From Word of Mouth to AI Search: How Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum Keeps Getting Found After More Than 90 Years

Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum has represented Rhode Islanders for more than 90 years—long enough to have watched the way people find a lawyer change several times over. In the firm's early decades, a good reputation traveled by word of mouth. Then came the Yellow Pages, then billboards, then television. Through every one of those shifts, the firm kept doing the same thing that built it in the first place.

"You do good for your clients and you get clients," says managing partner Christopher Russo, quoting the motto his late father lived by—a philosophy the firm ran on long before anyone had heard of a search engine. 

What's remarkable is how little that idea has had to change. The channels keep turning over, and the newest one is AI search—the results a growing number of Rhode Islanders now consult before they ever pick up a phone—but the thing that earns a recommendation is what it has always been: being genuinely good at the work, and being known for it.

Christopher still runs the firm much the way his father did, less like a business than a family. "We're really like family here," he says. "93 years and going." That continuity—a real firm, real people, a long and verifiable track record—turns out to be exactly the kind of signal modern discovery rewards, whether the one doing the finding is a neighbor, Google, or an AI assistant.

Foster Consulting™  founder Tom Foster saw it firsthand during a recent video shoot at the firm's offices. "Within the first hour, it was obvious the team at Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum genuinely understood this stuff," Tom said. "They weren't going through the motions—they were thinking about their clients, their cases, the questions people actually ask. That kind of authentic expertise is exactly what AI is designed to find and recommend. You can't fake it, and they don't have to."

Today, organic search is one of Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum’s most productive channels—the result of a steady, compounding body of content that puts the firm in front of people at the moment they're looking, and increasingly, in the AI-generated answers they see first.

A Lead Machine Built on Content

Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum invested in something that grows over time—a deep, structured library of content that answers the questions Rhode Islanders are actually asking, and that keeps working long after it's published.

That approach reflects how Christopher sees the market he's competing in. "It's just getting more and more and more competitive," he said of personal injury law, which he calls the most competitive area in all of law. He points to a new arrival in the state—Morgan & Morgan, one of the largest personal injury firms in the country—and is blunt about the math: "You're not about to outspend them." So Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum doesn't try to win on spend alone. Instead, the firm leans into what a national advertiser can't replicate. "We're not one of these big box firms where you have no idea who you're going to be dealing with," Christopher said. "Because we're a small state, we try to give them that very personal attention."

That personal attention is the promise. The content is how the firm proves it at scale—by being genuinely useful to people long before they call. And the questions those people bring aren't hard to guess. How long does a Rhode Island car accident case take to settle? How long do you have to file a personal injury claim? These aren't hypothetical questions. They're the real searches people type into Google on some of the hardest days of their lives. And right now, Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum shows up with answers—often at position No. 1.

The Strategist Who Cracked the AI Code

Behind those results is John Spare, the Foster Consulting™ strategist who manages the firm's digital presence. When Google's AI Overviews began rolling out in earnest, John watched organic traffic decline month over month for clients across the board. AI Overviews were consuming the top of the page, pushing local and organic results down—or off the screen.

So he studied the pages actually getting pulled into AI Overviews. The pattern was consistent: the sites earning citations were built around genuine topical authority. "You have to have a highly optimized website with authoritative content that directly answers the query the searcher is looking for," John explained. "Authoritative" means something specific—being a recognized thought leader in a defined practice area, with a domain that has history behind it and a consistent presence across third-party citation sites. Not something that appeared yesterday, and not something that covers everything without depth in anything.

That foundation—domain credibility, topical depth, citation consistency—is the price of admission. But many sites had paid it and still weren't getting pulled in. The gap was in how the content was built and presented.

What John saw in the top-performing pages was a set of structural and technical signals working together. Content was organized around specific, answerable questions with clear heading hierarchies sequenced so AI could extract a discrete answer without having to infer. Pages were technically clean: fast-loading, properly indexed, with schema markup telling search engines what the content was and who wrote it. Internal linking connected practice-area pages to related FAQ content and back, building topical clusters. And the firm's off-site presence—citations across directories like Avvo and Yelp, a well-maintained Google Business Profile, consistent name-address-phone information everywhere—was airtight, giving AI systems the external validation they need to trust a source.

For Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum, years of well-structured content and deep practice-area coverage meant the foundation was already in place. What John added was the technical and structural layer that made it legible to AI—the difference between a site AI can recognize as authoritative and one it can actively use. One recent example: adding a table of contents to key pages, a small structural change that helps AI parse and pull answers. That is what the AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) framework is built around: earning visibility not just in Google's results, but in the AI-generated answers a prospective client now sees first.

What Nearly a Million Impressions Actually Means

In the first half of 2026, the firm's website appeared in Google search results 962,519 times—nearly a million impressions, all of them organic.

The site has 875 pages indexed and ranks for more than 1,200 keywords: over 1,200 different searches that could lead someone directly to the firm. For a personal injury victim in Warwick. A grieving family in Cranston trying to understand Rhode Island's wrongful laws. An injured worker in Providence

The top organic landing pages tell the real story: FAQ pages answering specific, intent-driven questions drive more traffic than any other content—what to do after a car accident, mistakes to avoid in your worker’s compensation claim, how to get access to medical care when your injury keeps you from working. These pages weren't written to impress other lawyers; they were written for the people who need help, and those people found them. Organic search accounts for 70.2% of all sessions on the site.

When the Camera Rolls, Authority Multiplies

Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum’s website features an extensive library of on-camera content with the attorneys speaking directly to the questions clients care about most. AI systems don't just read text—they synthesize everything they can find about a source, including whether video content exists and whether the people behind a site have demonstrated expertise in a visible, verifiable way. An attorney who has answered a question in writing is an authority. One who has answered it on camera, with their name, face, and credentials attached, is a recognized authority.

Video marketing deepens the well of expertise AI systems draw from. Content that demonstrates genuine knowledge, in multiple formats across multiple touchpoints, is the closest thing to a shortcut that exists in AI search—which is to say, no shortcut at all. It's more work. But it's the right work.

Amplifying an Earned Foundation

The firm is now putting video to work in a second way: its first move into paid online streaming ads. Working with Foster Consulting, Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum is developing streaming spots built to carry the same message its content already does—that a small, established Rhode Island firm offers a level of personal attention the national advertisers can't match. 

That pairing is the point worth underlining for other firms. Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum built a durable, compounding asset—content and authority it owns outright—and uses paid media to amplify its reach. Organic earns the trust and does the long-term work; paid extends the signal. The two aren't in competition. They do different jobs, and they work best together.

What Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum’s Results Mean for Other Firms

1. Organic Authority Is the Channel That Compounds

Paid media is a faucet: genuinely useful for reach, but the moment you stop paying, the leads stop. Organic is different. Every FAQ page and every post that answers a real question adds to an asset the firm owns permanently. Kirshenbaum's 875 indexed pages didn't appear overnight, but they deliver every day—which is exactly why they make such a strong foundation to run paid campaigns on top of.

2. The Questions Your Clients Ask Are Your Best Content Strategy

The top pages aren't clever; they're useful. "How is a Rhode Island truck accident claim different from a car accident case?" "What happens if the driver who hit me has no insurance?" Being the firm that answers those questions clearly is how you become the firm they call. It's a modern version of what Chris's father understood decades ago: do good for your clients, and you get clients.

3. AI Rewards What Google Rewards, But the Window Is Compressing

The firms showing up in AI recommendations today started building years ago. Every month that passes is a month a competitor's content ages into credibility.

4. The Right Strategy Connects Every Channel into One System

Organic search, paid streaming, Google Business Profile, AI visibility, reviews, and FAQ content reinforce each other. A firm visible in search earns more reviews; a firm with strong reviews appears more in AI recommendations; a firm with deep FAQ content ranks in both and gives its paid campaigns something credible to point back to.

The Right Time to Start Is Now

Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum didn't become one of Rhode Island's most well-known law firms with one big move. It got there by making the right moves consistently—building content that answered real questions, earning the trust of Google and its users, and building durable authority that paid reach can now amplify.

The attorneys who show up in AI recommendations tomorrow are building that authority today. Where does your firm stand? A Foster Consulting™  AEO strategy review will show you exactly where you rank, what content is driving leads, and what it would take to compound those results—in Google, in AI, and in your intake pipeline.

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