AI Search Optimization and AEOfor Law Firms

Who this page is for. This page is the law firm version of our AI search optimization services. It is written for managing partners, solo practitioners and firm marketing leads who have noticed that prospective clients now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews who to call before they open a directory or scroll a list of ads. We are a reputation and search visibility company. We are not a law firm, and nothing on this page is legal advice. The work is marketing and information design, and every claim a firm makes inside it remains the firm's responsibility under its own jurisdiction's rules.

The questions people ask AI about lawyers. Legal questions arrive in classes, and each class is answered from different sources. The first is the find-a-lawyer prompt: a practice area plus a place, such as a family law attorney in a named city or a DUI lawyer near a named courthouse. The second is the do-I-need-a-lawyer prompt, where someone describes a situation, an accident, a notice from a landlord, a workplace complaint, and asks whether to hire counsel at all. The third is cost and process: how contingency fees work, how long probate usually takes, what happens at an arraignment. The fourth is the reputation prompt: is this firm any good, what do clients say about this attorney. The fifth is the comparison prompt, one firm against another, or a firm against an online legal-document service. We ask each class separately for each practice area and city you care about, because a firm can be named for one and invisible for another.

Where the answers come from. We log which sources the engines cite for your practice area and city, and we do not assert in advance how much weight any engine gives any source. In legal categories we expect to see general directories and profiles such as Avvo, Martindale-Hubbell and Justia, Google Business Profile listings and the reviews attached to them, state bar directories and public bar records, local news, and the firm's own practice pages. Which of those an engine cites varies by engine, by practice area and by week. The first output of the audit is therefore a map of the sources cited for your own prompts, and the work is built from that map instead of from a generic list.

Attorney entity pages. Many firm sites keep attorneys on a single team page with a paragraph of boilerplate each. An engine trying to answer who handles this matter in this city does better with a page per attorney that states the same facts everywhere: the name exactly as it appears in the bar record, admissions, practice areas, office location, languages, and published or spoken work. We add Person schema for each attorney that matches what the visible page says, and we align those facts across the firm site, the Google Business Profile, directory profiles and the bar listing. When the facts disagree, for example two spellings of a name or a practice area on one directory and not another, a model has less to corroborate. This is accuracy work, not invention. We use only what the attorney confirms and what the public record shows.

Answer-first practice pages. A practice page often opens with a banner about being aggressive and experienced. A page an answer engine can quote opens by answering the question in its first two sentences: what the matter involves, what the usual steps are, what a person should do first, and what varies by state. We restructure practice pages and write new ones for the unanswered prompts, each with a named attorney as author, sources for statements about the law, and a visible date showing when an attorney last reviewed it. Law changes, so a page should say how current it is. Each page states that general information is not legal advice and that outcomes depend on the facts. Our guide to what answer engine optimization is covers the method in general; this page covers how it is applied to a firm, within the limits below.

Bar advertising rules come first. Lawyer advertising is regulated, and nearly everything a firm publishes for an engine to read is advertising or information about a lawyer's services. ABA Model Rule 7.1 says a lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer's services, and that a communication is false or misleading if it contains a material misrepresentation of fact or law, or omits a fact necessary to make the statement, considered as a whole, not materially misleading. That is the Model Rule, and we cite it as a general reference only. State rules vary: each state adopts its own version, and many add requirements on testimonials, past results, specialty claims, disclaimers and comparisons, so confirm yours with your bar or ethics counsel. Reputation Resolutions is not a law firm and does not give legal advice. In practice we do not put superlatives such as best lawyer or top attorney on firm pages unless your local rules allow them and the firm can substantiate them, we do not claim or imply case results, and where your compliance reviewer wants wording changed, their wording wins.

Client confidentiality. We never use client names, matter details, or a review that contains client information in any page, schema or outreach. A lawyer's confidentiality duties do not end because a client left five stars, and a public reply that confirms someone was a client can itself create a problem under many state rules. Where reviews are part of the work, it means the firm's own honest request process to real clients, with the firm deciding what to ask and say. We do not write reviews, run sockpuppet accounts or post under invented client identities. Those tactics break platform rules, they tend to be found and reversed, and in a regulated profession they put far more at risk than a directory listing. Engagements are handled confidentially.

When the problem is wrong, not missing. Sometimes the issue is not absence but inaccuracy: a directory profile lists a practice area the attorney does not handle, an old address survives on several listings, or a review site entry is mismatched to the wrong lawyer. Fixing what AI or reviews say about a firm is a different job from growth, and it belongs to our law firm reputation management service, which deals with false, outdated or rule-breaking content. We hand those problems across so that growth work never builds on a false description. The two services share one monthly panel, so a firm can see the wrong answers and the missing ones in the same report.

Every engagement starts with a free AI visibility audit, delivered by an analyst and quoted separately in writing. For a firm, the audit asks a panel of prompts for your practice areas and cities across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, and records whether you are named, how you are described and which sources are cited. Anything beyond the audit is scoped in writing before it starts and handled confidentially. No one can guarantee that an engine names a specific firm, and we do not sell paid placement in AI answers, so the monthly panel exists to show you what actually moved and what did not.