A legal tech marketing lead opens the monthly report. Organic traffic is down year over year, again, and the obvious read is that the content program is failing. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is describing the company accurately to buyers who never visit the site. Both things are true in the same quarter. Only one of them shows up in the report.
The click was the measurement
For fifteen years, traffic was a fair stand-in for visibility. If people found you, they clicked, and the chart went up. That connection is breaking. SparkToro puts the share of US Google searches that ended without a click to any website at 68% in the first four months of this year. A decade ago, it was closer to 45%.
That is the paradox. A company can be winning more of the answer and still losing traffic, because the answer is increasingly where the search ends. A traffic chart cannot tell the difference between a brand losing relevance and a brand whose buyers got what they needed without visiting — both draw the same downward line, and both get the same uncomfortable question in the leadership meeting.
Most teams know the instrument is wrong
When Semrush asked 481 marketers about this in June, nearly half said they could not track their visibility in AI answers at all, and two in five were checking ChatGPT by hand. It comes from a vendor with software to sell, but anyone running legal tech marketing will recognize the picture.
SparkToro’s Amanda Natividad put the fix bluntly: “Retire traffic-as-scoreboard and set up a correlation dashboard instead. It’s unsexy. It’s imperfect.” Her point is that click-based attribution was never as precise as it looked. It just hid its guesses better.
For a legal tech company, the gap was always wider than average. Buyers in this market research carefully and talk to peers long before they fill out a form, so a lot of the influence never shows up on a chart in the first place. AI answers simply move one more piece of it out of view.
A falling traffic chart isn’t a verdict. It’s answering a question nobody is asking anymore.
What to track instead
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Presence: which buyer questions your company shows up in, and how often. This is the closest thing to a ranking these tools have.
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Accuracy: how you are described when you do appear. A citation that gets your product wrong — the wrong use case, the wrong buyer, last year’s pricing model — is a problem, not a win.
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The company you keep: which competitors show up beside you, and which show up instead of you. That is the shortlist forming in public.
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Downstream signals: branded search, direct traffic, demo requests, and what buyers say when you ask how they heard about you. Watch whether they move as presence changes, even when overall traffic does not.
A twenty-minute baseline
Write down ten questions a general counsel or legal ops lead would ask when looking for a product like yours — specific ones, the kind that name a firm size or a problem. Ask each one in ChatGPT and in one other AI tool. Note whether you appear, how you are described, and who is named instead. That list is your first presence report, and it will be more useful than the traffic chart you will be asked to explain next month. Run the same ten questions again in thirty days and you have a trend line that actually means something.
So the question to bring to the next leadership meeting isn’t “why is traffic down?” It’s “are we in the answers?” The first question has a discouraging answer that may not mean much. The second one tells you where you actually stand, and what to do about it.
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