A new client mentioned that ChatGPT suggested your firm. Another said it suggested three firms and yours was not among them. You asked it yourself, got a different list each time, and now you want to know whether there is anything to be done about it beyond hoping.
There is, though it starts with being honest about what can and cannot be controlled. Nobody can guarantee a placement in a ChatGPT answer. What a firm can do is make itself easy to find, easy to understand and well corroborated, so that when ChatGPT goes looking for lawyers in your city and practice area, your firm is a natural thing to mention.
What happens when someone asks ChatGPT for a lawyer
When a person asks "who is a good estate planning attorney in Henrico County," ChatGPT with search turned on runs web searches, reads a set of pages, and writes an answer with citations to the pages it used. When search is not in play, it answers from what the model absorbed during training, which is older, less specific and prone to naming well-known firms or none at all. For a small local firm, the web-search path is the one that matters, because that is where recent, specific information about you enters the answer.
The answer is composed fresh each time. Ask twice and the list changes. So the goal is not a fixed ranking. It is a high probability of being included, across many phrasings, over time.
Where the names in a ChatGPT answer come from
Look at the citations in a few answers for your practice area and city and a pattern shows up quickly. The sources tend to be pages that already list or evaluate lawyers: Avvo, Justia, Super Lawyers and FindLaw profiles, Yelp and Google reviews as surfaced through other pages, local "best lawyers in" roundups from news sites and magazines, bar association directories, and the firms' own websites when those websites state plainly what the firm does and where.
That tells you what to work on. If your firm is absent from the directories the answers draw on, or present with an old address and no reviews, you are invisible to that path. Our page on citations and directory listings for law firms walks through claiming and correcting those profiles, and the same directory work supports the entity SEO and knowledge panel signals that help any system recognize the firm as one definite thing.
Making sure ChatGPT can read your site at all
OpenAI publishes the names of its crawlers. GPTBot collects data for training models; OAI-SearchBot fetches pages for search results; ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a user's request calls for it. Many law firm sites blocked AI bots wholesale in 2023 and 2024, and some of those rules catch OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User too.
Check your robots.txt file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for those names. Decide deliberately: blocking GPTBot keeps your content out of training, which some firms prefer; blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from search-based answers, which almost no firm wants. Also confirm that Cloudflare or a similar service is not challenging these crawlers with a verification page, and that the practice-area pages render as readable HTML rather than requiring JavaScript to display the text.
Saying plainly who you are, where you are and what you do
Language models work with what is written. A homepage that says "Trusted advocates. Proven results." and never states a practice area or a city gives a model nothing to work with. A page that says "Hollins & Park is a three-attorney estate planning and probate firm in Henrico County, Virginia, serving the Richmond metro area" in its first paragraph gives it everything.
Apply that standard across the site. Each practice-area page should open by naming the matter type, the jurisdiction and who the firm helps. Attorney bios should state bar admissions, years of practice and a focus. The contact page should carry the exact name, address and phone that appear on the Google Business Profile and the directories, so the entity is consistent from every angle.
Then write pages that answer the questions people actually ask an assistant. "How much does a will cost in Virginia," "do I need probate if there is a trust," "how long does an uncontested divorce take in Chesterfield." A page that answers the question directly in its first two paragraphs, in plain language, and then goes deeper, is the kind of page these systems quote and cite. The same principle governs visibility in Google's AI Overviews, and we treat both under the umbrella of AEO for lawyers.
Testing whether it is working
Once a month, open a fresh ChatGPT session with search enabled and ask ten to fifteen variations: by practice area and city, by county, by a specific matter type. Record which firms are named and which sources are cited. Do the same in Perplexity and Google's AI Mode, because the pattern across tools is more informative than any one of them.
Track two things over time: how often your firm appears, and whether the cited sources are ones you can influence. If a local magazine's "top attorneys" list is cited repeatedly and you are not on it, that is a concrete target. If the citations are directory profiles you have not claimed, that is an afternoon's work. If answers cite your own site, note which page, because that tells you what format to produce more of.
Questions we get
Can we pay to appear in ChatGPT answers?
Not in the sense of a submission or an ad placement for a law firm's organic mention, as of this writing. The path is the one described above: directory presence, a clear and readable site, reviews and local mentions.
ChatGPT described our firm incorrectly. How do we fix it?
Find the source it cited and correct the information there. If it came from training data with no citation, there is no direct edit; the fix is to make the correct information prominent on your site and the major directories so that the search path overrides it.
Is this different from regular SEO?
It overlaps heavily. Much of what earns a citation is what earns a Google ranking: clear pages, corroborated entity data, reviews and links. The main additions are checking crawler access, writing to answer questions directly, and measuring inclusion instead of rank.
If you would like us to run the monthly test for your practice areas and turn the citations into a to-do list, tell us what you are working with.