brightonSEO is the largest SEO conference in the UK, and it is a genuinely useful place to take stock of where the industry is heading. Some sessions challenged our thinking. Others reinforced approaches we have already been developing.
Here are the Conscious search team’s key takeaways from the 2 – day event, and the five things we think law firms need to be paying attention to right now.
Reviews Have Moved from Best Practice to a Minimum Requirement
Multiple sessions at brightonSEO converged on the same message: Google reviews are one of the most powerful levers in local search, and firms that are not actively managing them are losing ground to competitors who are.
This is something we have been building into our local SEO strategies for a while, so it was reassuring rather than surprising, but the consistency of the message across sessions made it hard to ignore. The broader industry has reached the same conclusion, which means the window to get ahead of competitors on this is narrowing.
For law firms, the mechanism is straightforward. Clients searching for a solicitor in their area see a map pack before they reach organic results. The firms that appear there, and those that convert those clicks into enquiries, have strong, consistent, and recent review profiles. Volume matters, but so does recency and whether the firm is actively responding to the reviews it receives.
If your reviews strategy is still reactive, i.e. waiting for the occasional unprompted review and hoping for the best, the conference confirmed what we have been saying: that approach is no longer sufficient.
AI Search Is Changing the Metrics That Matter
The most discussed topic across the conference was the rise of AI-generated answers - through ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, and Gemini. For law firms, potential clients are increasingly getting answers directly from these tools without ever visiting a website. Measuring success by organic clicks alone now gives an incomplete picture of your true visibility.
The shift toward GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and the importance of brand mentions, structured content, and authority signals has already shaped how we think about strategy for our clients. It was encouraging to see the wider industry moving in the same direction, and the conference added useful clarity on where to focus first.
The consensus among speakers was to concentrate on three platforms: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude. These are where AI-influenced search behaviour is actually happening at scale. Everything else is secondary for now.
The firms that will perform best in this environment are those being cited and referenced when AI generates answers to legal questions - not just those ranking on page one of a traditional results page.
It’s worth checking whether your firm appears in AI-generated answers for your key practice areas. If it does not, content authority and brand signals are the place to start.
The Firms That Will Win Long-Term Are the Ones That Build Genuine Authority
One session stepped back from tactics to make a broader point: the direction of travel for search, both traditional and AI-driven, is toward trust. Not just technical credibility, but genuine recognition within your market that your firm is a reliable, knowledgeable voice.
For law firms, this is an area of natural advantage if it is approached deliberately. Your fee earners have expertise that generic content cannot replicate. The question is whether that expertise is visible online in a way that search engines and AI systems can recognise and reference.
That means sharing content from named solicitors, commentary on relevant legal developments, and having a consistent presence in the places your potential clients are looking for guidance. Not volume for its own sake, but content that demonstrates real knowledge on the specific questions your clients actually have.
A firm where the expertise lives only in fee earners' heads (and is not visible on its website) is harder for search to surface and harder for AI to cite. Making that knowledge visible is both a content strategy and a business development one.
Your Website Needs to Be Ready for AI Crawlers, Not Just Human Visitors
One session tackled a question many law firms are sitting with right now: should we proceed with a website migration or rebrand when no one is certain what AI-friendly design will look like in two years?
The answer given was clear, and we think it is the right one: the risk is migrating to a rigid platform that cannot adapt as the landscape evolves.
The practical requirements are not especially complex, but they are often overlooked in website briefs. AI systems need to be able to access your pages, read your visible text, and understand your content structure. Schema markup throughout the site is no longer optional. ARIA roles and labels matter. Hosting and platform choices need to allow full control over firewall settings and crawl access.
Single-page applications and overly restrictive security configurations were specifically flagged as common barriers to AI crawlability, and these are choices that are often made without anyone considering the downstream implications for search.
If a website project is on the horizon, AI crawlability needs to be in the brief from day one, not retrofitted after launch.
Unreliable Analytics Are a More Common Problem Than Most Firms Realise
The most practically useful session of the conference was a forensic look at common GA4 setup errors. The headline finding was uncomfortable: the majority of GA4 configurations contain mistakes that distort data and lead to poor decisions downstream.
The most common issues were events firing multiple times per action, pages with no tracking tags at all, duplicate installations, missing event parameters, and trivial interactions being counted as meaningful conversions. The cumulative effect is that firms end up reporting on numbers they believe to be accurate, but which are significantly inflated or misleading.
For law firms, where every genuine conversion - an enquiry form, a phone call click, a live chat start - has real commercial value, this is not an abstract problem. Misconfigured analytics can lead to misallocated budgets, misreadings of which practice areas are performing, and the wrong investment decisions.
The recommended approach was methodical rather than dramatic: standardise event naming, remove duplicate installations, implement Consent Mode v2, and reduce key events to three to five actions that are genuinely meaningful.
If you have not had an analytics audit recently, it is worth doing before drawing too many conclusions from your current data.
Conscious’ Conclusions
brightonSEO 2025 was a useful moment to take stock. The team came away with a clearer sense of where our existing strategies are well-positioned, where the broader industry is heading, and where there is still genuine uncertainty that requires careful thinking rather than confident prediction.
For law firms, the fundamentals have not changed: reviews, content authority, technical foundations, and reliable data.
What has changed is the environment those fundamentals need to work within, and the pace at which that environment is shifting.
As always, if anything in this post raises questions about your own SEO strategy, we are happy to talk it through.