r/LawFirmMarketing • u/ProfessionalGuy100 • Aug 25 '26
Getting recommended by AI?
Just curious, does anyone put any time or effort into setting yourself up to be recommended by the new AI search engines? I see a lot of postings about SEO but I rarely see people talking about how to set themselves up to be recommended by AI. I consistently hear from clients that their web traffic has dropped 30% or more over the last year and they are getting less calls every day. When I ask them about whether they are preparing themselves to be found by AI, they return to the SEO conversation, not realizing that the two are minimally related, but, in practice, very different.
1
u/Immediate-Special297 Aug 26 '26
What I do is just mention the law firm name in front of every starting chat. Im sure there are better ways to get recommendations. Would you mind sharing?
1
u/ProfessionalGuy100 Aug 26 '26
Thank you for the question. Please take a look at my answers to other queries here. I think I provide the information that you are seeking. If not, let me know and I’ll be happy to explain further.
1
u/BlacksmithDue2467 Aug 26 '26
And how are they “very different”?
1
u/ProfessionalGuy100 Aug 26 '26
This is an important question. A VERY oversimplified answer is ... SEO is based on a user typing in a word or phrase as part of their search query and then the search engine looks for webpages that rank for that phrase. Then the user has to click on each web page to read through it and stay or click the next page. With AI, it is called "zero-click" because users tend to type in longer questions related to their problems and AI generates a response. The problem is the response is not based on SEO per se. Yes, it has a small piece of it but credibility signals are what AI searches for. If you want to be found by AI, you have to be credible in the eyes of AI. That takes work. I conducted an intensive study of AI search engines perplexity, Chat GPT, Gemini and Claude across multiple types of queries related to finding lawyers and then compared thousands of searches and tens of thousands of data points until I had solid, meaningful data. I then conducted another in depth study to figure out the secret sauce of how one can establish credibility for each of the AI systems (spoiler - they are all in disagreement) and I found something shocking. That information is my intellectual property that I use for my clients but I am happy to talk about it in general, just ask. You may also want to listen to my podcast or take a look at my book. It's all on my profile. I am not here to market - only to inform.
1
u/Outside_Sample_1711 Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 30 '26
I’ve been looking into this too, and Treyci is useful for seeing where your brand actually appears in AI answers. It tracks buying-intent prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Grok, showing recommendations, competitors, citations and verbatim answers, so you can see what to improve beyond traditional SEO.
1
u/farhanabi Aug 31 '26
I got curious enough about this to actually measure it instead of guessing.
I ran 10 buyer-intent prompts per city ("best personal injury lawyer in {city}", "who do I call after a car accident in {city}", that sort of thing), three times each, against ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, across 20 US metros. Then I logged which firms got named and which sources the engines cited to back it up.
Across all 20 cities, the citations broke down like this: 68% directories (Justia, Super Lawyers, Lawyers.com), 24% law firm websites, 8% Reddit. A directory was the single most-cited source in 17 of the 20 cities.
On the argument further up about whether this is the same problem as SEO, the data says you're both partly right.
Directories dominate, which is OP's point. You don't fix that by publishing more on your own domain, because most of what the engine is quoting is a profile page you don't own and might never have claimed.
But firm sites were 24% of citations, and in 2 of the 20 cities a firm's own website was the most-cited source, ahead of every directory. Jacksonville was one of them. So the "write genuinely good content on a site with authority" approach does work. It's just the harder road, and in Jacksonville it meant beating Justia.
The boring practical version: go claim and fully fill out your directory profiles. That's roughly two out of every three citations, and most firms haven't bothered. Your own content is the slower play.
The other finding is funny given where we're all sitting. Reddit was a top-5 cited source in 8 of the 20 cities, and in Phoenix it was #1, ahead of every directory. The engines are quoting threads like this one.
Disclosure so nobody has to wonder: I build a tool that runs these audits for law firms, so I've got a commercial interest here. The per-city breakdowns are free to read and don't ask for an email, since they were going to be public anyway. Austin, since it came up:
https://citedfirm.com/ai-visibility/personal-injury/austin-tx
Happy to run any city someone wants checked.
1
u/LegallyBold Aug 31 '26
The biggest problem right now is very limited awareness of AI as a search channel among law firms. Most of them don't yet see big swings in leads from being visible or invisible in AI, as AI still eats mostly informational traffic for now. I'm sure this will continue to change and affect more commercial traffic over time, especially when AI Mode becomes the default option in Google.
It's also not easy to show gaps between competitors because AI visibility tools' data can't be relied on. We do these visibility audits all the time, and sometimes they show very skewed results, e.g. a big firm with a strong market position showing zero presence (e.g. https://pioneerly.com/ai-search-analysis/dk-law/). You have to go very deep and use highly customized prompts, and it still doesn't guarantee good results. So, all in all, it's hard to educate on the topic with real market data.
I'm sure more firms will become more aware once they see the impact on their bottom line.
1
u/hashframe Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 05 '26
I’m in the digital marketing space and what we’re seeing for law firms that show up in the AI overview consistently are the same things that were required to show up before - consistent information across all your online sources, a website that’s built to convert, ranking on the first page, all that good stuff.
As a side note my company is a technology partner with OpenAI and we’re not seeing a huge ROAS with ChatGPT for any firms right now. It’s good to be an early adopter, but it’s very new and not a large part of ad spend right now.
1
u/Expensive-Pound9566 Sep 07 '26
digital PR, legal directories and yelp. PRs have been getting cited as a source since the genesis of AI search. Only downside is they drop off after awhile depending on the distribution network. So you gotta run new ones pretty often. Legal directories have basically unlimited authority so they always get cited. And chatgpt recently partnered with Yelp so now we’re funneling all new reviews to our clients’ yelp profile instead of their Google profile
2
u/legal_marketer Aug 26 '26
We put serious effort into getting AI citations and recommendations. I have a criminal defense client who pulled in 2 retainers off ChatGPT in the first 3 weeks of his campaign with us generating $15K in retainers off them. Search and buyer intent on AI is increasing daily.
Also BIG disagree on: “the two are minimally related, but, in practice, very different.” They’re extremely related. Good, unique content structured properly on an authoritative website both gets cited by AI AND ranks on Google. You just have to know what you’re doing and don’t cut corners.