Why AI Content Writing Tools for Law Firm SEO Are a Bad Idea

To understand the real problem, you need to understand how these tools work—not the buzzwords, but the bones. So let’s drop the tech-speak and talk about AI like it’s a person in a library.

Imagine AI is a very smart, very fast reader who’s been dropped into a massive library. This library isn’t sorted the way you’d expect—it’s not organized by topic, or author, or title. Instead, every single word in every book is indexed. That’s how the AI learns: not by memorizing facts, but by understanding the patterns between words.

Now, here’s where it gets important: the people who build these AI tools are the ones who stock the shelves. They decide what books go in, which sections the AI can read, and what kind of patterns the AI should focus on. They can even write and insert new books of their own if they want to steer the AI in a certain direction.

This is called “training the model.” And it’s a big deal, because it defines what the AI can and can’t do. It determines what kind of voice it uses, how it interprets things like nuance or opinion, and whether it’s more likely to give you a legally sound answer or a creative word salad.

So when you’re using one of these tools to write your firm’s content, you’re not just “using AI”—you’re putting your trust in the library, the librarian, and the training rules they were given.

And that leads us straight into the first big issue.

Let’s go back to our AI librarian. It’s fast, and it’s confident. But here’s the catch: when the AI doesn’t know something, it doesn’t pause—it guesses. And it does so with the polish and tone of a seasoned writer.

This is what’s called an AI hallucination—and it’s more common than most people realize.

The AI isn’t trying to lie. It’s not sentient. It’s just doing its job: predicting the next word based on the words before it. If the training data is incomplete, outdated, contradictory, or vague? The AI fills in the blanks with what sounds right—not necessarily what is right.

And just to put this in perspective—even Google is getting it wrong. A recent evaluation of Google’s new Generative Search Experience showed that more than 60% of its answers contained false or misleading information. That’s from a company that spent $33 billion on AI in 2024, with plans to drop another $75 billion in 2025.

If Google—with its army of engineers, nearly unlimited resources, and direct access to the world’s largest index of information—can’t reliably avoid hallucinations, then we really shouldn’t expect better from the average AI content tool built for SEO bloggers.

Now, in some industries, hallucinations are annoying but manageable. In legal marketing? They’re a liability. Words carry weight. Accuracy builds trust—or erodes it. You don’t want to be the firm that confidently publishes a “close enough” answer to a legal question just because your content tool thought it sounded right.

Let’s go back to our AI librarian one more time.

We’ve talked about how it reads and how it fills in gaps when it doesn’t know something. But here’s the question nobody asks often enough: What books are even in the library?

Because if you’re using AI to generate content for SEO—especially legal SEO—there’s a really good chance that your AI’s “library” is just a giant remix of other law firm websites already on the internet.

In most cases, these tools are trained on publicly available content pulled from the web: blog posts, service pages, FAQs, maybe some news articles or government resources and legal text. And that content gets averaged out, rewritten, and repackaged with some SEO buzzwords sprinkled in.

It’s not creating anything new. It’s just studying what’s ranking, identifying the patterns, and stitching together something similar.

So if the top-ranking pages for “truck accident lawyer in St. Louis” all say the same 12 things in slightly different ways… guess what your shiny new AI blog is going to say? The same 12 things, in slightly different ways.

That’s not SEO strategy. That’s content regurgitation.

It’s Just More of the Same (And That’s the Problem)

These tools aren’t built to help you stand out—they’re built to help you blend in.

Which might sound fine if your goal is just to “have a blog” and check a box. But if your goal is to actually earn visibility, trust, and clicks in a competitive legal market? You have to bring something new to the table.

Search engines are already flooded with surface-level legal content. Google is seeking content that genuinely helps people, answers questions clearly, and demonstrates genuine expertise.

AI-generated SEO blogs that are just thinly veiled rephrasings of competitor content? That’s not helpful. That’s not authoritative. And eventually, that’s going to stop working.

The Ironic Twist: We’re Already Seeing AI Cite Our Content

And here’s the part that really drives it home—we’ve already started seeing this play out.

At TruLaw Marketing, we’ve seen a significant increase in law firm competitors backlinking to our clients’ websites, which appears to be using AI-generated content that pulls phrases, statistics, or answers directly from our original articles. One competitor even told us they explicitly trained their AI tool not to cite or link to competitor sites… and it still referenced our client, and their competitor, as “the best personal injury lawyer” in their market.

That’s the reality: AI needs original, high-quality human content to survive. And if your firm isn’t producing that kind of content, you’re not shaping the conversation—you’re just reacting to it. Possibly even quoting your competitors in the process.

(Want to learn about our non-AI research and writing team?)

Let’s talk about how AI makes decisions when it writes SEO content.

It’s not pulling insight from your intake team. It’s not attending community events or reading client reviews. It’s not checking out what your local competitors are actually doing offline.

Nope—it’s relying entirely on SEO data.

That means things like:

• Keyword gaps

• Related keyword suggestions

• Monthly search volume

• Ranking difficulty

• Top-performing pages for specific terms

All helpful data points, for sure. But not the whole picture. Not even close.

SEO Tools Only Show You What Already Exists

Here’s the catch: tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs—and by extension, any AI tool built on top of them—can only show you what’s already ranking. They don’t surface the questions people aren’t asking yet. They don’t reveal the frustrations potential clients have that haven’t made it into a search query. And they definitely don’t highlight the messaging gaps that exist between you and your competition.

That’s where real human strategy comes in.

Experienced SEOs know how to spot opportunity that lives outside of keyword data. We’ve seen this firsthand.

For example, in one of our clients’ markets, we learned that a huge annual motorcycle festival happens every year—thousands of riders flood into the area. But when we looked at the SEO tools? Nothing. No spike in search volume. No high-ranking keywords. Just radio silence.

So we built a marketing strategy around it anyway—tailored blog content, safety tips, accident resources, and event-specific messaging. We aligned it with the timing of the event and positioned the firm as the go-to resource for local riders.

And sure enough, it worked. We picked up more cases that year than ever before.

Not because the data told us to. But because we paid attention to the people in the market, not just the search trends.

The Best Content Starts with the Right Questions

This is what separates good SEO from average SEO. It’s not about who has the most blogs—it’s about who understands the client best.

AI can give you content that follows the data. But if you want content that leads the conversation in your market? You’re going to need an actual strategist—one who’s listening, researching, and thinking creatively.

So, what are the right questions? Contact us for a complimentary market audit.

Let’s clear something up: Content matters. But it’s not the whole game—not even close.

You can have the most beautifully written page on car accidents in your entire state, but if your site is slow, your internal linking is a mess, you have no backlinks, and your competitors are investing in actual strategy? That content’s just sitting there. Doing nothing.

This is where a lot of AI content strategies fall apart.

Because even if you somehow get a tool that produces decent legal content—content that’s accurate, localized, and written in your brand voice (which is already a big “if”)—that’s still only a small part of the SEO puzzle.

Real SEO Involves… a Lot More Than Writing

Here’s a quick rundown of what else goes into actually ranking:

• Technical SEO: Site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, structured data, etc.

• Authority Signals: Backlinks, local citations, and brand mentions.

• On-Page Optimization: Headers, meta descriptions, internal linking, image alt text, and accessibility.

• User Experience: Bounce rate, session duration, layout, readability.

• Local SEO: Google Business Profile, map pack signals, NAP consistency.

• Content Strategy: Not just what you write, but when, why, and how you promote it.

Most AI writing tools aren’t thinking about any of this. They’re not auditing your backlink profile. They’re not fixing duplicate content issues. They’re not aligning your content calendar with litigation cycles or local events.

They’re just writing.

And in Law, “Just Writing” Doesn’t Cut It

Especially in evergreen practice areas like car accidents, SSDI, or general personal injury, everyone’s already written the basics. Your competitors have entire pages optimized for “What to do after a car accident” or “When to hire a lawyer.”

The bar isn’t “Do you have content?” It’s “Is your content better, deeper, faster, and more useful than the other 10 options on the first page?”

If you’re relying on AI to cross that bar, you’re betting on the lowest-effort path in a field that already rewards effort, consistency, and depth.

Here’s the part nobody really wants to talk about.

The more law firms use AI to generate content, the more that content becomes part of the internet. And the more that content becomes part of the internet, the more it shows up in search engines. And guess what most AI content tools use to learn and write future content?

Yep. That same content.

So what you end up with is a weird digital echo chamber—AI feeding on AI to write more AI for other AI to learn from.

And because most of it is built around “what already ranks,” you’re not getting fresh ideas or expert insights. You’re getting a polished, slightly reworded remix of the same 10 articles every time.

It’s like SEO content cannibalism. And we’re already starting to see the consequences.

The Internet’s Getting Louder, But Not Smarter

This is what some people are calling the early stages of “Dead Internet Theory”—where so much of the content we’re reading online is no longer made by people, but by bots trained on other bots. It’s all technically “new” content… but it’s not actually saying anything new.

And in legal marketing, that’s a big problem.

Because if your firm’s content starts sounding exactly like your competitor’s—same headlines, same structure, same explanations—you’re not giving Google or your prospective clients any reason to choose you over them.

You’re just another firm with another blog post that reads like everyone else’s.

The Firms Creating Real Content Will Be the Ones That Last

The firms that will stand out in the long run are the ones producing content worth citing, worth reading, and worth sharing. Ironically, those are the same firms that AI tools will pull from—because someone has to feed the machine.

So you have a choice: Do you want to be the one creating the content that AI tools copy from? Or the one blindly copying content that was probably inspired by your competitor’s intern three years ago?

If you’ve been around digital marketing long enough, you’ve seen this pattern before.

Years ago, people figured out they could manipulate search rankings by keyword stuffing, buying low-quality backlinks, spinning content, and using other shady tactics. For a while, it worked. Sites would jump to the top with garbage content because they knew how to game the system.

Then Google caught on.

And one by one, those sites dropped off the map—penalized, deindexed, or just buried under better content from people who did it the right way.

AI content feels a lot like that right now. It’s the new black hat—slick, fast, and temporarily effective… for some.

But here’s the thing about shortcuts: they only work until they don’t.

Search engines are already moving in the direction of prioritizing Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust (E-E-A-T). They’re actively working to filter out low-value, repetitive, or AI-generated fluff. You might get away with it for a little while, but eventually, that wave of content will blend into the background noise, and the firms who didn’t invest in real content will have nothing solid to fall back on.

Do the Work Now, Reap the Rewards Later

AI content tools are tempting. They’re easy. They can spit out ten pages in an hour. But that’s not how you build authority. That’s not how you create trust. And it’s definitely not how you stand out in a saturated legal market.

The firms that win in the long run will be the ones that:

• Take the time to learn their market

• Create original, helpful content

• Think beyond keywords

• Build a real content strategy with humans behind it

Because when everyone else is churning out the same lifeless blogs, the ones doing the hard work—the real work—will be the ones left standing.

When you choose to work with TruLaw Marketing, you’re choosing to work with an agency that doesn’t take shortcuts. We are here for the long run, leveraging strategies tha will keep our clients around in the longrun too.