Author: Paul J Bruemmer
By Team Jury Analyst
With a nod to Casey Petersen’s spicy truths
“Unpopular opinion: I’m happy SEO is dying.”
– Casey Petersen, digital truth-teller and part-time slayer of crunchy marketing clichés.
The metaphor combines AI, especially large language models (LLMs) that generate content with Ouroboros…an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail, representing cyclical destruction and rebirth, or something consuming itself.
Once upon a time…
The holy trinity of SEO consisted of keyword density, backlinks, and a well-placed H1 tag. Trial lawyers dipped their toes into content marketing and were told, “Just write helpful stuff, and Google will reward you.”
Cue massive eye roll from every plaintiff lawyer who’s ever been burned by an agency that promised page-one rankings and delivered a blog post about how “slip and falls can be serious.”
Let’s be honest. We’ve all witnessed SEO devolve into the digital equivalent of a pyramid scheme—except instead of essential oils, you’re peddling 40,000 words about rear-end collisions in hopes the algorithm takes pity on you.
But here’s the twist: it’s not dying. It’s just shedding its skin. And what’s emerging is… weirdly good news—especially for trial lawyers who are finally ready to stop chasing Google’s tail and start sitting at the top of the food chain.
Welcome to the Age of Position 0 (aka: The AI Overview Supremacy)
In 2025, Google launched AI Overviews (formerly known as SGE), and SEO got a radical facelift. Instead of ten blue links, users now get neatly summarized, AI-crafted answers. And that summary—that top-of-page, answer-to-everything chunk—is what we call Position 0.
For trial lawyers, that means you’re no longer just fighting for rankings—you’re fighting to become the source the AI trusts to quote. That’s Position 0. That’s where the attention goes. That’s where clients start and stop their search.
So how do you get there?
You don’t.
You earn it.
GEO is the New SEO: Enter Generative Engine Optimization
Let’s make this simple:
Traditional SEO = Write for humans, optimize for robots.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) = Write for robots that write for humans.
Think about that.
If Google’s AI overview summarizes your site’s content when someone asks, “What should I do after a truck accident in California?”, and it quotes your insights—congrats, you’ve hit Position 0.
But if your page is a Frankenstein’s monster of keyword stuffing and ChatGPT-gone-wild copy, you’ll get buried like a forgotten email chain.
Here’s what works:
- Deep expertise (actual legal insight)
- Original perspective (not fluff written for bots)
- Trust signals (case results, client-centric language, and modern design)
- Structured data and schema markup (so AI doesn’t just read, it understands)
- Internal topical authority (content clusters with context, not blog post graveyards)
Why This Matters for Plaintiff Trial Lawyers
Every client you want is asking Google (or Gemini or ChatGPT) a question that leads to a verdict.
- “How much is a back injury settlement worth in Nevada?”
- “What if my surgeon left something inside me?”
- “Can I sue Uber if their driver was drunk?”
These are Position 0 moments. They are verdicts in disguise—and you either show up, or you vanish.
The firms who nail this?
They’re not posting AI-written FAQs every week.
They’re crafting real, resonant, human-centered answers and placing them strategically across their site and digital ecosystem.
Casey Petersen put it perfectly:
“Now we are going to use AI to produce tons of content that no actual human wants to read. Why? Because for SURE the LLMs want to read it.”
Except the joke’s on us.
LLMs are starting to hate that content too.
SEO’s Not Dead—But the Scammy Version Deserves a Funeral
To be clear, the problem isn’t AI. The problem is the delusion that more content equals better content. That your paralegal-turned-blogger can crank out 3,000 words a week and outlawyer the competition in Google’s eyes.
As Casey asks, “How many iterations of AI mass-produced fluff being used to train AI does it take before nothing makes any sense at all?”
It’s not a rhetorical question. We’re almost there.
What makes sense now is the thing we’ve all known but avoided:
Understand your client. Answer their real questions. Be the brand worth quoting.
And when the AI gods come crawling your site, they’ll know what to do.
Final Verdict: Visibility Is the New Verdict
Trial lawyers, you’re no longer just arguing in court. You’re arguing for authority in a search engine’s AI-driven summary.
Forget page two.
Forget volume-based blog mills.
And please—for the love of strategy—forget keyword density calculators.
Focus on Position 0.
Be the source.
Let the algorithm bow to your expertise, not the other way around.
Follow-Up Questions? DM me.
Mastering the New Digital Landscape for 2030 and Beyond 
Leave a comment