Criminal Defence Case Study
Lauren Tye Legal is a Melbourne criminal defence firm with 216 five-star Google reviews and a record most practices never build. When someone is charged, the first thing they do is ask — and increasingly they ask an AI, at 2am, before they ever call a lawyer.
Criminal Defence Lawyers · Melbourne
Victoria-wide · 216 five-star reviews
Results
Impressions in Google's AI features
Google Search Console, 3 months
Microsoft Copilot, 90 days
23.19% share of authority — none of it branded
Organic clicks
727 → 2,870 clicks
Search impressions
85.9K → 224K impressions
Invisible to cited
Zero paid media
2,870 clicks. 224K impressions. 3,315 Copilot citations. 3 months. Every new page climbing from zero.
Search Console — Google AI Features
Each of these pages recorded zero AI impressions in the previous period.
Microsoft Copilot — What AI asks, and who it quotes
Questions Copilot looked up, answered by citing Lauren Tye Legal — "intervention order", "police caution", "traffic lawyer melbourne".
Before vs after
Search Console · clicks and impressions
Apr – Oct 2026
727 → 2,870 clicks · 85.9K → 224K impressions
Google Analytics · visits by channel
Apr – Oct 2026
5,355 visits, up from 2,003 · organic search +254%
The Situation
Lauren Tye Legal had the part that can't be bought: 216 five-star reviews, a reputation among Melbourne's criminal bar, and clients who send their family members back.
None of it reached the person at 2am.
Criminal defence has a search problem no other industry quite shares. Nobody browses for a lawyer. Something happens — a charge, a summons, a knock at the door — and the first question isn't "who is the best firm in Melbourne". It's "how long does a not guilty charge stay on my record", "can police look at my phone", "will I go to jail for breaching probation". Those questions used to go to Google. Now a great many of them go to ChatGPT and Copilot, which answer in a paragraph and cite whoever wrote the clearest explanation.
Lauren Tye Legal had the expertise to be that source. It just wasn't written down anywhere a machine could find it.
The Problem Stack
→
Visible almost only in searches for the firm's own name — people who already knew them
→
466 impressions in Google's AI features across a whole quarter — effectively absent
→
Head terms like "criminal lawyers melbourne" drew impressions but almost no clicks
→
No page answered the questions people actually type the night they're charged
→
Directories and national firms owned almost every answer an AI gave about Victorian criminal law
Goals
01
Be the answer, not a listing
When someone asks an AI what happens after a charge, the answer should be built from Lauren Tye Legal's explanation — and say so.
02
Reach people before they search for a lawyer
The valuable moment is hours before "criminal lawyer melbourne" gets typed. It's the question about the charge itself.
03
Compounding architecture
Each guide answers one question completely and links to the service that handles it. Offence guides feed practice areas. Practice areas reinforce the firm.
04
Always-on momentum
Not a campaign with an end date. A library that keeps earning citations and inbound enquiries whether we're actively publishing or not. No paid media. No traffic cliff.
What We Did
Lauren Tye Legal didn't need a louder website. It needed its expertise written down in the shape an answer engine can quote.
We started with a full visibility audit — mapping every question a person asks between being charged and hiring a lawyer, and checking who the AI engines were citing for each one. It was almost never Lauren Tye Legal. From there we built in four directions at once:
Question-led offence guides
We built a library of guides that each answer one real question completely — travelling overseas with a criminal record, whether police can access your phone data, how charges get dropped before court, bail for young people, breaching an intervention order. Every one of them started at zero.
Structured to be quoted
Direct answer first, specifics second, Victorian law named explicitly. That format — plain language, specific facts — is what makes a page worth quoting rather than paraphrasing.
Internal architecture
Every guide connects deliberately to the service page that handles that offence, and each service page reinforces the firm. The whole site signals authority on a single topic: criminal defence in Victoria.
AI answer optimisation
We tracked which questions Copilot was answering, and who it cited, then wrote for the gaps. Lauren Tye Legal now holds almost a quarter of the citations on those questions — and not one of those citations is for a branded search.
The result is a site that doesn't just rank — it gets quoted.
AI Search Performance
Pages Copilot cites most
90 days · Jul – Oct 2026
Seven guides carry 943 citations between them — one page alone accounts for 230.
Share of Authority — Microsoft Copilot
90 days · Jul – Oct 2026
Total citations
Branded — none from name searches
Against every other firm, directory and government page competing for the same answers.
Outcomes
The firm's homepage traffic barely moved. Everything else did. Every guide published during the engagement went from zero to hundreds of clicks, and together they now carry more than three times the search traffic the whole site had before. Visitors from AI assistants are still few (43 visits), but 72% of them engaged with the site — more than from search (58%) or direct (27%). Without a dollar of paid media.
Google AI impressions
466 → 41.5K
Organic clicks
+295%
Search impressions
+161%
Copilot citations (90 days)
3,315
Share of authority*
23.19%
Time to results
3 months
*Of all Copilot citations on the questions the firm targets — none from branded searches
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