With 57% of adults in the United States using a generative chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini multiple times a week, the landscape for how people find information, such as what lawyer to hire, has changed dramatically in a very short time. But generative AI tools are more than just answer engines, they can, among other things, research, outline, draft, critique and edit the very content that formulates the answers they give. So, let’s explore what a law firm should do when they simultaneously want a presence in AI answers and have that same AI available to help create content.
For anyone who’s been through a law firm website project, or has been tasked with blogging and keeping a law firm’s website up-to-date, you’ll also know that website content is one of the most difficult things for attorneys to commit time and attention to. With so many pulls and constraints on an attorney’s time, AI proves to be a very tempting option to get the job done, and it’s one of the most common topics we’re advising law firms on right now.
So, what exactly is AI-generated content? And, what are the pros and cons that lawyers need to be aware of when using AI-generated content for their law firm?
What Is AI Generated Content?
Broadly speaking, AI generated content is any sort of text, graphics, video, audio or code that is created by an AI tool such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Claude instead of a human author. However, in 2026, the definition of AI generated content has evolved to include the involvement of AI as a collaborator in the creative process. If you were to create labels for the final works, they would look more like this:
- AI-Created: Content is generated almost entirely by AI with little to no human involvement.
- AI-Drafted, Human-Refined: AI creates the first draft, and a human edits, shapes, and improves it.
- Human-Created, AI-Enhanced: A human creates the first draft, with AI used for editing, suggestions, or polishing.
- Human-Created, AI-Assisted Research: Content is created by a human, with AI used only for research, brainstorming, or background support.
While AI can be involved in a variety of ways in the content generation process, what gets called out as “That’s AI!” or flagged by AI detection programs tends to be text, video or graphics where AI has created the first draft. But, beyond public perception, it’s important to recognize how AI is involved in the content creation process because there are proposed or passed regulations in nearly every state working to increase the disclosure of AI usage in commerce, especially as it relates to graphical content and human likeness.
For the purpose of this article, however, we’re going to focus primarily on textual content and using AI as a writing tool lawyers can use for their website and marketing.
The Pros of AI-Generated Content for Law Firms
Speed & Volume
AI tools are able to quickly produce first drafts of content at scale. This can represent a tremendous time savings for attorneys who are looking to balance the demands of their billable client work with necessary business development tasks like law firm blogging. With a bit of time and creativity dedicated to writing a detailed and nuanced prompt, AI can output an initial draft or outline that also moves away from the generic content that plagues many websites.
A word of caution here: if you’re using AI the right way, with proper attorney review, research verification, and editorial refinement, the time savings may be less dramatic than they appear. The value of AI in the writing process is often less about raw speed and more about producing a stronger starting point.
Cost Efficiency
No doubt about it, when you look at things from a pure cost-per-word or cost-per-piece perspective, AI is practically free. In the same way that services like LegalZoom are tempting to legal clients, AI can look very attractive when compared to the cost of staff time, a professional writer or agency.
Consistent Publishing Cadence
Publishing fresh content on a regular schedule is a part of any legal content marketing plan. Having a consistent publication cadence has long been a strong signal to search engines like Google that a site is regularly updated and should be crawled frequently. Further, writing on a specific subject matter, such as family law, builds topical authority. Whether you’re using AI to create first drafts or to brainstorm and research topic ideas, it can be tremendously helpful in maintaining a regular publishing schedule.
Research & Ideation
AI is tireless in its ability to keep coming up with new ideas or perspectives to consider. You may feel tapped out thinking of a topic for your 300th blog post on chapter 7 bankruptcy, but not AI. It can analyze your existing content to identify gaps. It can look at your competitors’ websites to see what you’ve missed. It can take in current news or caselaw to offer new ideas. AI can even imagine different customer avatars to suggest how you may rewrite or create additional content to speak specifically to a struggling single parent, a person with a gambling problem, or a family facing a medical crisis. Being the first law firm to surface and write about a topic can have real value both with search rankings and client connection and AI can help you find those topics.
SEO Foundations
After drafting a page or post for your website the work isn’t done. It still needs metatags, an SEO friendly title, and potentially structural improvements or keyword optimization. You may also want brief summaries to preview and promote the content across your website and social channels. AI is excellent at drafting this mico-content and suggesting technical enhancements that help content get indexed by both search and generative engines.
The “Professional” Editor
AI can be a fantastic second set of eyes to use in critiquing and enhancing your own work. With proper prompting it can spot factual errors, issues with tone, readability and grammar, additional angles you may consider, weaknesses or inconsistencies in your reasoning, and more. Training up an AI bot to serve as professional editor can meaningfully improve your final version.
The Cons
The Cons of AI-Generated Content for Law Firms
Accuracy & Hallucination Risk
AI systems are probabilistic, not deterministic. They make mistakes and sound confident while doing so. In fact, while researching this article, Gemini proudly told me about a book that doesn’t exist. Attorneys have an ethical duty to verify all facts presented by AI, especially legal claims, citations, and procedural rules before publishing. While you can prompt your AI to include citations with every claim, it still requires manual verification.
Poor Public Perception
People seeking legal help are rarely in a neutral headspace. They’re often facing tough life situations, a divorce, an injury, a criminal charge, a wage garnishment, a business dispute, or a death in the family. They arrive at a law firm’s website already emotionally activated and they’re remarkably good at sensing when the content they’re reading was written by something that has never experienced anything at all. AI-generated content in these moments doesn’t just fall flat; it can actively undermine the trust a firm needs to turn a visitor into a client.
Google learned this the hard way during the 2024 Olympics, when an ad depicting Gemini ghostwriting a child’s fan letter was pulled after a swift and universal backlash. The lesson wasn’t lost on the industry, by 2025, AI advertising had pivoted sharply away from human emotional tasks toward logistics and productivity. Law firms should take the same note. The higher the emotional stakes of a practice area, the more important it is that the content reads like it was written by someone who actually understands what the client is going through.
Google Penalizes Thin AI Content
Google, as a search engine, has a responsibility to its brand and users to first and foremost, discover and surface the most helpful answers and content to a user’s query. If it stops giving good answers, users will flee. Starting in 2022 Google has made a series of algorithm changes called “Helpful Content Updates” designed to weed out thin or poorly produced content that it believes was published solely to get clicks vs. offering real value to human readers. While Google does not ban AI generated content, each successive Helpful Content Update has continued to raise the bar that all content must reach in order to rank well. This means that generic or lightly edited AI drafted content is unlikely to perform well in search.
Fails E-E-A-T Standards
Google has a framework for assessing the overall quality of content called E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Experience means does the author have enough first-hand, professional or life experience to be a credible source on this topic. Expertise means does the author have the necessary skill, knowledge or qualifications to discuss the topic. Authoritativeness means the website is a go-to or recognizable resource for information on the topic. And trustworthiness means the website is safe, accurate and transparent. Since AI does not actually embody the lived experience of a lawyer, it has a difficult time producing actual E-E-A-T worthy content for a law firm. Further, since law is in a category of information referred to by the industry as “your money or your life” (YMYL) it receives extra scrutiny by search engines so, generic AI generated content is especially hard hit.
Won’t Get You Cited by AI Search
Like search engines, AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are also in the business of answering questions and concerned about their reputation for providing the best answers. This means that they are also looking for content that is high-quality, unique, authoritative, and conveys expertise by containing jurisdiction-specific details, referencing relevant case law and having authorship attributed to an attorney. AI systems are not as interested in citing or learning from content that it could have drafted itself.
AI Content is Detectible
It’s not just em dashes, telltale words and tone that give AI away, it’s the algorithms. As AI models grow in sophistication they are each leaning into their own unique styles of writing and reasoning. Pangram, a leading AI text detection tool can not only identify AI content with 99.98% accuracy, it can also tell which AI tool was used and can distinguish between content that is authored vs. edited with AI. In our own experiments we also found that AI authored text, despite heavy human editing, remained highly detectable. So, if authenticity is important to your law firm’s brand, it is difficult to use AI drafted content without risk of detection.
What Google and AI Search Actually Reward
At the end of the day Google and AI tools are all centered around trust. Google wants users to trust its search engine results, AI overviews and ads, otherwise users will bail. Similarly, generative AI engines want to be seen as an even more efficient and trustworthy source for answers. These companies all have a vested interest in squashing any behavior that undermines trust in their product. It may take some time for companies to react, during which the latest trick may get some results, but over the long-term these companies will do everything in their power to surface the best content and answers.
Look no further than Google’s Core Update log to see that almost 40% of their updates since 2021 have been to reduce spammy content and raise the profile of truly helpful content.
In addition to being indexed by search engines, content is now being digested in a new way by Generative AI engines. Published information and research into how generative AI engines, like ChatGPT, think about content shows many overlapping techniques and principles between optimizing content for search engines (SEO) and AI. However, since AI processes and “understands” content in a different way from search engine crawlers, there is an emerging field of expertise and set of techniques called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) that aims to structure and organize content in a way that leads to more frequent citations and linking in generative AI answers.
Some of the early takeaways that law firms can use to optimize their content for generative engines include:
- Adding key takeaway summaries to the top of articles. This entices generative engines to consume the content by giving it an early indication of what it’s going to find before it commits computing resources.
- Add jurisdiction-specific details, real case scenarios, and practice area context that AI cannot generate on its own.
- List a named attorney and link to the attorney’s bio on every article. This is good for both E-E-A-T and GEO.
- Add schema markup (schema.org) to give a better technical understanding of the content to generative engines. Common schema types for law firms include Article, FAQPage, LegalService, Person, LocalBusiness.
- Focus on a single topic per page or article.
As AI tools and search engines like Google update their algorithms to adapt to an internet that’s freshly flooded with AI drafted content, the result is a landscape where content needs to be better than ever to get noticed. Ironically, AI is proving incredibly helpful here as an assistant to research, critique, refine and enhance human authored content.
Best Practices – Using AI The Right Way
Monthslong studies reveal that websites that rely heavily on AI drafted content with little or no human involvement may get an initial boost in traffic but quickly plummet, and then fall further with each successive spam mitigation or helpful content update. So, while there may be a short term win based on volume, heavily AI authored content fails to outperform human-involved content in the long-run due to low quality.
However, where AI shines most is by augmenting the content strategy and production process. This includes topic brainstorming, competitive research, topic research, editorial critique and marketing support. The result is content that is stronger than what an unassisted writer could create on their own.
In a law firm setting, an AI enhanced writing process may look like this:
Pre-Writing Phase
- AI to suggest blog topics based on your target audience, content already on your website and content published on the websites of your top five competitors.
- Once a topic is selected, use AI to perform initial research and suggest an outline, key points or rough structure to follow.
- If the topic is covered by competitors, use AI to brainstorm angles or approaches that would make your version more helpful and distinct from what’s already out there.
- An attorney or knowledgeable person vets and consolidates all research into a concise document brief.
Writing Phase
- Full Human Writing: With research vetted and in-hand, an attorney, or capable writer, is now set for success to draft a thorough, helpful and authoritative piece of content that includes their unique style and perspectives and will not be flagged as AI generated.
- AI Drafted, Attorney Reviewed: As an alternative to human writing, AI can create a first draft that is then augmented and reviewed by an attorney who adds critical experience based information. The result will be better than pure AI content but will remain detectable as AI or heavily AI generated content.
Post-Writing Phase
- Have AI take on the role of professional editor to check for errors, grammar, tone and style consistency.
- Stress test your arguments by asking AI to critique the main points of your piece.
- Double-check the draft against the content brief using AI to ensure all points were covered.
- Have AI draft suggest micro-content summaries to use for sharing via social media, newsletters and other channels.
After working with law firms on their content and digital presence for more than two decades, the pattern is consistent: the firms building lasting online authority are the ones investing in content that truly connects with and helps visitors. That hasn’t changed, but how they produce it has.
The firms gaining ground in 2026 aren’t ones that fully embraced AI or fully rejected it. Rather, they’re the firms that have figured out where AI belongs in their process. AI handles the heavy lifting of research, brainstorming, editing and rough-drafting. Attorneys or experienced writers bring the nuanced judgment, personal experience, and authority that AI can’t replicate. The combination of AI capability with human touch produces the elevated level of content that search engines reward, AI platforms cite, and clients trust.
