Tools: Free 60% Of Legal Searches Now End Without A Click 2026

AI Overviews are answering legal questions before users reach your website. Traffic is down 19%, CPCs are up 568%, and the old playbook is breaking.

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.

That's not a gradual decline. It's a collapse in progress.

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.

Here's the painful irony: while traffic drops, the cost to compete for what's left keeps rising.

Source: HackerNews