Law firms have spent years optimizing their websites with SEO to appear on a Google page of ten blue links. Now clients are asking ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews for a firm recommendation instead of scrolling through search results.
To unpack what this shift means for legal marketing, we sat down with Lalindra Perera, SEO and AI search strategist at Cubicle Fugitive. Lalindra explains generative engine optimization (GEO) in plain terms: what it is, how it relates to traditional SEO, and what law firms can realistically do today to show up when a potential client turns to AI for help finding a lawyer.
What Is GEO, and How Is It Different from AEO?
CF: How would you explain GEO, or generative engine optimization, in plain language to someone who has never heard the term?
Lalindra: GEO is what you do to show up on AI platforms.
CF: What's the difference between GEO and AEO, or answer engine optimization?
Lalindra: In 2026, these are just two names we use for the same thing. Both describe the practice of optimizing a brand to be included in the answers that AI generates for a potential client.
How AI Search Engines Find and Recommend Law Firms
CF: How would a law firm turn up in a ChatGPT response or a Google AI Overview, compared to a traditional Google search?
Lalindra: Traditional Google search returns ten blue links, and Google builds that list by weighing three things: content, backlinks, and user engagement. A generative engine like ChatGPT works differently. The LLM looks at its training data to see if it can provide accurate information; if not, will search the internet to find the information needed. It pulls a snippet of information about a brand and builds a direct answer around the question the user asked. GEO looks at who is talking about your brand or your brand's overall reputation on niche specific sites, including mentions in forums and social media, and tries to read the sentiment behind them. Platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity don't have Google's infrastructure for crawling and scraping pages at scale, so they only see a limited slice of data. These LLMs also analyze the sentiment in the data or content accessible from your site.
Is AI Search Replacing SEO for Law Firms?
CF: Is AI search visibility replacing SEO? Should law firms start moving SEO budgets elsewhere?
Lalindra: The data doesn't support moving away from SEO. Google still runs a much broader set of products that people already rely on daily, and it's catching up to ChatGPT. Current estimates put ChatGPT at roughly 30 percent of the market, Google around 15 to 16 percent, and Claude near 8 percent, with both Google and Claude gaining ground quickly. No LLM has Google's spam-filtering capabilities, which is a big part of why Google still delivers more consistently reliable results. In a couple of years, experts expect Google to shift further toward a fully AI-generated answer engine.
CF: Would you say AI search is complementary to SEO?
Lalindra: GEO sits on top of SEO. If a firm hasn't implemented good SEO strategies, they aren’t going to show up in Google search results over time, and the same holds true across other LLMs. GEO isn't replacing SEO. Instead, it adds another layer of optimization on top of the SEO work law firms should already be doing.
What is the AI Search Myth That's Costing Law Firms Visibility?
CF: What's the biggest misconception about how AI search works?
Lalindra: AI search isn’t something entirely new, and one real misconception is that publishing through LLMs alone will help visibility. Google’s search team actively argues against that, pointing out that llms.txt only reflects a snapshot of a website at a single point in time, not its current state.
What Content and PR Strategies Actually Move the Needle with AI?
CF: Do press releases and third-party mentions matter more to AI? What content or PR strategy should law firms build around influencing AI visibility?
Lalindra: Even Google's own help documentation says not to rely solely on what a website publishes on its own site. What matters just as much is what others say about a law firm, and how that shows up as backlinks and mentions across the web. Press releases help keep a firm's name and news circulating. Backlinks from reputable, recognized sources, such as Chambers and Best Lawyers, carry real weight with LLMs. On top of that, firms need a multimodal strategy. More people are speaking to LLMs rather than typing prompts and having the same content available in multiple formats (text, audio, and video) gives a firm a better chance of surfacing with LLMs, since these platforms can pull from different sources when assembling an answer.
Do Law Firm Rankings and Awards Matter to LLMs?
CF: Do law firm rankings, lawyer rankings, and awards influence how LLMs describe a firm?
Lalindra: Yes, when the ranking or award comes from a highly authoritative source. Legal content falls into a category called YMYL, which stands for "your money, your life." Bad legal advice can cause financial, physical, or emotional harm to clients, so AI platforms tend to stay deliberately objective rather than naming a single "best" law firm outright. Instead, LLMs lean on reputation signals: firms that have ranked in a subject area for a long time, that are widely recommended, and that appear consistently across ranking sources. Those signals genuinely help LLM models formulate a more confident answer.
How Can Law Firms Build a Website LLMs Trust?
CF: Is there anything else a law firm can do on its website to appear credible or reputable to an LLM?
Lalindra: Law firms should build topical authority on their website. That means covering the full depth and breadth of the services a firm offers, which requires creating content in multiple formats. Giving AI platforms more material to draw from signals genuine authority on a topic. Lawyer credentials matter too, and website bios should be properly marked up with schema so search engines and crawlers can extract that information quickly and make the necessary associations within the data extracted. AI also values freshness, so website content needs to stay current, including a firm's Google Business Profile.
CF: What are examples of multimodal content?
Lalindra: Take one question, say, “What to do after a car accident?”, and respond to it in multiple formats. Write it as a text-based FAQ. Turn it into an explainer video for the website and YouTube. Create a downloadable PDF a client can keep or share. It's the same core information, packaged differently so it can surface in more places where LLMs retrieve data.
Does the AI Search Strategy Change for B2C vs. B2B Law Firms?
CF: Should a personal injury or family law firm that is more B2C in nature take a different approach to AI visibility than a commercial or B2B firm?
Lalindra: At its core, AI visibility is about positioning a brand better than its competitors, so the goal is the same. What changes is the execution. B2C firms typically need to create more content because they're reaching a much broader audience, while B2B firms target a more specific ideal client. Because the audience is different, the content strategy should also be different.
How to Measure AI Search Visibility
CF: How can a law firm measure its AI search visibility without the same click and ranking data as traditional SEO?
Lalindra: The measurement tools for AI search are still evolving. Bing Webmaster Tools shows what kinds of queries LLMs are pulling from Bing, which gives some indication of the traffic those platforms are sending. Google Search Console now shows impression data, and Google Analytics can show how many visitors are arriving from LLM referrals. Log file analysis is also useful because it shows how often AI crawlers are visiting a website. A higher return rate of crawler visits suggests a law firm is being cited more often by that LLM. Tools like SEMrush also track a set of brand-related prompts; however, since no tool can capture every possible question a person might ask AI, the data will not be precise. Even so, it's enough to get a directional read on brand positioning relative to competitors.
How Long Does It Take to See Results from AI Visibility Work?
CF: What's a realistic timeline for a law firm to start seeing changes in how it appears in AI or LLM results?
Lalindra: It depends heavily on the topic. Branded queries show up faster, since a firm's own name has little real competition. Generic or highly competitive terms, like "car accident lawyer," take much longer, and the timeline depends on how much content a law firm produces, along with the same three factors that drive traditional ranking: the strength of the content, the firm's reputation online, and how engaging that content is for users.
When an LLM Gets Your Firm Wrong
CF: What happens if an LLM describes a law firm's services inaccurately?
Lalindra: Unfortunately, due to the probabilistic nature of how LLMs produce results, it may hallucinate and generate inaccurate information. So, it is important that firms verify whether they are represented by LLMs accurately or not. Since AI platforms already influence client decisions, making sure a law firm is represented accurately across these tools matters more than ever. It is critical for every law firm to have a solid SEO and AI optimization and monitoring plan in place to ensure its brand is positioned properly in LLMs. If not, these firms risk losing clients to the competition.
CF: Is there anything a firm can do to correct inaccurate information cited by LLMs?
Lalindra: Before LLMs, firms only had to worry about Google. Now there are several major platforms - ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI, Perplexity, and others - and each one retrieves and generates information differently. That means auditing all of them, identifying where the gaps or errors are, and closing those gaps with more content and stronger backlinks and mentions. Doing this manually at scale is time-consuming, which is why investing in prompt tracking tools is worth the investment.
CF: Would the same approach apply if an LLM recommends a competitor?
Lalindra: Yes, entirely. When tracking AI prompts, it's worth specifically testing for comparison-style questions, since that's how a firm can see where it stands against competitors. From there, the fix is the same: find the gaps and close them with content and brand mentions.
How Can Law Firms Start Building AI Visibility Today?
CF: What can a law firm do today to start building AI visibility, especially without a large budget or major technical overhaul?
Lalindra: It really depends on where a firm already stands with SEO. A firm ranking well on Google typically needs a smaller lift to gain visibility on LLMs. A firm that isn't showing up on page one of a Google search is going to need a larger push with more content and more foundational optimization work. It's hard to give a universal answer without reviewing a firm’s website and its current SEO strategy.
What Other Technical Enhancements Improve AI Search Visibility?
CF: Is there anything else you want to add about how firms can improve their AI visibility?
Lalindra: Improving AI visibility comes back to the same three things: content, brand mentions, and user engagement. Site speed is one factor behind user engagement, so the technical basics matter for a website. Images should be served in efficient formats like WebP. Broken internal and external links need to be fixed. Robots.txt and the sitemap need to be current, and any new website should be built on current technology and follow WCAG accessibility standards. Looking ahead, a growing amount of activity will come from AI agents completing tasks on a user's behalf. If an agent can't read a site's accessibility tree, it won't have time to extract information and will simply move on to a competitor's website instead. This is why headless content architecture and server-side rendering are becoming more important. E-commerce sites adopted these practices early for the same reason: there often isn’t a second chance to make a sale, so the user’s website experience must be seamless on the first visit.
Key Takeaways for Law Firm Marketers
AI search isn't replacing SEO; it's an additional optimization layer on top of it. Firms that neglect SEO fundamentals, quality content, credible backlinks, and a fast, accessible website won't appear in Google searches or any LLM prompt result. Law firm visibility in AI search comes down to an accurate representation of a firm’s credibility, depth of content, breadth of formats, and a consistent, accurate brand presence across the web. Because legal content falls into a sensitive, high-stakes category, reputation signals like long-standing rankings and third-party recommendations carry real weight in how an AI platform accurately describes and how confidently it endorses a law firm to potential clients.
For a deeper look at how client search behaviour is shifting and what that means for legal marketing AI strategy, read our related article, How LLMs Are Transforming Legal Search: What's Changed, Why It Matters, and How to Win.
Ready to Jumpstart Your Law Firm's AI Visibility?
AI search visibility takes more than a single fix. It takes a strategy built around content, credibility, and a website that both people and AI platforms can find, trust, and cite. If you're ready to build a plan that results in LLMs recommending your law firm, get in touch with Cubicle Fugitive today to start building your SEO and AI search plan.
