that page. Okay. How about filing. How about filing. How do you file on the different counties that you operate in. Because like that is actually the procedure. All the procedures in different counties are different. They're not the same. So like those are two very, very specific things that are easy wins. That will set you apart from a lot of different places. You know, we thought we'd one of the other things we focus on is calculators. Like we inform the public on how child support is calculated in such different scenarios, how alimony is calculated and a bunch of different scenarios, how property division works and like what what are the rules around property division? We're not giving legal advice. We're basically making the statutes that are visible on all of the state government sites accessible to the public from a language perspective, instead of written in legalese like, that's our job as, you know, managers of these websites and those, those sites that we get to do those with, they rank really well from an SEO perspective. They rank them and they're they are ranking really well in AI search results. Well, sad. Big time. This is a big. Yeah. The second topic here like it's going to, you know, the with whether you're using chat or you're using the browser. It really gives you the ability to analyze what you're doing and what's what you have and what's missing. So like it's it's really smart. Like you can ask you can prompt, you can prompt a, ChatGPT chat instance about a page and ask it like, what? What could I do to optimize this page better for whatever its intent is? And like it's going to tell you, it's going to give you a whole bunch of different things, like including topics that you're missing. It's going to talk to you about different things like schema markup and how you're how you're just thinking about the page. It's going to analyze your overall structured data and like give you feedback on that. So like there's so much potential information that you can get to leverage to implement so like there's there's a lot of benefit there if you're in the, in the space to try to optimize this and kind of do the DIY, DIY thing. Well, sad. How about competitors? How, how is this going to change the competitive landscape? Who are you asking? Yeah. I mean for me, the the competitive landscape, you know, my background is is heavily into SEO. So a lot of our clients, it's always a shock to them when they come from another agency because they're like, well, nope. Nobody has ever done our SEO this way before. And that's really the competitive edge, especially the that we do over here is like, we keep up with the changes. You know, the way that we're structuring content that we're we're writing things. And then with the competition, like a lot of the competition is still, you know, 3 or 4 years behind where it's like it's very salesy, like, you go on every page and it's like, let's just talk about us, you know, let's talk about our brand on, you know, all ten of our main navigation pages. So it's like, that's one aspect. But then the other aspect, that I constantly harp on my team to, to like, further educate themselves in this the sphere with, with AI searches, if we're not on top of it, and if we're not utilizing this every single day, we're going to be gone in two years or less. The way that the rate that this is evolving, like you have to get it integrated into your team, you have to get it integrated into your business now, or you're just going to be left in the dust. So and it'll do a good job to like doing like helping you compare what you're doing versus what your competitors in the marketplace might be doing in terms of like what topics are they talking about? Which ones are you not like? Where are your, where are your gaps from an information perspective that will help? Sure. Shore up your ability to be visible in the results. So it's, you know, like Casey said, if you're using it, you're using it prudently, like you're going to see see gains here because it's it. It will tell you exactly what the problem is. And then you have an opportunity to just execute and fix it. And if you can do the execution, you'll have a good chance of winning. Okay, we know that 42% of all family law leads come from the maps that come from local searches. Right? Divorce attorney near me. Divorce attorney. Milwaukee. How is this evolution going to change? Local results. And what can firms do about it? Tony, I'll start with you. I don't I don't know what percentage it'll change, but I actually think it'll make it more important. But it's going to be different. So if you do, you currently go to an Atlas browser and you search for, you know, I need a lawyer. I need a lawyer in my area for divorce. You're not going to get a whole search results page displayed to you with, like, 20 options. You're you're gonna. I'm I'm currently what I'm receiving is three getting three options that are all free, but it so some instances like I was seeing this morning with one of our team members, he was getting six every time he did a search results. So like they're they're obviously testing. They're going to continue to test on how they return the data. But it's going to be a it's actually going to aggregate this more intensely, not less. So because there's going to be less when they do their research, they're going to coalesce, you know, if you go to any search page and search for one of those terms, there's probably 40 options there. It's going to break them down into like three to 5 to 10 maybe. And then it's going to ask you to prompt it. They don't say at the end would you like more options. Would you like a, you know, more research. And there be some people that want to do that, but the vast majority are going to be like, so you gave me three firms that all have like a 4.8 star or higher, and you gave me reasons why they're good. I'm going to just call that. Here's my short list. Like one thing that I always talked about with the marketing team at Sterling is we were billing the firm is our job is to get on the shortlist. What the what that means to me is anytime you buy something, you typically have 2 to 3 options that you're considering. And, a lot of firms, when you do good work, those repeat businesses, those referrals, like that's one way you get on the shortlist is referrals. So you can do that over the long term. But the other way is through marketing, like how do you get on the shortlist? And like this, this is the I is essentially just giving you the shortlist. You don't have to do research to go develop it yourself. It's speeding that up tremendously. And that's what they're displaying. And then if you want to see the whole list, you can go to the next tab over and click links. And you can see the Google search or the Google search results page that you would have typically seen, if you were to do the research on your own. So it's just streamlining the process tremendously. I've even been leveraging that a lot where it's like, I'll do a search, you know, best, you know, attorney in green Bay or whatever. And then, you know, Sterling didn't pop up. Why didn't Sterling pop up like asking it? Why didn't you choose this? Here are the reasons why I didn't choose that. All right, team, we need to start doing this thing. So, like, it gives you the cheat code. You just have to ask it. that's a great point. I think that a really, really important point to all of this is what we're saying is you're going to get more personalized, calibrated results and less of them. And so step one, be in the shortlist. But step two, if someone calls your firm, answer the damn phone like this is your chance, and you. Have. serving them well, like make sure the person answering it isn't annoyed with the fact that they got to answer the phone like they should be a very warm, compassionate person, especially in the family law space, because these people are now telling a very personal story for the first time to a stranger. And if that stranger seems annoyed, they are not going to remember you or your firm, and they're going to be like, yeah, I'm going to just try the next person that that ChatGPT gave me. This is to me, this is an evolution of what we've been talking about for the last few years. But you have to double down on service. That's the ante. You know, I is never going to be able to replace actual human to human connection and service. And so if you can be in that top three and you can get your firm ranking and have your site be authoritative, you still got to do the basics really, really well. All right. As we're ending here, I'd like both of you to give me your your five year outlook, you know? Where is this going? How's this? This is our little tinfoil hat part of the episode. What do you think the actual evolution of this, plays out? Casey going first. Oh, man, my tinfoil hat. I got a pretty big tinfoil hat. I mean, when you look around, even just outside of limb searches, you know, just just AI in general, it's simplifying our life even more so. So it's like it's making things move ten times faster. So if you start utilizing, you know, ChatGPT in your workload, you're going to start producing 50% more work or 40% if you look at Harvard Studies. But even that that's that's huge. So then you look at search, I was just using Atlas looking for motorcycle parts, and I wanted to find the best deal, and then I wanted it to find promotion codes. So I'm like, all right, this is going to take me forever trying to find a promo code that works. It was done in seconds. So it's like there's so many different things now that are just done. Ten times faster. And then the other thing that I look at too is like the competition has this tool also. So it's like making sure that I'm up to date is more crucial. But I mean, five years out, I think that this is going to be your complete digital assistant. If you think about like when Siri was first announced and I was like, oh my God, this thing is going to be just like out of a sci fi movie. I'm going to just tell it what I want, and it's going to pull it up on my phone and do all of these things. And then you look at how many years later and still doesn't do that, but I think five years from now, that's what lambs are exactly going to do. And it's going to be right in your, your handheld device too, where it's just like, I need this thing. Find me at, okay, here you go. And then, you know, check out, do whatever you want to do. Even with Atlas, I was seeing, like, if you have an online scheduler, it will schedule for you. It will. You can integrate your calendar and it'll look at your calendar. It'll be like, oh, you have an availability there. All right. The schedule says there's availability here. Done. And then you get an email. So it's crazy where it's at right now. In five years it's going to be insane. Tony, you agree? I would say the like. The best corollary is if you've watched any of the Iron Man movies, where Tony Stark is talking to Jarvis in his headset, that's what I, I think that's what it's going to be like, because men will do a lot like it already displays, like, one of the prompts that I run every morning is I ask it to give me the news, the U.S news from the previous day, and then, give me the, the right wing perspective, moderate right, moderate left and left wing perspective and then put it in, put all the stories into an audio file so that I can listen to it as a podcast. And it does all of that for me. And I just have to like, open my ChatGPT and listen to listen to it. And now I'm very well informed on all sides of topics. So it's going to them like that that already exists. So like it's going to It'll be there every day. You don't even have to ask it every day. It'll just be there. of how this impacts Google, because I think that's the big question here that we're talking about is I do believe in the next like so ChatGPT has a massive user base. I think it's 800 million active users every month. In the United States, I think that's close to 200. I think that's, in the United States, I believe that is, close to 200 million active users every month. Most of those are going to switch over and use Atlas instead as their default browser, because the experience is just so much better. Especially the early adopters. So, the, you know, in terms of percentage of the population, I believe that's still only 12 to 15% of the population is actually actively using ChatGPT at the moment. But those are all your early adopters. If you've ever looked at an early adopter curve curve graph, you kind of have like four, or five six sections. You have like the pre pre adopters, the early adopters, then you have like the free normal and then you kind of have everybody after there's it's like a bell curve. And we're in that we're in that second standard deviation now. And we're we're about to move into the third where we're still in kind of early adopter phase. But they have a massive volume of users already. And this is going to impact Google because once you're over in this space, you're probably not going to switch back unless there's a really compelling reason. I haven't switched browsers from Chrome in over ten years. Right. And like this is the first time I've started using a different browser in that ten year period. So I'm going to have to have a really compelling reason to switch back to Google, because the experience is better. And like, I'm starting to load all my crap into this browser because it's a pain in the butt. It's kind of like it's kind of like switching bank accounts. Like nobody likes to switch bank accounts because you got to log in to everything that you're possibly connected to so that you can pay your, your credit card and your internet bill and your so on and so forth. They made it so easy to like. You can just import your Chrome user Yeah. all that. Like when I saw it I was like, oh, all right, we're good. Make it easy. Yeah. It's, next six months, I do believe, I think Google currently has like an 80 or 81% search share in the United States. I think that's going to drop to the low 70s. Like it's not going to happen overnight. Like this isn't going to be a death cliff. At Google is one of the best, most capitalized, well, well-funded companies in the world. Like, they're they're not going to be like, oh, well, we'll see what happens. And hopefully nothing breaks. Like they're going to aggressively make moves, obviously, because they have tons of capital, tons of backing, but they're also big and bureaucratic because they're a huge company where, you know, I open I guess is a lot smaller and they can move and they're more nimble. And, you know, it's much easier to turn a speedboat than it is to turn an aircraft carrier in Google's aircraft carrier in a circumstance. Well said. The world is changing around us, and we are going to stay on the bleeding edge. I think we have a little AI podcast series coming out so we can keep all of our Family Attorney listeners up to speed. Gents, really appreciate your time today. Appreciate your insights. Looking forward to watching this. Continue on.

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Jeff Hughes

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