Agencies, search experts, PR experts, and generalist digital marketers alike have been posting feverishly about AI in the last 18 months. There is so much noise around AI search that it can be challenging to wrap your head around what’s fact and what is self-serving rhetoric.

I’m going to break down “the real real,” as millennials might say, on what you NEED to know if you are a managing partner, legal marketer, practice group leader, or anyone that even remotely touches marketing, develops new business, or has a responsibility for new matter intake.

Let’s start with some key facts:

• You can “do” all the search engine optimization (SEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) in the world, but without high-quality content, you’re a sitting duck waiting for a competitor to take you out.
• Hiring a PR firm is not going to magically make you show up in ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI search tools.
• Your website is the central hub and reference point for generative engines. It is vital that your website properly represents who you are, who your attorneys are, what you do, and who you do it for, all while being properly structured in a way that machines can easily navigate it.
• Yes, today, “listicles” work for boosting AI visibility.
• Awards, rankings, and citations matter more than ever.

And here are some falsehoods:

• PR is the most important part of GEO.
• Being listed on 20 listicle sites guarantees inclusion in AI results.
• (My personal favorite) SEO is dead — AI killed it.
• Your website doesn’t matter anymore; people don’t go to websites anymore, they only use AI tools.
• Large law firms don’t “get found” online.

Yes, these are, in fact, things I’ve heard people say and read in “expert” posts. AI is the shiny new thing everyone is infatuated with, and many of those experts feel that if they are not talking about it 24/7, they will be seen as outdated. So, instead of consuming objective educational content, you’re seeing conflicting guidance and inaccurate information. Unwittingly, people double down on these false statements, and now we have an even bigger issue: no one knows which way is up.

Fifteen years in SEO come with a certain kind of pattern recognition. You start to see the same recycled narratives resurface — dressed up differently, but fundamentally unchanged. Rather than add to the noise, let’s focus on what will actually move the needle for your firm.

Start with Content

Here are a few questions to ask your managing partner and practice group leaders:

• Is our firm well represented online for who we are and what we do?
• When you search for the firm name or our attorneys, are you happy with the results?
• If you could wave a wand and fix or change one thing about how we show up online, what would it be?

These three questions will give you a ton of material to work with.

“Good SEO is Good GEO.” Good SEO starts with consistently published, authoritative content, and clear dominance in your practice. This is only achieved when a firm takes their online presence seriously and demands input from the experts at the firm.

Content comes in many forms: blogs/articles, LinkedIn content, guest blogs and quotes in industry publications, webinars, podcasts, and video. What is moving the needle today, and frankly has been for the last decade, is written content: blogs and legal alerts published on your website, as well as guest posts on other sites and quotes in industry publications. These are foundationally critical to drive digital visibility. Consistently publishing high-quality, authoritativecontent that covers what your clients actually want and need to read is vital.

Your Website is Not Optional

We listed it as a fact above and it deserves its own section: your website is the cornerstone upon which everything else is built. Generative AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others — reference and synthesize information from across the web. Your website is one of the primary anchors they use to understand who you are, what you do, and whether you are a credible source.

A few things that matter more now than ever before:

Attorney Bios

These are often the most visited pages on a law firm website and among the most referenced by AI tools when constructing answers about legal expertise. Thin, outdated, or generic bios are a liability. Each bio should clearly articulate the attorney’s practice focus, notable matters, thought leadership, and the types of clients they serve.

Practice Area Pages

Practice and sub-practice pages must go deep. Very deep. Not “we handle patent litigation,” but who you handle it for, what the process looks like, what outcomes you have driven, and what questions your clients are actually asking.

Technical Structure

Machines need to be able to crawl, parse, and understand your site. Clean URL structures, proper heading hierarchies, schema markup, fast load times, and mobile optimization are table stakes — not nice-to-haves.

Internal Linking

Your content should connect logically. When an AI engine is synthesizing information about your firm, strong internal linking reinforces topical authority and ensures the right pages are surfaced.

The irony of the “websites don’t matter anymore” crowd is that AI tools are, in large part, trained on and actively referencing the web. A weak website isn’t just bad for traditional SEO — it actively undermines your AI visibility.

Before Turning to PR, Get the House in Order

It’s so easy to fall into the “this is the way law firms have always done it” mindset. Most law firms have a PR firm on retainer. Most firms are also underutilizing or misusing PR.

If you take one thing from this article, I hope it is this: if your website isn’t strong, your content isn’t consistent, and your attorneys aren’t at the forefront of all you are doing, you should not be hiring a PR firm.

PR, in a lot of ways, is an ego-driven area of marketing. Who doesn’t love to see their name cited in a big-time article in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal? But PR for online visibility requires a new approach that breaks from the traditional methods most PR firms have failed to adopt.

The publications firms like to be cited in, the ones that “PR firm relationships” land them, are not the ones moving the needle anymore.

Your PR efforts should be digital first, and should focus on publications that have strong authority in the legal practice area you want to be known for. These publications include niche websites, specific online magazine-style sites, and, occasionally, industry-specific microsites from larger publishers.

If your current PR agency hasn’t initiated a serious strategy discussion about shifting publication targets in the last 12 months, it may be time to seek a partner who is better prepared to lead your firm over the next 5–10 years. A strong partner, often an experienced SEO agency, will prioritize Digital PR that secures placements in authoritative, results-driven publications over purely vanity citations.

Answer Engine Optimization: A Different Kind of Visibility

Not all acronyms are created equal, and in the volatile AI visibility marketplace today, GEO ≠ AIO ≠ AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization. AEO has a different objective than traditional lead generation; itis less about driving someone to contact you, and more about validating your expertise by being the cited answer for top-of-funnel questions — questions like “how do I begin the process of suing for patent infringement” or “what should I know before filing a wrongful termination claim.”

The strategy for AEO follows the same foundational steps — strong content, credible citations, a well-structured website — but the content itself needs to be structured to answer questions directly and authoritatively. Think about the questions your prospective clients are asking before they know they need a lawyer. Then build content that answers those questions better than anyone else.

AEO wins compound over time. When your firm is the consistently cited answer for the questions that precede a legal need, you become the name people already know when they’re ready to hire. That’s a powerful position, and one that many law firms are completely ignoring right now.

Listicles, Awards, and Citations: Use Them Strategically

Listicles and awards work, when leveraged strategically. But the key word is strategically. Not every directory listing or award carries the same weight, and chasing volume without strategy is exactly the kind of thinking that gets law firms taken advantage of by vendors peddling easy answers.

For listicles, the question to ask is, “does this publication carry topical authority in my practice area?” Being listed on a well-regarded legal tech publication for your cybersecurity practice group is meaningful. Being listed on a generic “top 100 lawyers” site with no clear domain authority or editorial standards is not helpful. AI engines are sophisticated enough to weigh source credibility — don’t confuse activity with impact.

For awards and rankings — Chambers, Legal 500, Best Lawyers, Super Lawyers, Am Law rankings, etc. — these are increasingly referenced by AI tools as validation signals. If your firm is eligible to pursue these and isn’t actively doing so, that is a gap worth closing. Beyond vanity, these recognitions serve as third-party credibility signals that generative engines use to determine whether your firm belongs in the answer.

Connecting It Back to Intake

(If you have any responsibility for intake, this section is for you.)

AI search changes where clients start their journey — but it does not change the destination. Prospective clients still need to find you, evaluate you, and decide to contact you. The difference now is that the evaluation process is starting earlier and in more places. When someone asks an AI tool a legal question and your firm’s name comes up as a cited source, that is an intake touchpoint. When a general counsel uses Perplexity to research outside counsel for a new matter and your firm appears consistently in the results, that is an intake touchpoint.

Your intake process needs to account for the fact that prospects may arrive already warm. They’ve seen your name. They’ve read your content. They have a baseline of trust before they ever call. Your intake team should be asking “how did you hear about us” with enough specificity to capture AI as a source. And your website should make the conversion from “found you through AI” to “submitted a contact form” as frictionless as possible.

How Do You Know If It’s Working?

This is the question most articles on this topic skip entirely, so let’s address it head on.

Measuring AI search visibility is still evolving as a discipline, but there are concrete things you can track today:

Manual Prompt Tracking

Build a list of 10–20 prompts that represent how your ideal clients would describe their legal problem. Run these weekly or monthly in an incognito browswer window across several AI tools and track whether your firm is appearing and where. This is low-tech but genuinely useful.

Website Referral Traffic

As AI tools increasingly link to sources, you will begin to see referral traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar tools in your analytics. Track this as its own channel and watch the trend.

Intake Source Tracking

Update your intake questions to specifically capture AI tools as a source. “I found you through a Google search” and “I asked ChatGPT and it recommended your firm” are different signals — treat them differently.

Brand Mention and Citation Tracking

Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and emerging GEO-specific platforms can track brand mentions and citations across the web — the inputs that influence AI output. A growing citation footprint is a leading indicator of AI visibility.

The goal is not perfection — the measurement infrastructure for AI search is still maturing. The goal is to establish a baseline today so you can see the trend over time and make informed decisions.

If You Can Only Do Three Things in the Next 90 Days

The managing partners and legal marketers who read this article are busy. So here’s the on-ramp:

1. Audit your website and your content. Pull up your firm’s website with fresh eyes and ask the three questions from the content section above. Look at your attorney bios, your practice area pages, your recent blog posts. Is this the best representation of your firm’s expertise? If the honest answer is no, that is where to start — before anything else.
2. Do the prompt research. Spend one hour with your AI tool of choice. Search for the legal problems your best clients bring to you. See who shows up. See which sources are cited. You will learn more in that hour than you will from any vendor pitch.
3. Have an honest conversation with your current service providers. Ask your SEO agency, your PR firm, your digital marketing partner: what are we doing specifically to improve our visibility in AI search results? If you get a vague answer or a repackaged version of what they’ve always done, that tells you something important.

The Bottom Line

AI search is not a trend to wait out. It is also not a reason to blow up everything that has been working. The firms that are going to win are the ones that build on a strong foundation — great content, a credible website, real thought leadership from their attorneys — and adapt their strategy to meet clients where they are starting their search.

The noise is loud. The path forward is actually pretty clear.