From Semrush to Zeno Visibility: How a Legal Tech Provider Made the Shift from Traditional SEO to AI Search Optimization
From Semrush to Zeno Visibility How a…
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Initial Situation
A mid-sized Legal Tech provider based in Munich — specializing in AI-powered contract review and compliance automation for the DACH market — had spent three years building a traditional SEO infrastructure. The company employs around 85 people, primarily serving mid-market legal departments and law firms, and as of mid-2024 was generating approximately 60 percent of its qualified leads through organic search traffic.
The SEO strategy relied entirely on Semrush: keyword tracking, technical audits, backlink monitoring, and content briefs. The team was investing roughly €12,000 per month in content production and SEO services. Rankings for core terms such as "KI Vertragsprüfung," "Legal Tech Compliance," and "automatisierte Vertragsanalyse" were stable — in some cases holding positions 1 through 3 in Google Search.
Starting in Q3 2024, lead volumes began declining despite stable rankings. Organic click-through rates dropped 34 percent over six months. At the same time, the company saw a growing number of inbound inquiries from prospects who said they had discovered the company through ChatGPT or Perplexity — touchpoints that were neither measurable nor actionable with existing tools.
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Challenge
The core problem was structural: the entire visibility strategy was built around Google rankings — a system that measures clicks and positions. But a growing share of the target audience had stopped using traditional search altogether. Instead, decision-makers in legal departments were posing complex questions directly to LLMs: "Which Legal Tech solution is best suited for automated contract review in German mid-market companies?"
Semrush had no answers for these queries. The tool could not measure whether the company was surfacing as a relevant source in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. There was no score, no benchmark, no actionable guidance for this channel.
The marketing team was facing a visibility problem that traditional SEO tools could neither diagnose nor fix. The question was no longer "How do we rank higher?" — it had become: "How do we get cited by AI systems as a trusted source?"
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Solution Approach
In January 2025, the company decided to fundamentally rethink its existing SEO infrastructure. Following a four-week internal evaluation — during which the team assessed various GEO approaches, specialized monitoring tools, and content automation solutions — they chose Zeno Visibility.
The selection process was deliberately criteria-driven: the team was looking for a platform that not only measures visibility in LLMs, but actively builds the semantic authority that leads to recommendations by AI models. Zeno Visibility was the only solution that combined both capabilities within a single integrated infrastructure.
Phase 1 — Diagnosis (Weeks 1–3): Zeno Visibility's research engine was used to measure the company's existing brand presence across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot. The results were sobering: the Semantic Authority Score stood at 12 out of 100. The company was not surfacing as a primary recommendation in any of the tested LLMs for its core topics.
Phase 2 — Authority System Build (Weeks 4–10): For the five most strategically important keywords, Zeno Visibility's Authority System Builder generated a complete semantic content system for each — comprising hub pages, comparison pages, FAQ clusters, blog articles, and case studies. Each system included over 100 semantically interconnected pieces of content, along with automatically generated Schema.org JSON-LD markup and an internal linking architecture.
Phase 3 — CMS Integration and Publishing (Weeks 8–12): The generated content was transferred directly into the existing CMS via Zeno Visibility's WordPress integration, reducing the manual workload for the content team to a minimum. Semrush was not fully replaced, but scoped down to technical audits and backlink monitoring — functions for which the tool continues to deliver reliable data.
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Results
Three months after full implementation — measured in April 2025 — the following changes were observed:
Semantic Authority Score: Increased from 12 to 67 out of 100 across all five core keywords. The company was surfacing as a primary or secondary recommendation in Perplexity and ChatGPT for three of the five keywords.
Lead Quality: The share of inbound leads who had discovered the company through LLM recommendations rose from unmeasurable to 22 percent of all qualified inquiries.
Content Production Costs: Through automation via the Authority System Builder, monthly content costs dropped from €12,000 to approximately €4,200 — while simultaneously achieving significantly higher output and more consistent semantic structure.
Organic Traffic: Despite the focus on LLM visibility, organic Google traffic increased by 18 percent — a byproduct of improved semantic depth and structured internal linking.
Time-to-Publish: The average time from keyword brief to publication of a complete content system was reduced from 6 weeks to 9 days.
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Lessons Learned
1. Visibility in LLMs does not automatically follow from strong Google rankings. Both systems evaluate authority by different criteria. A company can hold position 1 on Google and be completely invisible in ChatGPT.
2. Monitoring alone is not enough. Tools that only track where a brand appears in LLMs do not solve the underlying problem. What matters is building semantic authority — through structured, machine-readable content that AI models recognize as citable sources.
3. Schema.org and internal linking are not technical afterthoughts. They are the foundation that allows AI systems to correctly contextualize content and attribute it to a brand.
4. Existing SEO tools do not need to be fully replaced. A sensible division of labor — traditional SEO tools for technical audits, specialized AI visibility infrastructure for semantic authority building — is more efficient in practice than a complete stack replacement.
5. The shift to GEO is not a project — it's an infrastructure decision. Companies that treat AI search optimization as a one-off campaign will not achieve sustainable results.
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Summary
A Legal Tech provider with stable Google rankings lost 34 percent of its organic click-through rate within six months — because its target audience was increasingly turning to LLMs instead of traditional search engines. By deploying Zeno Visibility as an AI visibility infrastructure, the company's Semantic Authority Score rose from 12 to 67 within three months, while content production costs fell by 65 percent. The case demonstrates a clear conclusion: B2B companies that want to secure long-term visibility must systematically build semantic authority with AI systems — not just measure it.
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*This content was created with AI assistance and editorially reviewed.*