WAY more people are using AI for lawyer recommendations (and contacting the firm) than you’d think! Case in point, see pic above (or click here). Interestingly enough we’ve never promoted this practice area, but ChatGPT and Google trust this law firm so much they just can’t help themselves.
Good problem to have I guess? I will of course deoptimize assault and battery for this firm from whatever source AI is pulling from, but I’ve learned over the years that getting calls and messages for cases you’re not interested in simply comes with the territory when you’re a personal injury law firm dealing with the typical clientele.
To note: this AEO/ GEO work I do for lawyers doesn’t just mean helping you show up in AI Answers and ChatGPT. It means doing our best to get AI to actively RECOMMEND your firm and list it as a top choice for a given prompt.
People place significant trust in AI answers, more so than traditional Google search results. And this makes sense because Google shows what is essentially a dozen billboards stacked on top of each other, and it’s up to the user to visit each website and make up their mind on what’s best for them. But most people are lazy, so it’s not unreasonable that they will consider the AI answers over spending the time to do more research.
The good news is we can not just help you appear higher in AI, but we can also influence what credentials, unique selling propositions, and content snippets the AI LLMs repackage about you and your firm, so we have some control over how you appear to users.
It’s not as straightforward as with Google where your meta tags and the content of your website you wrote are essentially listed verbatim. Instead, we use the content on your site and third party sites strategically to guide the AI on what to write. It still does the “writing” itself and in many cases it’s great, but no SEO can guarantee how exactly you’ll appear in AI. I wish it were that easy.
One quick SEO/AEO tip I will leave you with: 2026 is around the corner, so when the new year kicks off, you better update all your practice area and location pages, and even many blog pages, so they have a 2026 pub date on them! You shouldn’t just change the date (I wish it were that easy once again), but you should update a few sentences here and there, maybe add a few new paragraphs. So each page has some genuine updates to it. Trust me it’s worth it.
Why? Because AI and even old school Google doesn’t like to reference a page from 2025 when there’s plenty of other lawyers in your market who have 2026 page for the same topic. And god forbid you have pages from 2021 or something. A page that is regularly updated is seen as more accurate and trustworthy by search engines, that is the default assumption. This of course doesn’t apply to news stories from a fixed date, but if you’re a lawyer you shouldn’t be doing regurgitated news stories in the first place (especially en-masse), that ship sailed years ago!
Happy (almost) new year everyone!