There's no denying it anymore: ChatGPT and other AI search engines have taken a massive bite out of Google.
We see it in the data. Impressions and clicks are down across our client accounts — not because rankings dropped, but because fewer people are clicking through to websites at all. And if you're honest with yourself, you see it in your own behavior. I use ChatGPT as my primary search engine for most queries now. So do a lot of your future clients.
So when firms ask us, "Do you do ChatGPT optimization — GEO — as part of your process?" the answer is simple: of course. Because we don't treat these as separate things. We treat all of it as search.
This is the full breakdown of how your law firm gets found, cited, and recommended inside ChatGPT — and why it's a different game than the SEO you're used to.
Search Is One Umbrella — Not "SEO vs. ChatGPT"
The biggest mistake firms make is thinking of ChatGPT as some separate channel that competes with their SEO. It isn't. It's another surface under the same umbrella: search.
Picture that umbrella. Under it sits Google — and Google itself is four different products: local SEO and the Google Maps pack, traditional website SEO, Local Service Ads, and pay-per-click ads. Then there's YouTube, which is a search engine in its own right. And now there are the LLM search engines — ChatGPT chief among them, plus Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.
All of it is search. When someone has a problem and goes looking for an answer or a lawyer, they're searching — the only question is where. A modern program has to show up across the whole umbrella, not just the Google slice you optimized for five years ago. That's why GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — isn't a bolt-on. It's part of search, and search is what wins you cases.
ChatGPT And Google Overlap ~80% (The 20% Is The Game)
Here's the good news. If you picture two overlapping circles — ChatGPT optimization and Google SEO — they share about 80% of the same work. The fundamentals that make Google trust you also make ChatGPT trust you: authority, reputation, real content, a clean web presence.
So if you've done real SEO, you're not starting from zero. You're 80% of the way there.
But the other 20% is where firms win or lose. That's the part almost nobody is doing deliberately yet — and it's the part this post is about. (Worth noting: ChatGPT also recently relaunched a self-serve ad platform, which we're actively testing for clients. That's a separate topic — this post is about earning your way into the answers, not buying your way in.)
People Use ChatGPT Differently Than Google
To understand the 20%, you have to understand how people actually use these two tools — because it's not the same.
Google is linear. Someone types a keyword. Maybe they refine it once. Then they pick a result. It's trackable — we can pull a tool, see exactly what people search, how often, and in what volume. That's the entire foundation of traditional SEO: known keywords, known volume, known intent.
ChatGPT is a conversation. It's not one keyword and done — it's a back-and-forth, more like a spiderweb than a straight line. Someone doesn't type "car accident lawyer." They type: "I hurt my neck in a car accident a year ago, my insurance won't cover it, what can I do?" Then they ask a follow-up. Then another. ChatGPT remembers the context of the whole conversation. It knows them.
And because it's hyper-personalized to each user, there's no keyword tool for it. You can't pull search volume for ChatGPT the way you can for Google. The behavior is invisible — but it's very real, and it's growing.
"ChatGPT is much more of a conversational, almost like a spiderweb. Google is linear. You track the keywords, you know the volume. With ChatGPT there's really no way to get that data — it's so hyper-personalized to the user."
Why Your Blog Traffic Died
This shift explains something you've probably already noticed: your blog doesn't pull traffic like it used to.
For years, the SEO playbook for law firms was top-of-funnel blog content. "What to do after a car accident." "How long do I have to file a claim." Informational articles designed to catch people early and funnel them toward you.
That playbook is broken — and Google broke it. Google's AI Overviews now gobble up those informational answers and serve them directly at the top of the page. Someone asks the question, gets the answer in the Overview, scans it, and moves on. Your article never gets the click. Pew Research put numbers on it: when an AI summary appears, people click a traditional result just 8% of the time — down from 15% without one — and only about 1% ever click a link inside the summary.
Here's the nuance most people miss: you should still build that content. Just don't build it expecting traffic. Its job has changed — more on that when we get to the ranking factors.
What Google is still genuinely great for is bottom-of-funnel queries. "Car accident lawyer near me." That's money in the bank — someone actively looking to hire. The catch is that winning the click is brutal, because the page is fractured: Local Service Ads at the top, up to four PPC ads, the Maps pack, then organic. Attention is split a dozen ways before anyone reaches your listing.
Meanwhile, the top-of-funnel and emotional queries are migrating hard to ChatGPT. Why? Because the experience is better. You can refine the question, pull from multiple sources at once, and get a cleaner answer faster — with no wall of ads. Business disputes, family law, "should I even have a case" — these are deeply personal, high-context conversations, and ChatGPT is eating them up. Increasingly, bottom-funnel and shopping-style queries are moving there too. People would rather ask ChatGPT to weigh options than sift through ten blue links and a pile of ads.
Think about how you shop now. Type "running shoes" into Google and you get a wall of ads and endless options to wade through. Ask ChatGPT and it does the opposite — it asks you questions. How far do you run? What's your weight? Any injuries? Then it hands you a few specific recommendations based on your answers. That's the behavioral shift in one example, and it applies to hiring a lawyer every bit as much as buying shoes. People increasingly want a recommendation, not a list of ten links to evaluate themselves. Which means your job has changed too: it's no longer enough to rank on a page. You have to be the recommendation.
So the question becomes: when ChatGPT answers one of those conversations and recommends a firm, how do you make sure it's yours? Those recommendations are called citations — and earning them is the whole ballgame.
The 6 Factors That Get Your Firm Cited In ChatGPT
Here are the ranking factors to focus on. I'll say up front: this isn't a checklist to run once and forget — we'll come back to that. But these are the levers that decide whether ChatGPT sees your firm as an authority worth citing.
1. Entity Authority
In plain terms: get your name across the web. Press features, news mentions, podcasts, directories and citations, bar associations, sponsorships — all of it. Every credible place your firm shows up is a signal that you're an authority on what you do.
The logic is simple. If you're mentioned across a lot of trusted places, you're probably legitimate and probably respected — so your voice deserves to be surfaced in the answer. Reddit and Wikipedia are especially heavily cited by AI — Semrush's study of the most-cited domains found both near the top across every major LLM. Wikipedia because it's a verifiable, structured source of truth. Reddit because it's organic, real-person discussion — pre-influencer word of mouth. The more the web vouches for you, the more AI treats you like a trusted brand.
2. Consistency
Every profile that represents your firm — Google, Facebook, Yelp, Avvo, and the rest — needs to be consistent. Same name, same address, same phone, same description, same practice areas.
Consistency reinforces authority. It signals that your information is current, that someone is actually managing and monitoring these profiles, and that the firm is real and active. Inconsistency does the opposite — it creates doubt, and doubt gets you left out of the answer.
3. Reviews & Reputation
This is one of the biggest, and it's where AI search departs most sharply from old-school SEO.
Traditional SEO is largely about your Google Business Profile reviews — and those still matter enormously. But Google leans on GBP because Google owns it; it's their asset. ChatGPT has no such loyalty. It looks everywhere: Yelp, Avvo, FindLaw, and every other platform where your reputation lives.
The takeaway: reviews on Google alone aren't enough anymore. The more reviews you have, across more platforms, the more credible and authoritative you look to an AI trying to decide who to recommend. These engines are quietly building trust and reputation scores for every firm, and reviews plus press mentions plus citations are exactly how they do it.
4. Content (As Credibility, Not Traffic)
Content is a bit of a double-edged sword now, and this trips a lot of firms up.
You still have to build it — blog posts, resource pages, video, podcasts. But you're no longer building it for views and traffic. You're building it as proof of expertise. Think of it as checking the box that says, "this firm genuinely knows this subject."
Ask it from the AI's perspective: if your website has nothing on it, why would any platform surface you as an authority on complex legal situations? It wouldn't. It doesn't make sense. So the content is what earns you the right to be cited — even if far fewer humans read it than they did five years ago.
That makes the investment tricky. You're allocating real time and money to content that two people might read, or nobody might read — but that the search engines are using to understand your credibility. It's still worth it. It's just no longer a traffic play. It's a trust play. (And it's still valuable for the humans who do land on your site — it just isn't the volume game it once was.)
5. Freshness
The data is clear: research from Amsive found that roughly 50% of the content cited in AI answers is under 13 weeks old. Freshness matters, and it's one of the trickier factors to manage — because how do you keep years of pages and videos current while still producing new ones?
Freshness doesn't mean fixing a typo or tweaking a page title. It means real maintenance, ideally on a quarterly cycle: Are the external sources you cite still live and relevant? Are you linking to current, authoritative information? Have the laws changed?
That last one is huge in legal, and it surprises me how often firms miss it. In the car accident space especially, laws shift constantly. I often hear about it from clients — "the state changed this, so we don't want those cases anymore" — and my reaction is always the same: why isn't that on your website? If a law changed, your prospects need to know, and the platforms are watching to see who's on top of it. A firm publishing accurate, up-to-date legal information gets cited more, because the AI sees it as current and reliable. A firm sitting on three-year-old pages slowly falls out of the answers.
6. Citations — What It All Adds Up To
The five factors above don't operate in isolation. They compound into the thing that actually matters: citations — ChatGPT naming and recommending your firm inside its answers. Authority, consistency, reviews, content, and freshness are the inputs. The citation is the output. When someone asks ChatGPT for a lawyer and your firm is the name it returns, every one of those factors did its job.
It All Comes Down To Brand
I don't want to oversimplify this into a checklist, because it's far more complicated than that. We're talking about the most advanced AI algorithms on earth, and they evolve daily.
But if I had to boil it down to one word, it's brand.
Brand in the legal space is notoriously hard to quantify. People hear "brand" and think top-of-mind awareness — billboards, radio, TV. And yes, all of that counts. Those channels are real and they work. But brand is so much bigger than that.
"Your brand, your authority, is the sum of every review, every profile, every piece of content, every press mention, every attorney you have, every win, every billboard, every campaign. It's the sum of all of it."
That's what these AI platforms are actually measuring. Not one page. Not one tactic. The whole footprint.
And that's the hard part. For years, marketing could be run like a checklist — you could attack an SEO campaign task by task and tick the boxes. This is bigger than a checklist. It's earned over a long period of time, across everything your firm does. You have to be more involved, and you have to understand what's actually being measured.
This is exactly why most agencies will fail you here. They come in with a checklist, run the tasks, and when it doesn't work they shrug: "We did everything we could, and we got paid, so — whatever." Knowing what you now know, you won't accept that. Building authority that AI trusts isn't a checklist you complete. It's a reputation you earn.
What To Do Now
Pulling it together, here's what a modern legal search program actually requires:
- Build entity authority — press, directories, bar associations, and mentions on trusted sources like Reddit and Wikipedia.
- Lock down consistency — identical name, address, and details across every profile that represents you.
- Get reviews everywhere — not just Google, but Yelp, Avvo, FindLaw, and beyond.
- Publish content as credibility — a real roadmap of pillar pages and posts that prove your expertise, even if traffic isn't the goal.
- Keep it fresh — a quarterly cycle to update content, check links, and reflect changing laws.
- Think in brand, not tasks — every review, win, mention, and campaign adds to the authority AI is measuring.
None of this is easy, and it's not fast. But this is what it takes to run a search program that actually works for a law firm right now — across Google, YouTube, and ChatGPT alike. The firms that treat search as one umbrella and build real, earned authority will own the answers. The ones waiting for a checklist to save them will keep wondering why it isn't working.
One last thing worth saying plainly: this is not a project you finish. The algorithms behind ChatGPT and Google change constantly, the platforms that matter shift, and the laws your clients care about move underneath you. That's why a real search program is an ongoing relationship, not a one-time engagement — and why the partner you choose matters more than any single tactic. You want someone who understands the whole umbrella, who's watching how these engines evolve, and who's building your authority deliberately over quarters and years. That's the difference between a firm that quietly becomes the name AI recommends, and one that keeps paying for tasks that don't move the needle.
