A Q1 2026 core update finished rolling out at the end of March. We’ve been watching the dust settle across our law firm portfolio for a couple of weeks, and the pattern is clearer than most updates we’ve tracked in the last two years. This one is about practice-page substance and the difference between firms with a real topical home and firms with content sprawl. The losses and gains line up almost too cleanly. Here’s what we saw, what we did about it, and five things any firm should check on their site this week.
Standard disclaimers. Anonymized practice areas, not specific client names or numbers — it’s their data, not mine. What I will publish is the directional read, the patterns that repeated across multiple firms, and what we changed in response.
The takeaway up top: this was an E-E-A-T weighting update with a practice-page bias. Firms that lost ground are the ones whose money pages are thin, generic, or template-stamped across practice areas. Firms that gained are the ones whose practice pages read like a senior attorney wrote them. None of this is new advice. What’s new is how aggressively the algorithm is applying it.
What the update appears to have targeted
Three signals seemed to carry the most weight.
Substance on the practice page itself. Pages that gained have specific case examples, local references, procedural detail about how the practice area actually works in Arizona — statute references, county-court realities, the kind of thing only a practicing attorney would write. Pages that lost read like every other firm’s PI page: “If you’ve been injured, you may be entitled to compensation. Contact us today for a free consultation.” That used to rank on local signals alone. Not anymore.
Authorship and attribution. Pages that gained have a named author, a credentialed bio link, and clean Person-level signals. Pages that lost are unsigned, or signed by a generic “the firm” entity. Second update in a row we’ve seen this — magnitude bigger this time. The algorithm appears more willing to discount content it can’t attribute to an identifiable expert.
Topical concentration vs. content sprawl. Firms with a tight content footprint — clear hub pages, dense practice area coverage, modest blog volume on the same topics — gained or held. Firms with sprawling blogs across loosely related topics lost. Not because off-topic content was penalized per se, but because the site’s overall topical signal became fuzzy. The algorithm treats sprawl as a reason to discount the whole domain’s expertise, not just the off-topic pages.
Patterns we observed across the portfolio
Personal injury firms. Mixed but skewed positive for firms with substantive Arizona-specific practice pages. The PI firms that gained have detailed pages on specific case types (rear-end, commercial truck, motorcycle, rideshare) with Arizona procedural detail. The PI firms that lost had a single generic “personal injury” page with no subtopic depth.
Family law firms. Heavier losses on firms with templated divorce / custody / property division pages that could swap with any other firm’s. Gains on firms with substantive content on the Maricopa County family court process — what to expect at a Resolution Management Conference, how property division works, what mediation looks like in this jurisdiction. Local-procedure depth mattered most here.
Estate planning firms. The most consistent gains in the portfolio. Pages that did well have depth on Arizona-specific topics — community property and estate planning interaction, the homestead exemption, how revocable trusts function in AZ. Pages that flattened were generic “what is a will, what is a trust” explainers that could have been written in any state.
Criminal defense firms. The most volatile vertical this quarter. Local pack composition shifted noticeably — Google appeared to be testing different ranking weights throughout March before settling. Pages that held have offense-specific subtopic depth and explicit attorney credentials including bar admissions. Firms with a single “criminal defense” page and a thin bio lost ground consistently.
The firms that gained in this update didn’t do anything new in Q1. They did what we’d been asking them to do for the prior twelve months — fix the practice pages, sign the work, narrow the topical footprint. The algorithm just rewarded it harder than it had before.
One observation worth calling out: AI Overviews continued to expand for legal informational queries during the update. Traffic loss from AI Overview substitution is a separate phenomenon — but firms that lost the most in March lost on both axes at once. Tempting to attribute the entire drop to one cause; it’s not. The firms whose pages still rank organically are the ones AI Overviews are citing. The work that protects you from one protects you from the other.
What we did about it
For firms that lost ground, the playbook isn’t dramatic — same one we’d been running for the firms that gained, with more urgency. Audit every money practice page against the criteria above. Rewrite the generic ones. Add named-attorney bylines and credentials. Prune the off-topic blog sprawl — or move it under clearer subtopic structure so the site signal stays focused.
For firms that gained, the work is to keep doing it. The update is the validation, not the finish line. We’re using the post-update window to push deeper into the subtopic structure that’s working — answer pages for long-tail questions, more local-procedure depth, more attorney attribution. Most agencies won’t invest in this because it’s harder to invoice for than “we published 12 new blog posts this month.” More on what actually moves cases for law firms here.
The five things to check on your site this week
1. Pull the practice page that drives the most traffic. Read it as a stressed client would. Does it answer specific questions? Does it have Arizona-specific procedural detail? Does it read like a senior attorney at your firm wrote it, or like an SEO brief got turned into prose by someone who’s never been to court? If the answer to the last question is uncomfortable, that’s where to start. More on what a ranking practice page looks like here.
2. Check whether every practice page has a named author. Not “Posted by Admin.” Not “The Firm.” A real attorney byline with a link to a real bio. If your site has unsigned practice pages, that’s the second priority. The fix takes a day.
3. Run a content inventory and look for sprawl. Every page that isn’t on a practice-area topic, an Arizona legal procedure topic, or a client-decision-stage topic is contributing noise. The instinct is to delete those pages — don’t, immediately. First check whether they get meaningful traffic. If they do, decide whether they can be rewritten to fit. If they don’t, prune or noindex. More on practice page audits here.
4. Audit attorney bios for credential depth. Bar admissions, law school, years of practice, practice areas, and at least one piece of substantive content — a case result (within bar rules), a published article, a CLE presentation. Bios that read as a single paragraph of “John has been practicing law for 20 years” are doing nothing for E-E-A-T.
5. Look at your GBP and your last-90-days review count. Local pack composition shifted during the update for some practice areas. If your GBP categorization is imprecise or review velocity is near zero, the local pack disruption may be hiding a fixable issue. Lowest-effort, highest-leverage check of the five. More on why rankings stall and what to do about it here.
I’ll update this tracker through Q2. The Q1 read is a recognizable E-E-A-T pass with a heavier hand than we’ve seen in a while. If your rankings moved, the work is the same work it always was. The update just made it more expensive to keep putting off.
— The owner, PHX Search Co.
