LawyerClaude and Gemini for law firm marketing: use them, and get named by them
This guide has two halves. The first is the one most lawyers search for: how to use Claude and Gemini in your own marketing, and what the ethics rules say about it. The second is the one that affects your caseload: how Claude and Gemini decide which firms to name when a person asks for a lawyer, and what you can do about it.
The two sides of Claude and Gemini for law firm marketing
Most articles about AI for lawyers cover side one: AI as your assistant. That is useful, and we cover it below. But side two is where the money is. A person hurt in a crash asks an assistant, "who is a good car accident lawyer near me?" The assistant gives a short list. The person calls one of the names. Nobody visits ten websites or scrolls the Maps pack.
| Side 1: AI as your assistant | Side 2: AI as a referral source | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | You prompt Claude or Gemini to draft marketing text | Clients ask Claude or Gemini to recommend a lawyer |
| What it does for you | Saves drafting time | Can send you calls, or send them to a competitor |
| Main risk | Confidentiality, accuracy, advertising rules | Not being named at all |
| Who controls it | You | The sources the assistants read |
How a solo PI lawyer can use Claude and Gemini day to day
Treat both tools as a fast junior writer who has never met your clients. They draft quickly. They also invent details, and they do not know your state's rules. Here are the jobs that work well for a firm with no marketing staff.
Blog posts and practice pages
Give the tool an outline and the facts you want in the post. Ask for a draft in plain English at an eighth-grade reading level, with a short answer in the first paragraph. Then do the part only you can do: add your local knowledge, fix every legal statement, and remove anything you cannot stand behind. A post that says what a generic assistant would say adds nothing. A post that includes how claims actually go in your county does.
- Good prompt: "Draft a 700-word post answering: how long do I have to file a car accident lawsuit in [state]? Use only the facts I paste below. Put a two-sentence answer first. Flag anything you are unsure of."
- Bad prompt: "Write a blog post about car accidents." You will get filler that sounds like every other firm.
Google Business Profile posts
GBP posts are short, so AI drafts them well. Paste your practice areas and ask for four posts a month in different formats: a tip, an answer to a common question, a short explanation of a process, and a community note. Edit for tone, and never let a draft make a promise about results.
Review replies
Ask the tool for a warm, short reply template, then personalize it. Do not paste the client's review along with any case facts you know from the file. A reply on a public profile should never confirm that the reviewer was your client or describe their matter. Keep it to thanks and a general line. This is a place where a lawyer's judgment matters, and a tool that does not know the rules will happily write something too specific.
Intake scripts and follow-up texts
Claude and Gemini are good at turning your intake process into a checklist: the questions to ask, the order, and what to say when a caller is not a fit. Ask for a script a non-lawyer receptionist could follow, and have it include a line that no attorney-client relationship exists until you say so. Write the script from your own process, not from a real caller's story.
Other jobs that save time
- Turning one blog post into a short email, three social posts and a FAQ.
- Rewriting a page title and meta description in a few options.
- Summarizing a long article you want to cite, which you then read yourself.
- Drafting a press note or a quote for a reporter who asked you a question.
Whatever you generate, remember that AI text published as-is tends to read like everyone else's. Search engines and assistants reward pages with something specific to say. See our guide to Google AI Overviews for law firms for what gets cited.
Ethics and confidentiality: what ABA Formal Opinion 512 says
On July 29, 2024 the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility issued Formal Opinion 512, "Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools." It adds no new rules. It explains how the existing Model Rules apply to AI. The Bar Examiner summary of ABA Formal Opinion 512 gives the main points, and I rely on it here. Read the opinion itself and your state bar's guidance before you set a firm policy, because states differ and some have issued their own opinions.
| Duty | What the opinion says (summary) | What it means for marketing use |
|---|---|---|
| Competence | Lawyers need a reasonable understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the tools they use, and should not rely on output uncritically. | Check every fact, statute and number in a draft before it goes on your site. |
| Confidentiality | Assess the risk before putting client information into a tool. Boilerplate consent is not enough; informed consent needs a specific explanation. | Keep client names, facts and case details out of prompts. Use made-up examples. |
| Communication | Tell clients about AI use in some situations, such as when they ask or when their information is entered. The engagement agreement is a suitable place. | If AI touches intake or client messages, say so in your engagement letter. |
| Supervision | Firms should have clear AI policies and training. | A one-page policy covers a solo firm and any assistant or freelancer you use. |
| Fees | Hourly billing covers actual time; tool costs may be overhead or an expense depending on the case. | Mostly a billing issue, not a marketing one, but do not bill AI-saved time as if you spent it. |
The opinion focuses on using AI in legal work. Marketing is a lighter-risk use, but the same logic holds. Three habits cover most of it:
- No client information in prompts. Not names, not facts, not a screenshot of a review thread. If you need an example, invent one.
- A lawyer reads and signs off on every published word. Your name is on the advertising. Lawyer advertising rules in your state apply to AI-written text the same as to text you typed. That includes rules about misleading statements, results claims and testimonials, which vary by state.
- Know the settings of the plan you use. Consumer and business plans handle your data differently. Read the terms for the exact plan on your login before you paste anything sensitive, or better, paste nothing sensitive.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. It is how I would set up a small firm's workflow, and your bar's ethics counsel can tell you where your state goes further.
Side two: how clients find a lawyer through Claude and Gemini
Here is the part with money attached. When a person types "best truck accident lawyer in Tampa" into an assistant, the assistant does not recall a ranking from memory. For a question like that, it searches the web, reads what it finds, and writes a short answer with the names that appear in its sources. Your firm gets named when the sources it reads say good things about you. The two assistants gather those sources differently, so it helps to know how.
How Gemini finds sources
Google's developer documentation describes a feature called grounding with Google Search. Google's Gemini grounding with Google Search documentation says the model analyzes the prompt, decides whether a web search would help, and if so generates and runs one or more search queries, then synthesizes the results into an answer with inline citations. In short, Gemini's web answers are built on Google Search results.
That is good news for a firm that already works on local SEO. The signals that help you in Google's results (a strong Google Business Profile, reviews, a site that answers real questions, citations on trusted directories) also feed the pool Gemini draws from. Google's own guidance on AI features says there are, in its words, no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and no special optimization needed beyond being indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet (Google Search Central guidance on AI features). The same page says these features may use a "query fan-out" technique, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources. That means your firm can be surfaced by a related search you never targeted, such as a question about a hospital, an intersection or a type of claim.
One caution. The documentation I cite describes the developer product. The Gemini app and Google's AI features may not behave identically, and Google changes them often. I use the documentation to explain the mechanism, and I test real answers to see what happens.
How Claude finds sources
Anthropic's web search tool documentation says Claude decides when to search based on the prompt. It searches for things that are current, changing, or outside its training data, such as information about specific organizations. It does not search for stable knowledge or creative work. When it searches, the response includes citations to the sources it used. The docs also note that site operators using the API can allow or block specific domains, so results can vary by how a given product is set up.
The documentation does not name the search index behind the tool, and I will not guess at it. What you can verify is simpler: ask Claude with web search on, "who are the top car accident lawyers in [your city]?" and look at the sources it lists. Those sources are your to-do list.
Claude also reads pages directly. Anthropic's crawler help page describes three Anthropic crawlers. ClaudeBot collects content that may contribute to model training. Claude-User retrieves a page when a person asks Claude something. Claude-SearchBot indexes content to improve search results. Anthropic says blocking Claude-User may reduce your visibility in user-directed searches, and blocking Claude-SearchBot may reduce visibility in search results. All three follow robots.txt.
What the two have in common
- Both search the web for a question like "find me a lawyer" and cite sources.
- Both can only use what they can reach. A site that blocks the crawler, or that hides its text behind scripts, gives them nothing to read.
- Neither guarantees the same answer twice. In the audits we run, the same firm can be named in one run and missed an hour later, so measure over time instead of trusting one screenshot.
First check: is your own site turning Claude away?
In our study of 816 California personal injury firm websites checked on November 10, 2026, 12.4 percent (101 firms) blocked at least one AI crawler. Anthropic's ClaudeBot was refused most often: 93 firms, or 11.4 percent. Most of these blocks happen at the server or firewall, so robots.txt looks normal and the firm never knows. Several firewall rules blocked ClaudeBot by name while letting other AI crawlers through.
The study notes that GPTBot and ClaudeBot are mainly training crawlers, so a block on those alone does not keep you out of live answers. But blocks rarely come alone, and a rule that refuses unknown bots can catch Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot too. If you have not looked, look. The steps:
- Open yourfirm.com/robots.txt. Look for "Disallow: /" under ClaudeBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, Google-Extended or any wildcard rule you did not write.
- Ask your web host or CDN whether bot protection or "block AI bots" is on.
- Run the free audit. It requests your homepage as several AI crawlers and tells you which are turned away.
Blocking Google-Extended affects how Google uses your content for Gemini, not your search ranking, according to the same study. Make that choice on purpose.
What to do so Claude and Gemini name your firm
The work is the same work that wins local search, with a bigger emphasis on being mentioned in many places. Here is the order I would do it in.
- Fix access. Remove accidental blocks and make sure your key pages show their text without JavaScript. Nothing else matters until the assistants can read you.
- Tighten your Google Business Profile. Correct categories, hours, services and a clear description. Gemini's answers lean on Google's data, so this is your base layer. Our local SEO for lawyers page walks through it.
- Earn real reviews the allowed way. Ask every happy client, make it easy, and never pay for or gate reviews. Reviews are a trust signal that both assistants repeat in their wording.
- Match your listings everywhere. The same name, address and phone on Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Martindale, Super Lawyers where you qualify, Bing Places and your local bar directory. In our audits, the sources AI cites most often for injury lawyers are these directories, local news, and "best of" lists.
- Make pages quotable. Put the answer in the first paragraph, with local specifics. An assistant can lift a clear two-sentence answer. It cannot lift a vague paragraph.
- Get mentioned by people other than you. Reporter quotes, local news, community sponsorships and your own data. An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found brand mentions correlate with AI Overview visibility far more than backlinks. For the full playbook, see GEO for law firms.
- Test the questions your clients ask. Run them in Claude and Gemini each month, with web search on, and write down who is named and which sources are cited. Our AI visibility audit does this across five engines.
If you want the ChatGPT version of this, read how to get your law firm recommended by ChatGPT. If you already tried and a competitor keeps winning, why ChatGPT recommends other law firms explains the usual reasons.
Should you pay for tools or for visibility?
A subscription to Claude or Gemini costs little compared with an ad budget, and it is a fair buy for the drafting jobs above. It will not by itself make assistants recommend you. Writing more posts faster does not fix a blocked crawler, a thin profile or an absence from directories. Spend your first hour on the checks in the previous section, and your next ones on the profile, listings and reviews.
If you would rather hand all of this off, our plan covers the local SEO and AI visibility work for a flat fee. See the pricing page for what is included, or book a 30-minute call.
A starter checklist for this week
- Write a one-page AI policy: no client information in prompts, a lawyer reviews all published text, which tools are allowed.
- Add a line about AI use to your engagement letter if AI touches client communication.
- Check robots.txt and ask your host about bot blocking.
- Ask Claude and Gemini three client questions and save the sources they cite.
- Claim or fix the one directory profile your competitor has and you do not.
- Draft this month's GBP posts with AI, edit them, and publish.
Claude and gemini for law firm marketing FAQ
Can lawyers use Claude and Gemini for marketing?
Generally yes, if you follow your state bar rules and ABA Formal Opinion 512. Keep client information out of prompts, review and edit every draft yourself, and remember that lawyer advertising rules apply to AI-written text the same as to anything else you publish. Check your state bar for its own guidance, because states differ.
How does Gemini decide which lawyers to name?
Google documents a feature called grounding with Google Search, where Gemini runs web searches and builds its answer from the results with citations. So the signals that help you in Google, such as your Business Profile, reviews and pages that answer real questions, also feed Gemini. Results change, so test your own questions monthly.
Does Claude search the web for lawyer recommendations?
Anthropic documents a web search tool that Claude uses for current or changing information, including facts about specific organizations, and it cites its sources. Whether a given Claude product has search on depends on the product and settings. Ask Claude for a lawyer in your city with search on and read the sources it cites.
Should I block ClaudeBot on my law firm site?
For most firms, no, unless you decided on purpose to keep your content out of training data. Anthropic lists ClaudeBot for training, Claude-User for user questions and Claude-SearchBot for search, and says blocking the last two may reduce your visibility. In our study, 11.4 percent of California injury firms refused ClaudeBot, often by accident.
Free audit for solo personal injury lawyers
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 30-minute call with Mark.