What Google just published about AI search, and what it means for your firm

A general counsel sits down on a Tuesday morning with a hard matter: a cross-border IP dispute for a technology client, on a tight timeline. She needs outside counsel.

In 2022, she would have called three peers for referrals. In 2026, she opens ChatGPT and types: "Which firms handle cross-border IP litigation for mid-market technology companies?"

Thirty seconds later, she has a shortlist. Five firms, each with citations. She is already opening their websites.

Your firm might be on that list. Or it might have been considered and quietly dropped. You will never know which. And on May 15, 2026, Google published a guide that explains exactly how that list gets built.

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What Google just told us about how the shortlist gets built

Google's new document is titled Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. It is the company's most direct statement yet on how a firm earns a place in AI answers. Two ideas in it reshape how firms should think about their marketing, and one line the document is careful to soften deserves a closer look.

Idea one: one question becomes many

Google now formally describes a technique it calls query fan-out. Stripped of the jargon, it means this: when you ask an AI one question, it quietly runs several smaller searches at once, then assembles a single answer from across all of them. One question becomes many parallel searches, and the person asking sees only the clean answer at the end.

Apply that to a legal question. A general counsel asks, "Best M&A firm in New York for a cross-border tech deal." Behind the scenes, the AI runs five or six smaller searches in parallel: top M&A firms in New York, firms with cross-border deal experience, firms serving mid-market technology companies, recent tech M&A rankings, partner-level deal history.

Each of those smaller searches pulls its own sources. A directory names a few firms. A legal news outlet names a few more. Deal write-ups and partner credentials round it out. The AI then looks for the firms that show up consistently across every one of those searches, with the strongest supporting evidence. A couple make the cut. The rest get dropped. The general counsel sees one clean shortlist and has no idea six searches just ran.

This is the central shift. For twenty years, search was about ranking for the query: one keyword, one race, one winner. Query fan-out breaks that model. Your firm does not need to rank first for "top M&A firm in New York." It needs to show up, credibly and consistently, across the smaller questions the AI asks on the way to the answer. A firm that ranks far down on the headline term but performs strongly across those five smaller questions can be the firm that gets named.

Whether your firm appears on the shortlist is not a measure of quality. It is a measure of how consistently you show up across the questions AI is actually asking.

Jacob Shamis, Co-Founder, Selectio.ai

Idea two: what Google says you can stop worrying about

The guide also includes a useful myth-busting section. Google tells site owners plainly that they do not need to:

• Create LLMS.txt files or other special AI-specific markup.
• Break content into small pieces for AI to consume.
• Rewrite content specifically for AI systems.
• Pursue inauthentic mentions across the web.
• Overfocus on structured data.

If a vendor is pitching any of these as essential AI optimization services, Google has just told you they are not. The real work, building a consistent and trusted footprint across the sources AI actually reads, is harder and slower than markup tricks, and Google is now on the record saying so.

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What Google has good reason to downplay

One line in the guide deserves close attention. Google addresses the term AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, directly and concludes that, from its own perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is "still SEO."

That is defensible, but only inside Google's own framing. Google is talking about its own AI surfaces, AI Overviews and AI Mode. For those, the best practices that have always driven Google performance still apply.

But there is a plain commercial reality behind that framing. Google has a search advertising business worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Every minute a general counsel spends inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Copilot is a minute she is not spending on Google. Telling the market "this is all still just SEO" keeps the world organized around Google's view of search, which is the view that has paid Google's bills for two decades.

The honest reality is this. There are now five major AI engines that matter for whether your firm gets recommended: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot. Each gathers and weighs its sources differently. Google can only speak for one of them. The discipline of measuring and improving your visibility across all five is the real work, and it is not the same as ranking on Google.

Three things this means for your firm

For the partner or marketing lead trying to act on this, the guide and the wave of changes behind it come down to three shifts.

• Depth beats keywords. The old playbook treated content as a series of bets on individual keywords. The new one treats your practice pages, attorney bios, case results, and thought leadership as a single body of evidence the AI reads together. They matter in relation to each other, not one keyword at a time.
• Your authority is spread across many places. Directories, legal news coverage, deal write-ups, bar profiles, speaking engagements, and your own insights page. The AI connects these dots. If your footprint is thin or inconsistent across them, even excellent legal work will not translate into AI visibility.
• Your dashboards will not warn you. Google Search Console folds AI traffic into the standard report, and ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini do not appear there at all. Your firm could be invisible across four of five engines and your monthly dashboard would look fine. The tools were built for a different era of search.

And it is about to run continuously

Days after the guide, Google announced what its CEO called the biggest upgrade to Search in over 25 years: AI Mode, its full-page conversational search, rolled out to all of its users. When a general counsel searches Google now, she is increasingly not seeing ten links to click through. She is seeing a synthesized answer with firm recommendations already baked in, built by the same one-question-becomes-many mechanic, now running at the scale of a billion people a day.

Google also introduced agents that work in the background around the clock: a partner can ask one to track a litigation matter, a regulatory change, or a deal market, and it returns to the web on its own to surface new information over time. Firms that publish substantive, citable content on a steady basis will appear in those streams. Firms that publish thin or sporadically will not, because the agent has nothing to cite when it comes back. An invisible firm no longer loses one search at a time. It gets filtered out on a loop, quietly, for weeks. You will not see the searches you are losing. You will just see the phone ring less.

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What to do this week

Most firms are not behind on this. The guidance is weeks old and the shift is still in its early innings. Firms that move now have a real window to build the standing AI rewards before the field crowds. Three steps:

• Map where you show up. Before fixing anything, learn whether your firm appears when AI runs its hidden smaller searches, for your city, your practice area, your matter type, your recent results. These are different searches pulling from different sources, and most firms perform unevenly across them without knowing where the gaps are.
• Audit your footprint. Your directory profiles, your legal news coverage, your attorney profiles, your firm bio pages. AI reads these together and looks for them to agree. If any are thin, outdated, or describe your core practice areas inconsistently, they leave gaps in the coverage that gets you named.
• Do not wait for it to feel urgent. The standing AI uses to build its shortlists accumulates over time. Firms that start now will hold a structural lead over firms that wait, and by the time this feels urgent, the window to build that lead cheaply will have closed.

The first step is honest measurement. You cannot fix what you cannot see. That is the gap Selectio closes.

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