Analyzing trust signals...
Trust Visibility Check
AI Visibility for Law Firms

Is Your Law Firm Showing Up in ChatGPT and AI Search?

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews for the best attorney in your practice area, does your firm get named, or does a competitor? Run a free check and see what AI can read about your firm.

Run My Free Check How It Works
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AIOInsights line art: Law Firms, pulled off the bridgeA large set of scales of justice standing in front of a courthouse with columns and a pediment. The left pan, holding a bound record with a wax seal, hangs lower than the right pan, which holds a single loose sheet. The ribbon and seal tying the record are drawn in coral, and a small four-point sparkle sits above the record. A gavel rests on its block at the right. The whole scene rides on a flatbed across a bridge. Ahead of it the bridge is broken off, the torn edge drawn in coral, pieces of deck falling into the gap, and the steam engine pulling it has its front wheels over the edge, tipping, not fallen yet. Far across a wide gap a crane marked Digilu is lowering a new span, still a long way off. DIGILUYOUR LAW FIRM AIOInsights line art: Law Firms, pulled off the bridge, mobileA large set of scales of justice standing in front of a courthouse with columns and a pediment. The left pan, holding a bound record with a wax seal, hangs lower than the right pan, which holds a single loose sheet. The ribbon and seal tying the record are drawn in coral, and a small four-point sparkle sits above the record. A gavel rests on its block at the right. The whole scene rides on a flatbed across a bridge. Ahead of it the bridge is broken off, the torn edge drawn in coral, pieces of deck falling into the gap, and the steam engine pulling it has its front wheels over the edge, tipping, not fallen yet. Far across a wide gap a crane marked Digilu is lowering a new span, still a long way off. DIGILUYOUR LAW FIRM

What to do, in order

  1. Find out where you actually stand. The distribution below is a corpus, not a diagnosis of your firm. The spread inside estate planning ran from 1.1 to 9.1.
  2. Fix location consistency first. It is the cheapest of the weak pillars and it is clerical rather than creative.
  3. Make the attorneys legible as people. Named, credentialed, with jurisdictions.
  4. Then work on corroboration, which is the slow one, never finishes, and is the reason the firms ahead of you are ahead.

Run my free check How it is scored

What we measured across 26 legal practices

The figures below come from AIOInsights research: 466 public websites we chose to evaluate, scored on six pillars from what a visitor, a crawler or an answer engine can read from the public web. Nobody asked us to evaluate them and none are our clients. Every individual evaluation is published, with its own date and engine version, at estate planning and divorce mediation in public signal research, and the corpus-wide findings are written up in AI Trust Signals: What 466 Websites Show.

Scales of justice before a courthouse, the sealed record outweighing a loose note

Two legal specialties in that corpus have enough sites to report, and the gap between them is the whole argument of this page:

Practice typeFirmsOverallReputation signalsLocal presenceEntity consistency
Divorce mediation118.144.917.059.13
Estate planning156.412.534.707.61

Both groups are legal practices serving individuals. Both are staffed by people who write for a living. The mediation firms are nearly two points ahead, and almost none of that gap is technical: entity consistency differs by 1.5 while reputation signals differ by nearly double and local presence by more than two points.

Estate planning scores ranged from 1.1 to 9.1. That spread inside one specialty matters more than the average: the ceiling is reachable, and most firms are nowhere near it.

Why ChatGPT does not mention your firm

The usual assumption is that the website is not optimized. Across the corpus that is rarely the binding constraint. Legal sites tend to score well on the parts a developer ships: structure, schema, a consistent name and address, readable service pages.

What an answer engine is short of is a reason to name you specifically. When someone asks for a probate attorney in a named city, the model has to choose. It resolves that with corroboration: independent sources that mention the firm, agree on who it is, and say something specific about what it does. A firm that only appears on its own website has given it nothing to work with. The one published count of AI citations for lawyers points the same way: in a vendor study of 359 personal injury answers in five metros, Super Lawyers and Justia were cited in 53% of attributable answers, far ahead of any firm's own site (see which legal directories AI answers cite).

One possible reason mediation outscores estate planning, which we have not tested: mediators are often listed in directories, referral panels and court-adjacent resources, and those listings are the kind of corroboration an engine can read. It is a hypothesis, not a finding. As the limits below say, this data does not show what causes the gap.

What is different about legal, and it is not marketing

Every state bar restricts what a lawyer may say about outcomes, and rules on client testimonials vary by jurisdiction. That is a real constraint and it is not an excuse, because the signals that move this score are mostly not testimonials:

  • Attorney identity. Named lawyers with bar admissions, jurisdictions, and a biography that reads as a person rather than a placeholder. This is verifiable and uncontroversial.
  • Practice specificity. "Estate planning" is a category. "Revocable living trusts for blended families in Ventura County" is an answer to a question somebody typed.
  • Third-party presence. Bar association listings, legal directories, local organizations, speaking, writing published somewhere other than your own blog.
  • Location that resolves. Consistent office details wherever they appear. This is the second weakest pillar for estate planning at 4.70 and it is almost entirely clerical work.

None of that requires a claim about results, and none of it requires a client to say anything.

Limits of this data

  • 26 firms across two specialties is a small cohort, and it is mediation and estate planning specifically. We have not evaluated a cohort of personal injury, family, criminal, immigration or corporate firms, and this page does not claim to describe them.
  • These figures pool more than one engine version. The evaluations behind them were stored between late June and late August 2026, and the rubric changed during that window: versions 2.3.1, 2.4.0, 2.7.0 and 2.9.3 all appear among the published legal reports, each of which states its own version and date on the report itself. Two of those releases corrected faults that moved scores upward on re-evaluation, so the pooled averages here are indicative of the gap between the two cohorts rather than a precise reading of either. A same-version cohort large enough to publish on its own does not exist yet, and we are not going to manufacture one by pretending the versions are interchangeable.
  • These are sites we chose, not a survey. The cohorts are the firms we evaluated during competitor research. No figure here should be read as "the average firm" in any field.
  • A score measures published signals on a date. It is not a judgment of the practice. A firm with an excellent reputation and no public trace of it scores low here, correctly, because the question being asked is what a machine can verify.
  • We have not shown that these signals cause an AI recommendation. This reports what sites carry. Our share of voice research measures what engines actually answer. Connecting the two properly needs both, over time.
  • Nothing here is legal or ethics advice. Advertising rules vary by state bar and compliance is yours.

A check is a baseline, not monitoring. The free evaluation reads what your firm publishes on the day it runs and returns a score, the evidence behind it and the highest-priority issue. It does not watch what changes afterward, and re-running it on an unchanged site returns the same reading. If what you need is the record over time, and somebody completing the authorized work, that is ongoing AI visibility tracking from Digilu.

Scores from legal practices we evaluated

We publish the AI visibility scores of the legal practices we have evaluated, with the score range, the most common gaps and every site in the set.

Estate Planning Family Mediation Divorce Mediation
Questions

Law Firms and AI Search

Yes. When a potential client asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews to recommend an attorney for a practice area and city, the assistant names specific firms it can interpret and trust from public signals. If your firm's website, profiles, and reviews do not clearly establish what you practice, where, and how credibly, AI systems tend to recommend a competitor instead.

Some people now ask an AI assistant questions such as best estate planning attorney near me or who handles construction disputes in Phoenix. We have found no reliable measure of how much legal intake starts this way. Where an assistant answers, it returns a short, synthesized answer naming a few firms and citing its sources, and in one vendor count of personal injury answers the most cited sources were legal directories such as Super Lawyers and Justia, not firm websites.

Common reasons include thin or vague practice-area language, a firm name and address that differ across directories, a website that is not indexed or that crawlers cannot fully read, and too few independent sources that mention the firm. Google says a page only needs to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and that no special schema.org structured data is needed for AI Overviews; markup can describe a firm clearly, but it is not an entry requirement. The free check identifies which gaps apply to your firm.

Traditional legal SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of links. AIO, AI optimization, is about being correctly understood and named inside a single AI answer. A firm can rank on the first page and still be left out of the AI recommendation, which is why the two need to be measured separately.

Yes. AI systems match the client's specific question to firms whose pages clearly state the practice area, jurisdiction, and who they serve. Firms that describe themselves only as full-service give the assistant little to match, while clear personal injury, family law, estate planning, or criminal defense positioning is far easier to recommend.

Reviews are one of the signals Google names for local search prominence, but no AI system documents how it weighs reviews when naming a lawyer, and we have not measured it. Reviews on independent platforms such as Google or Avvo are the ones a reader can treat as independent. Republishing them on your own site does not earn search stars, because Google makes self-controlled reviews on LocalBusiness and Organization pages ineligible, and bar rules in states such as Florida and New York attach conditions and disclaimers to testimonials a firm publishes. Ask clients for honest reviews on independent platforms, within your bar's rules.

Yes. A complete Google Business Profile, a consistent name, address, and phone number, and published bar admissions and credentials make your claims checkable: anyone, including an AI system, can match them against the bar's public record and your listings. Details that disagree across your site and directories make it harder to tell that they describe one real, locatable firm.

Yes. The AIOInsights check is free, needs no account, and returns a real, deterministic score with your single highest-impact fix. A deeper, human Full Evaluation for your firm is available through Digilu.

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Questions law firms ask about AI

Each page answers one question for a law firm or a lawyer, with the bar rules, ethics opinions and platform documents it rests on.