TL;DR
- Google now automatically pulls service descriptions, offers, pricing, and discounts straight from your website to populate your Local Service Ads, with no approval step.
- Under terms that took effect April 2025, Google also reserves the right to use the content of phone calls and messages routed through LSAs to generate ad copy and train its systems.
- The only opt out for the website scraping piece is to remove your URL from the LSA account entirely, which kills your website link in the ad.
- There is no opt out at all for the call and message data usage. If you did not accept the new terms by June 5, 2025, your ads were stopped.
- Law firms need to audit what their site says about pricing, offers, and services right now, because Google is already feeding it into your ads.
If you run Local Service Ads for your firm, Google quietly redrew the lines on what you control and what they control. Two changes, one in April 2025 and one in April 2026, take a chunk of ad copy authorship out of your hands and put it in Google’s.
This matters more for law firms than for most LSA advertisers. Attorneys live under bar advertising rules that vary by state. If Google starts generating ad copy that promises something your firm did not approve, or that hints at a guarantee, or that surfaces pricing language your bar association does not love, you are the one with the ethics complaint. Not Google.
This is what changed, what it means for your firm, and what to do about it.
What Google changed in April 2026: rich content from your website
As of April 2026, Google automatically pulls service descriptions, special offers, pricing information, and discounts from whatever website URL you have listed in your LSA account. Account level setting. No campaign level toggle. No preview before it goes live.
To check what URL Google is reading, log into your LSA account and go to Account, then Profile and Budget, then Website. Whatever URL is there is the one Google is scraping.
If you do not want Google generating ad content from your site, you have one option: remove the URL from the account entirely. That also removes the website link from your ad, which most firms will not want to do. So in practice, most firms are stuck with Google deciding what gets pulled.
This is a problem because most law firm websites were not written with Google’s ad robots in mind. You may have:
- Old “free consultation” language buried on a practice area page
- Outdated office hours in a footer
- A pricing page from 2022 that mentions a flat fee you no longer offer
- A blog post from a paralegal that uses language your managing partner would never approve
Any of that can now show up in your LSA. You will not get a notification. You will not get a draft to approve. It just appears.
What Google changed in April 2025: rich content from your phone calls
This one was bigger and got less attention.
Under updated LSA Terms of Service that took effect in April 2025, Google reserves the right to “select, modify, display, and use” rich content pulled from the phone calls and messages that get routed through your LSA. They can use this content, along with your profile data, to populate ads across Google’s properties.
In plain English: when a potential client calls your firm through an LSA, Google can analyze that conversation and use what was said to generate ad copy, train models, and optimize ad delivery.
There is no opt out. If you did not accept the new terms by June 5, 2025, your LSA campaign was paused. Acceptance was mandatory.
For a personal injury firm, this means a call where a caller describes a slip and fall at a specific business can become source material for how Google represents your services. For a family law firm, calls about divorce, custody, and abuse can feed into the same system.
If you have not thought about how this interacts with attorney-client privilege, intake confidentiality obligations, and state bar rules on client communications, now is the time. We covered some of the broader Legal AI privacy issues in our Legal AI guide for law firms, and the same concerns apply here, just routed through Google’s ad infrastructure instead of a chatbot.
What this actually looks like in a law firm LSA
Walk through the practical scenarios.
Scenario one: your website has a “no fee unless we win” line on your personal injury landing page. Google sees it. Now your LSA, in some markets, starts displaying “No fee unless we win” as a callout. Your state bar requires that phrase to be paired with a disclaimer about costs. Google’s version does not include the disclaimer. You did not authorize the placement. You are still responsible.
Scenario two: a caller tells your intake team they were rear-ended on I-95 last Tuesday. Google’s systems pick up “rear-end accident” and “I-95” as relevant service terminology. A week later, your ad shows “I-95 accident attorney” as a service highlight in a city you do not actually serve.
Scenario three: an old page on your site says “Free 30 minute consultations.” You stopped offering free consultations two years ago. The page is still there because nobody cleaned it up. Google pulls it. Now your LSA promises something you do not deliver.
None of these are hypothetical edge cases. They are predictable outcomes of how rich content automation actually behaves.
What to do this week
There is no perfect defense here, but there are concrete actions that reduce the risk.
Audit the URL Google is pulling.
Log into your LSA account and confirm exactly which URL is set under Profile and Budget. Then go to that URL as if you were Google’s robot. Read every page linked from it. Note every mention of pricing, fees, consultations, guarantees, hours, and special offers. If something is outdated or unapproved for advertising, fix it on the site.
Clean up your pricing and offer language.
If you have pages that mention free consultations, contingency fees, flat fees, or any promotional pricing, make sure that language matches what your firm actually offers today and what your state bar permits in advertising. Generic blog posts that quote ranges or industry averages are particularly risky here.
Check your hours and service area pages.
Google likes to surface hours and service areas. If your site says you serve a county you no longer practice in, or lists hours that have not been updated since the office moved, that information can land in your ad.
Monitor your live ads weekly.
Search for your firm’s LSAs in your target markets the way a client would. Take screenshots. If Google starts displaying language you did not approve, you need a record of when it appeared so you can dispute leads tied to inaccurate ads and file complaints if needed.
Talk to your intake team about the call recording change.
They should know that what callers say is now potentially being used by Google for ad generation. This does not necessarily change what they do, but it changes the disclosure conversation. Some firms are adding a line to their intake script noting that calls may be recorded and used by third party providers.
Document your compliance position.
If your state bar comes asking about something that appeared in your LSA, you want to be able to show that you took reasonable steps to control your account, audit your site, and monitor your placements. The defense “Google did it without telling me” is more credible when you have records of what you did to limit Google’s discretion.
Why this is happening
Two reasons, and both are worth understanding.
First, Google is under enormous pressure to make LSA ads more competitive with the rich, AI generated content that is showing up across every other surface. They want LSA ads to look as compelling as an organic AI Overview result. Dynamic content pulled from your site and your call history is how they get there without making advertisers manually write more.
Second, Google’s AI systems need training data. Phone calls and messages routed through their infrastructure are an enormous, mostly untapped source of high quality conversational data tied to commercial intent. The April 2025 terms change unlocked that.
The implication is that this trend keeps going. Expect more dynamic content, more automated copy generation, and less advertiser control over what appears in the ad. The firms that win this period are the ones that treat their entire web presence as ad copy, because Google now does too.
Where LSAs still make sense for law firms
None of this means abandoning LSAs. They still produce some of the most efficient leads in legal marketing for the right practice areas. Personal injury, family law, criminal defense, estate planning, and DUI cases continue to come through this channel at costs that work for firms that have their intake and conversion process dialed in.
For a deeper view on whether LSAs make sense for your specific practice and market, read our pillar post on Local Service Ads for lawyers, and our comparison of Google Ads vs LSAs for law firms.
What changes is the level of attention you need to pay. LSAs used to be a “set it and check it monthly” channel. After these two updates, they are a “audit it weekly and treat your website as ad copy” channel.
If you want help auditing your LSA setup, your website’s exposed content, and the language Google is most likely to pull into your ads, get in touch. We work with personal injury, family law, and other consumer facing law firms on exactly this kind of work.
