How to get your law firm recommended by ChatGPT
Someone who needs a lawyer used to open Google and scroll. Now a lot of them ask ChatGPT instead, and it names two or three firms. This page shows you the questions they ask, where those answers come from, and the ten things that decide whether your firm is one of the names.
This is what gets typed: whole sentences, with the problem in them, rather than keywords.
These are the shapes of question people type: full sentences with the mess left in, rather than keywords.
Of US Google searches now end without anyone clicking through to a website. The answer happened on the results page.
SparkToro, 2026
Of searches show an AI Overview. Your listing is below an answer most people never scroll past.
TechCrunch, July 2026
Of AI Overview citations come from YouTube. Reddit is another 19%. Most of what feeds the answer is not your website.
Ahrefs, across all topics
The engine is reading. Mostly not your website.
AI does not invent a list of lawyers. It reads pages, then names what it read. For legal questions the same few source types keep showing up.
Law society and bar association listings
The register for your jurisdiction is a trusted, structured list of who is actually admitted. Engines lean on it because it settles the question of whether you are real.
Legal directories
Directory profiles get cited even when they are thin, because they carry practice area, location and contact details in a predictable format.
Review pages
Your Google Business Profile reviews are readable text. A review that says "helped me with an unfair dismissal claim" is a practice-area signal. A five-star review with no words is not.
Reddit and local forums
People ask "which lawyer in [city]" in public and get answers from strangers. Ahrefs found Reddit accounts for roughly 19% of AI Overview citations across all topics.
YouTube
The single biggest source in that same Ahrefs data, at around 23%. A lawyer explaining what happens in a first consultation is exactly the kind of thing that gets pulled.
Local press and quotes
Being the firm a journalist rings for a comment on a local case puts your name in a page an engine already trusts.
Your own practice area pages
These matter, but less than you would hope. Your site confirms what other sources already said. On its own it rarely gets you named.
The 23% and 19% figures are Ahrefs numbers across all topics, not law specifically. We have not seen a public breakdown for legal queries and we are not going to make one up. The pattern holds in every legal prompt set we have run: the citations are mostly not the firm's own website.
Ten fixes that change what the engines say.
Ten fixes, in the order we would do them. Most of these are an afternoon, not a project.
Name your practice areas the way clients say them
Nobody types "employment law advisory". They type "sacked without notice". Rename the page, keep the legal term in the body.
One page per practice area per city you actually serve
A single "Our services" page cannot be the answer to twelve different questions, so split it into one page per matter type. Do not invent cities you do not have an office or a licence in.
Put the human on the page
Name, admission year, jurisdiction, photo, and which of the firm's matters this person actually runs. Engines are matching entities, and a named admitted solicitor is a much stronger entity than "our team".
Complete your law society listing
Same firm name, same address, same phone number as your website. Mismatches make engines hedge, and a hedging engine names someone else.
Fix your name, address and phone everywhere else
Google Business Profile, directories, the old office address still sitting on a 2019 listing. Pick the canonical version and make everything match it.
Answer the ten questions clients ask before they ring
Write them as questions, in plain English, on your site. "What does a first consultation cost?" beats "Fee structure". Pages with question headings pick up a measurable lift in AI Overview citations.
Publish what things cost, or at least how you charge
Fixed fee, hourly, no win no fee, a range. Cost is in a huge share of the questions people ask, and a page that dodges it gets skipped for one that does not.
Ask for reviews that mention the matter
Tell the client what to say: the problem they had and the city. "Five stars" is invisible to a model. "Handled my contested probate in Adelaide" is a citation waiting to happen.
Turn up where people ask, as a person
Answer the legal questions in local forums and on Reddit under your own name, with no pitch. Slow, compounding, and it is the source type the engines read most.
Date your pages and mark up your FAQs
A visible "last updated" line and FAQPage schema on each practice area page. Five minutes each. AI-cited pages are meaningfully fresher than Google-cited ones, and freshness is something you control.
How likely is ChatGPT to recommend your firm? Score it in two minutes.
Answer ten quick questions about your business and get a score out of 100 straight away. Within 24 hours, I ask ChatGPT three questions your customers would type, and email you whether it named you and who it named instead. It is free, and nobody rings you.
If you are not sure of an answer, that is an answer too.
Start free, then pay only for what earns its keep.
The free audit shows you what ChatGPT says today. The paid audit comes with a 90-day plan to change it, and monitoring tells you every month whether it worked.
1. The free basic audit
FreeTen quick questions about your law firm, scored out of 100. Within 24 hours, I ask ChatGPT three questions your clients would type, and email you whether it named you and who it named instead.
2. The audit and strategy
US$297 onceWe ask 20 to 30 real client questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews, several times each. You see who gets named and what the engines read. Then you get the 90-day plan: what to fix, in order, and who does it, written so your office manager can run it.
3. Monitoring
US$149/moYour questions, asked again every month (or every week for US$249). One page: how often you were named, which competitor moved, and what to do next, plus an alert if you drop out. Cancel any time.
Start with the free basic audit. It takes two minutes and you pay nothing. I do not build or maintain websites, and I do not sell guaranteed rankings.
Mark Ashworth
Growth Pigeon, Singapore
I have spent 25 years doing marketing in Asia, most of it for businesses that needed customers this quarter. I am not a tool and there is no agency behind me. When you buy an audit for your law firm, I am the one reading the answers.
The promise: no jargon. If I send you something you need me to translate, I have done it wrong. And I will never tell you a ranking is guaranteed, because AI answers change run to run and anyone claiming otherwise has not checked twice.
The honest answers.
Will this get my firm to the top of ChatGPT?
There is no top. ChatGPT names a handful of firms and the list moves between runs. What we can do is measure how often you get named across a set of real client questions, change the things that feed those answers, and measure again. Anyone promising you a number one spot in an AI answer is selling you something that does not exist.
Is this just SEO with a new name?
It overlaps, but the winning moves are different. Classic SEO spends its budget on backlinks. Backlink counts barely correlate with whether an AI names you. What does move is being present and consistent in the sources the engines read, which for law is registers, reviews, forums and video more than it is your homepage.
How long before anything changes?
Perplexity picks up changes in about two to four weeks. Gemini takes one to three months. ChatGPT is slower for anything baked into the model, though its browsing mode reacts faster. Expect partial movement in month one.
Do we have to do the work ourselves?
Most of the ten fixes are things your practice manager can do. The audit tells you which five actually matter for your firm so nobody wastes a week on the other five. If you would rather we did it, we quote it as fixed scope.
Is any of this against advertising rules for lawyers?
Nothing here asks you to claim a result or compare yourself to another firm. Accurate listings, plain answers to client questions, honest reviews and being findable are all ordinary practice. Your jurisdiction's rules still apply and you should check them, particularly around anything that reads as a testimonial.
What does the scorecard give me?
Ten questions about your own firm, two minutes, a score out of 100 and the three things to fix first. It costs nothing and nobody calls you. If it puts you in the running, that is a fine answer and it will say so. If not, the audit is the next step, because it asks the engines instead of asking you.
Growth Pigeon helps law firms get named when people ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for a lawyer. We test the questions real clients ask, report which firms the engines name today, and give you the fixes that change it.