AI visibility audit for law firms: does AI name you or your competitor?
What the AI visibility audit for law firms checks
Search is splitting in two. People still use Google and the Maps pack, but more of them now ask an assistant: "who is the best car accident lawyer near me?" The answer names a handful of firms and the person often calls one of them without visiting any website. An AI visibility audit, sometimes called a GEO audit, measures that second channel.
The free audit on this site runs four checks:
- Money questions, five engines. Questions like "best car accident lawyer in [your city]" go to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity with web search on, and the first one also goes to Google to see whether an AI Overview appears and who it cites. You get the result per engine, for example "Perplexity 1 of 2, Gemini 0 of 2".
- Brand questions. Does each assistant recognize your firm by name and describe it correctly?
- Who AI cites instead. The websites the assistants pulled their answers from: legal directories, "best of" lists, news sites and competitor pages. This is your to-do list.
- What AI can read on your site. Whether your robots.txt blocks AI crawlers, whether your pages answer questions in the first paragraph, and whether your firm is linked to the directories AI trusts.
Why the engines disagree
Each assistant searches and summarizes differently. ChatGPT and Perplexity lean on Bing's index, Google's AI Overviews use Google's, and each one weighs sources its own way. In audits we ran this week, the same firm was named by Perplexity and Claude in one run and by none of them an hour later. That is why a single screenshot of "ChatGPT recommended us" proves very little, and why the audit reports named-out-of-asked for each engine instead of a yes or no.
What we see consistently is which sources the engines cite. Across the PI audits we ran on November 10, 2026, the most cited sites were Super Lawyers, Avvo, Justia, FindLaw's directory, Expertise.com and Best Lawyers, plus local news and a few competitor websites. Firms that appear on those sources get named far more often than firms that only have a good website.
What a result looks like
Two real examples from this week, without names:
- A Southern California PI firm with about 850 Google reviews was named in a third of money answers (ChatGPT 1 of 2, Perplexity 1 of 2, Google AI Overview 1 of 1, Gemini and Claude 0 of 2). It was missing from Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Martindale and Super Lawyers, which were exactly the sources the engines cited for its competitors.
- A large Los Angeles firm with over 1,000 referring domains was recognized by name in every brand question but named in none of the money answers in that run. Strong backlinks alone did not put it in the AI shortlist.
That matches outside research. An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found brand mentions across the web correlate with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, compared with 0.218 for backlinks.
What to do with the results
- Fix access first. If your site blocks AI crawlers or loads its content only with JavaScript, nothing else matters yet.
- Get onto the cited sources. Claim and complete the directory profiles the engines cited for your competitors, and make your name, address and phone match everywhere, including Bing Places.
- Earn mentions. Reporter quotes, local news, data studies and YouTube answers create the kind of mentions AI weighs most. See GEO for law firms.
- Make your pages quotable. Answer the question in the first paragraph, with local specifics.
- Re-run monthly. AI answers shift and the sources they cite change often, so track the trend.
The full guide is how to get your law firm recommended by ChatGPT. If you would rather have it done, see our plan.
AI visibility audit vs a regular SEO audit
| Regular SEO audit | AI visibility audit | |
|---|---|---|
| Main question | Can Google crawl, index and rank your pages? | Do AI assistants name your firm, and why not? |
| Looks at | Your website and backlinks | Answers from five engines and the sources they cite |
| Key fixes | Pages, speed, schema, links | Directory profiles, mentions, reviews, quotable pages |
Ours does both in one run, plus your Google Maps rank. Use the law firm SEO audit checklist for the manual version.
Ai visibility audit FAQ
What is an AI visibility audit?
It is a check of whether AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews name your business when people ask for what you do, and which websites they rely on instead. For law firms it means asking the questions injured people ask in your city and recording which firms get recommended.
Is a GEO audit the same as an AI visibility audit?
Yes, mostly. GEO stands for generative engine optimization, the work of getting named in AI answers, so a GEO audit measures where you stand before that work starts. Both look at AI answers, the sources they cite and whether AI can read your site. Our free audit covers both plus your Google Maps rank.
How often should I check AI visibility?
Monthly is enough for most firms. AI answers vary from one run to the next and the sources they cite change often, so a single check is a snapshot rather than a verdict. Running the same questions every month shows whether your work on profiles, reviews and mentions is moving you into more answers.
Which AI engines does the audit check?
It checks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity with web search turned on, and Google AI Overviews through a live Google search for your first question. Results are shown per engine, so you can see that one assistant names you while another does not, and which sources each one cited.
See where your firm stands
The free audit checks your Google Maps rank around your office, whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews name you, and your website, in about a minute.
Prefer to talk? Book a 15-minute call with Mark.