60% of Legal Searches Now End Without a Click

Summary

60% of legal searches now end without anyone clicking through to a website. Google's AI Overviews answer questions like "what to do after a car accident" right there on the results page. No click needed. By mid-2026, that number is expected to hit 70-80%. For law firms that built their entire client acquisition strategy on Google, this is an existential shift. The data from 2025 tells the story clearly. That's not a gradual decline. It's a collapse in progress. The Traffic Numbers Are Brutal According to QS Digital's analysis of the legal sector in 2025, the median law firm saw website traffic drop 19%. Some firms experienced declines of nearly 80%. The strange part: impressions stayed flat. Firms were still appearing in search results. Users just weren't clicking through anymore. Why? Because the answer was already on the page. AI Overviews provide summaries, suggest next steps, and even curate lists of attorneys. The user makes their decision before visiting a single website. Surefire Local reports that when AI Overviews appear, top-ranking pages see a 34.5% drop in click-through rates. Being #1 on Google used to guarantee traffic. Not anymore. Meanwhile, Costs Keep Climbing Here's the painful irony: while traffic drops, the cost to compete for what's left keeps rising. Personal injury lawyers are paying 568% more per click than they did in 2021. The keyword "Las Vegas personal injury attorneys" costs $500 per click. Some legal keywords have crossed $1,000. iLawyer Marketing's 2025 analysis shows this isn't limited to a few high-competition terms. The entire legal advertising category is experiencing cost inflation while delivering diminishing returns. The math is simple: higher costs, lower traffic, same conversion rates. ROI is collapsing. Urban Firms Are Hit Hardest The QS Digital data shows geographic patterns in the decline. Urban firms experienced larger drops and more volatility than rural practices. This makes sense. Metropolitan markets have more competit...