The way buyers research products and services online is shifting dramatically, and legal technology firms are among the first to feel the pressure of that change.
Internet search has deteriorated steadily, with organic results pushed further down by AI-generated summaries and sponsored alternatives that often obscure the most relevant content.
A company whose product became so intuitive it turned into a verb is now increasingly difficult to rely on, creating real problems for businesses that depend on internet visibility.
Two public relations firms with deep roots in the legal technology sector have launched a joint initiative designed to help clients adapt to this new reality.
Plat4orm and Edge Marketing announced a partnership to help organisations in regulated industries adapt to changing buyer research and vendor evaluation behaviours emerging across AI-powered search environments.
The two firms introduced what they are calling the Trusted Answer Growth System, an integrated framework aligning strategic communications, earned media, content strategy and demand generation into a coordinated market visibility approach.
The objective, as the firms describe it, is to help organisations become the trusted answer wherever buyers seek guidance in an increasingly automated research environment.
Forrester’s 2026 buyer survey found that 94 percent of B2B buyers now use generative AI somewhere in their purchase process, up from 89 percent a year earlier.
The same survey found that twice as many buyers named AI or conversational search as their single most meaningful research source compared to any other channel.
Platforms such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini are becoming deeply embedded in how buyers research and evaluate technology and service providers before making purchasing decisions.
An independent analysis of more than one million citations from top AI models found that 89 percent of sources came from news articles, expert interviews and trusted third-party coverage rather than paid or owned content.
Valerie Chan, CEO of Plat4orm, explained the stakes clearly: “AI-powered discovery synthesizes an organisation’s credibility and market visibility to who’s quoting you, who’s citing you, whether authoritative sources treat you as the answer in your category.”
A Gartner study reinforced this point further, finding that AI answer engines pull more than 95 percent of their cited links from nonpaid sources, making traditional advertising buys largely irrelevant to AI discoverability.
The shift marks the effective end of search engine optimisation as the dominant strategy, replaced by what practitioners are now calling Answer Engine Optimisation or Generative Engine Optimisation.
The Trusted Answer Growth System begins with a Trust Signal Review, an evaluation of how an organisation currently appears across search, media coverage, digital channels and AI-assisted discovery environments.
The broader implication reaches well beyond legal technology vendors and applies equally to law firms competing for client attention in an AI-mediated information landscape.