How a law firm gets named by ChatGPT.

What AI search is

AI search means asking an assistant, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or the AI overview at the top of Google, a question and getting an answer instead of a list of links. A client asks, “Who is a good personal injury lawyer near me?”, and the assistant names a few firms.

Making your site easy for those answers to use is called answer engine optimization, or AEO. It builds on ordinary search optimization, because assistants lean on search results. It adds a few things an assistant needs in order to be sure who you are.

What I saw

• On 2 October 2026 I asked ChatGPT who is a good personal injury lawyer in Laurens, South Carolina. It named four firms, and every one has a website. A local firm with no website was not named. You can see the answer on the home page.
• On 7 October 2026 I ran five Google searches that a law firm might make about web design and SEO. A search-data service returned an AI overview on three of the five, and one of them cited twelve sources.

That is a small sample from one day. It shows that the answers exist and that they name firms. It does not show how often they appear for your searches.

Eight things an assistant needs

1. Let the crawlers in. Your robots.txt file should not shut out the assistants’ crawlers. I check six: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, plus Googlebot and Bingbot. A single line can lock them all out without anyone noticing.
2. Put the words in the page itself. Many crawlers read a page as it arrives and do not run scripts. If your words only appear after scripts run, they see an empty page.
3. Say who you are in a way a machine can read. Your name, address, phone, hours and the area you serve, written into the page code as legal service details. This is the plainest way to tell an assistant who and where you are.
4. Say what you do and where, in the headline and the title. Questions to an assistant almost always include a place. “Injury lawyer in Laurens, South Carolina” matches the question. “Welcome to our firm” does not.
5. Answer the questions people ask. Write the five questions clients ask most as headings, with a two-sentence answer under each. A page that already holds the question and the answer is the easiest to quote.
6. Keep your name, address and phone the same everywhere. Assistants match a site to your Google listing and to directories by those three facts. A different suite number or an old phone number weakens the match.
7. Link to your other profiles. Your Google listing, your bar directory page, Avvo, LinkedIn. Assistants check a business against other places that mention it.
8. List your pages and keep them fast. A sitemap shows a crawler every page. A page that opens in under two seconds on a phone is read more reliably than a slow one.

There is also a small optional file, llms.txt, that describes a site to assistants. No assistant has said it relies on one, so treat it as a courtesy, not a fix.

What nobody can see

No tool, including mine, can tell you whether an assistant will name your firm, or why it named another. The way to find out is to ask the question the way a client would, in your city, and write down the answer with the date. The answer changes with the wording and the place.

What a checker can tell you is whether the steps above are in place. That is the part you control.

Careful with what a lawyer can say

Text that an assistant quotes from your site is advertising. Your state bar’s advertising rules apply to it, including any required disclaimer. When I build or fix a page, you approve every word. I describe what you do and where. I do not write legal advice, testimonials or promises about results.