Your article on how child custody is decided in your state used to be the top result. Now a Google-written summary sits above it, and your page is one of several small links tucked to the side, or not there at all. Traffic to the article has dropped.
AI Overviews are the summaries Google generates at the top of many results pages, with citations to the pages it drew from. This page covers when they show up, what gets cited, and how to write for them without abandoning the rest of your SEO.
When an AI Overview appears for legal searches, and when it does not
Overviews are most common on question-shaped searches: "what is the statute of limitations for personal injury in Virginia," "can I get a DUI expunged," "how does a revocable trust avoid probate." They are much less common on searches with obvious commercial or local intent. "Personal injury lawyer Richmond" still tends to return a map pack and ads; Google is cautious about summarizing "who should I hire."
That divide matters for planning. Your practice-area landing pages, the ones built to win a client, are mostly competing in the traditional results and the map pack. Your explanatory content, the articles and FAQs, is competing to be cited in the overview. Google's separate AI Mode tab goes further and does answer "find me a lawyer" style requests with local business information, which draws on the same Business Profile and web data as everything else.
Which pages Google cites in an overview
The cited pages are, in our observation and in Google's own description, pages that support the statements in the summary, and they are overwhelmingly pages that already rank well for the query or closely related ones. So the first condition for being cited is the ordinary one: rank for the question.
Beyond ranking, cited pages share some traits. They answer the specific question rather than a broader topic. They state the answer in a form that can be lifted: a sentence with the number, the rule, the exception. They are specific to a jurisdiction when the question is. And they carry clear authorship and entity signals, which is where schema markup for law firms helps by labeling the author as an attorney, the organization as a law firm, and the page as being about a legal topic in a given place.
Writing a page so the answer is quotable
Put the direct answer in the first paragraph, in one or two sentences, before any background. "In Virginia, the statute of limitations for most personal injury claims is two years from the date of injury, under Va. Code § 8.01-243(A)." Then expand: the exceptions, the discovery rule, what happens with a minor, what to do if you are close to the deadline.
Use headings that are the follow-up questions a person would ask next. Google's overviews often answer a chain of related questions, and a page that covers the chain is more useful to cite than one that covers a single link.
Make the jurisdiction explicit in the title, the first paragraph and the headings. A page that covers "the statute of limitations" generically competes with every legal publisher in the country; a page that covers Virginia's competes with a handful of firms and the state's own resources. Date the page and update it when the law changes, with the revision date visible.
Avoid burying the answer to protect the consultation. Firms sometimes hedge so heavily that the page never says anything quotable. That approach loses the citation and rarely wins the call; the reader who gets a clear answer and then learns the exceptions are complicated is the one who picks up the phone.
Practice-area content an overview cannot replace
If the overview answers the general question, your remaining advantage is what only a local firm knows. What the judges in your circuit typically do with a first-offense DUI. How long the clerk's office in your county takes to process an uncontested divorce. Pages built on that kind of specificity get cited for the specific question, and they persuade in a way a summary cannot.
This is a content planning question as much as a writing one. Our page on content strategy for law firm websites describes how to split the calendar between pages meant to rank for clients and pages meant to be cited for answers, and the same split applies to being recommended by ChatGPT and the other assistants covered under AEO for lawyers.
Measuring it when Search Console does not label it
Search Console counts impressions and clicks from AI Overviews in the regular Performance report, but does not break them out as a separate category. So you cannot get a clean "AI Overview clicks" number from Google. What you can do is watch for the signature: impressions steady or rising while clicks and click-through rate fall for question-shaped queries. That pattern usually means an overview arrived above you.
To see whether you are cited, search the queries yourself in an incognito window and note the sources, or use a rank tracker that records AI Overview presence and citations. Keep a short list of the twenty questions that matter most to your practice and check them monthly. If you want to opt a page out, the nosnippet and max-snippet directives limit what Google can show from it, at the cost of also limiting your regular snippet; most firms will prefer to be cited.
Questions we get
Should we block Google from using our content in AI Overviews?
The Google-Extended control in robots.txt affects Gemini training and grounding, not AI Overviews, which use standard Googlebot. The only page-level controls are the snippet directives above, and they reduce your normal search appearance too. For most firms, being cited beats being absent.
Our traffic dropped but rankings did not. Is that the overview?
Very likely, for informational pages. Check the Performance report for those queries: flat impressions with falling clicks is the tell. The response is to make those pages more citable.
Do FAQ sections still matter?
Yes, as content, though the FAQ rich result that used to show in search is now limited to government and health sites. Write the questions and answers because they are useful and quotable, not for the markup.
If you would like us to review which of your pages are being summarized and which are being cited, tell us what you are working with.