When a client recently came to us with a bold vision for their new website, we listened carefully - and then pushed back.
A law firm, about to double in size, they wanted their digital presence to reflect where they believed the industry was heading: forward. Futuristic. AI-first.
The ask? Tear out the homepage. No navigation. No hero section. No services list or trust signals. Just a single AI chat prompt sitting in the center of the screen - letting visitors type a question and get intelligent, site-generated answers.
It was a genuinely interesting idea. And we talked them out of it.
Why the Idea Is Appealing (and Where It Falls Apart)
The instinct makes sense. AI chat interfaces feel modern. They feel effortless. And for the right kind of site - a deep knowledge base, a documentation hub, a research platform with hundreds of resources - a prominent chat experience can be transformative.
But a law firm’s marketing site is not that. It’s a brochure. And brochure websites have a fundamentally different job.
The role of a homepage is not to wait for users to know what to ask. It’s to show them what’s possible - and guide them toward it. A primary navigation isn’t just a list of links. It’s a signal. It tells a first-time visitor: here’s who we are, here’s what we do, here’s who we serve, here’s how to reach us. It plants ideas in people who didn’t arrive with a specific question in mind. That’s especially true for a law firm, where a visitor might not know they need an estate planning attorney until they see “Estate Planning” in the nav and think - actually, yes.
Strip that away, and you’ve built a site that only works for users who already know exactly what they want - a minority of your actual audience.
The SEO, Accessibility, and UX Cost
Beyond the navigation logic, a chat-only homepage creates real, measurable problems.
SEO takes a hit. Search engines crawl content. An empty homepage with no headings, no copy, no structured information gives them almost nothing to index. For a firm trying to rank for practice areas, locations, and attorney names, this is a serious disadvantage right out of the gate.
Accessibility suffers. Screen readers, keyboard navigation, and assistive technologies depend on structured, semantic HTML - landmarks, headings, labelled regions. A chat interface as the sole interactive element fails a significant portion of users, and likely runs afoul of WCAG guidelines that law firms, of all clients, should be mindful of.
Non-technical users are left behind. A blinking cursor in an empty box is not intuitive to everyone. Older clients, users unfamiliar with AI tools, or anyone who just wants to find your phone number should not be expected to know what to type. Friction at the homepage level is friction you can’t afford.
What We Recommended Instead
The goal wasn’t to talk the client out of AI - it was to put AI where it actually belongs on this type of site.
The solution we proposed keeps a traditional homepage structure intact: primary navigation, a clear hero section, service highlights, trust signals, and a strong call to action. Nothing revolutionary there. But layered into the hero, we added an AI-powered search prompt. On desktop it sits prominently, and when clicked, it expands to full-screen - a focused, immersive experience for users who want to explore the firm’s content or FAQs through natural language.
On interior pages, the same functionality lives as a persistent floating button - familiar to anyone who’s used a support chatbot, but backed by the firm’s actual knowledge base rather than a generic script.
This approach gives the client what they actually wanted: an AI-forward experience that signals innovation to sophisticated clients. It just doesn’t sacrifice the things that make a website work in order to get there.
AI belongs on your website. It works with great UX structure - not instead of it.
What Decision Makers Should Know Before Saying Yes to AI
If you’re a business owner or executive considering AI integration on your site or in your software, here are a few things worth understanding before the conversation with your developer gets too far along.
Your content has to be ready. AI is only as good as what you feed it. If your site content is thin, outdated, or poorly organized, the AI will reflect that - confidently. Before investing in integration, make sure your resource base, service pages, and FAQs are accurate and well-structured. Content readiness is almost always the bottleneck.
Grounded AI vs. generative AI - know the difference. A grounded AI pulls answers directly from your existing content - your pages, your docs, your data. A generative AI creates responses from scratch based on what it knows. For a client-facing business site, you almost always want grounded. Generative AI can produce confident, plausible-sounding answers that are simply wrong - a real risk when legal or professional advice is on the line.
It needs ongoing maintenance. An AI integration is not a set-and-forget feature. As your services change, your team grows, or your content evolves, the underlying data the AI draws from needs to be updated too. Budget for that as part of your operating costs.
Ask your developer these three questions:
- What content will the AI actually draw from, and how is it kept current?
- What happens when a user asks something the AI doesn’t know - does it say so clearly, or does it guess?
- How will this affect our page load speed and Core Web Vitals?
If the answers are vague, that’s a signal to slow down.
A Note on the Technical Build
For teams planning a similar integration, here’s a brief outline of how we approached the implementation.
CMS: WordPress, with Custom Post Types (CPTs) to structure the firm’s resource content - attorney bios, practice areas, blog posts, FAQs - in a way the AI can query cleanly.
Chat integration: An agent builder-based tool connected to the site’s content layer, configured to surface relevant pages and resources rather than generate free-form responses. Grounded answers, not hallucinations.
Plugin considerations: Search indexing plugins to feed structured data to the AI layer; accessibility plugins to ensure the chat widget meets WCAG standards; caching strategy to ensure the added JavaScript doesn’t affect Core Web Vitals.
Scope, hours, and gotchas were documented separately - but content readiness and AI response accuracy testing are the two areas that consistently take longer than clients expect.
The Takeaway
AI belongs on your website. When implemented thoughtfully, it can meaningfully improve how users find information, reduce routine calls to reception, and position your firm as a forward-thinking practice.
But it works with great UX structure - not instead of it.
When a client asks for something bold, our job isn’t to say yes automatically. It’s to understand what they’re really after, tell them honestly what won’t work, and build something better than what they imagined.
That’s still the job. AI or not.