Law firms are being told that they must prove their authority before AI systems will recommend them. The direction is sensible, but the language risks making a complicated and still-developing area sound far more certain than it is.
A recent Legal Futures article has prompted considerable discussion across the legal sector. It reported that most law firms are failing to provide systems such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini with the signals they need to recommend them.
The article draws on an AI Reputation Index developed by Black Letter Communications with Legmark. The research considered more than 5,300 law firms and ranked 250 of them against five categories: authority signals, review sentiment, brand visibility, specialism clarity and risk exposure.
There is a valuable idea at the centre of this. A law firm cannot expect to be understood accurately if its expertise is unclear, its information is inconsistent and nobody beyond the firm appears to confirm what it says about itself.
However, “AI approval” is a useful headline rather than a technical description of how these systems work.
There is no single AI gatekeeper assessing every law firm against one agreed authority standard. Google, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity use different systems, information sources and retrieval processes. Their answers can also change according to the wording of the question, the user’s location, the available sources and the model being used.
The question for law firms is therefore not:
How do we win AI approval?
It is:
How do we make our real authority clear, accessible and sufficiently well evidenced that clients, search engines and AI-assisted services can understand it?
There is no universal AI authority score
Google says that its AI Overviews and AI Mode may use different models and techniques, which means the answers and links displayed can vary. It does not require a special form of AI optimisation. Its existing search fundamentals still apply: pages must be accessible, indexable, relevant and useful to people.
OpenAI’s guidance is similarly practical. A public website can appear in ChatGPT search, but publishers should ensure that they are not blocking OAI-SearchBot if they want their content to be discovered, summarised and cited.
Microsoft has gone further by introducing AI Performance reporting within Bing Webmaster Tools. This allows website owners to see when their pages are cited across supported AI experiences. Importantly, Microsoft warns that citation totals do not indicate ranking, authority, placement or the importance of a page within an answer.
Taken together, the official guidance points to an important conclusion.
Being mentioned by an AI system is not the same as receiving an authoritative endorsement from it. A citation shows that a page was used or displayed as a source in a particular context. It does not prove that the system has judged the firm to be the best, the safest or the most capable choice.
Authority has two separate jobs
For a law firm to benefit from online authority, two things must happen.
First, the firm’s information must be eligible to be found.
Secondly, what is found must give the reader or system enough reason to regard the firm as relevant and credible.
These are related, but they are not the same job.
A firm can have excellent solicitors, a strong client base and decades of experience, while still having pages that are difficult to crawl, vaguely written or poorly connected.
Conversely, a firm can have a technically polished website and publish constantly without demonstrating any distinctive experience. It is visible, but not necessarily persuasive.
This is the authority gap many professional services firms experience. Their real expertise exists inside client work, partner conversations, case histories and professional relationships. Very little of it survives the journey to the website.
AI has not created that problem. It has made the consequences more noticeable.
What the platforms mean by authority
Google uses the term E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
It is important not to turn this into another mythical score. Google says E-E-A-T is not one specific ranking factor. Its systems use a mixture of signals that may indicate whether content demonstrates these qualities, with trust considered the most important.
Its guidance asks whether content:
- provides original information, research or analysis;
- adds something beyond what other sources have already said;
- identifies who created it;
- gives evidence of the author’s expertise;
- is free from easily verified factual errors; and
- appears to come from a person or organisation that is recognised and trusted in the relevant subject.
That should be reassuring for good law firms.
The raw material is not a clever AI technique. It is the experience the firm already has.
The problem arises when that experience is converted into generic commentary that could have been published by almost any firm. Removing names, examples, judgements and practical detail may make an article easier to approve internally, but it also removes much of the evidence that the author has genuinely done the work.
Six signals a law firm can strengthen
No law firm can control exactly what an AI assistant will say. It can control the quality, clarity and consistency of the evidence available to clients and retrieval systems.
1. A technically accessible website
The basic requirement is not glamorous: important pages must be crawlable, indexable and understandable.
Google states that a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in conventional search before it can be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. It also says that there are no additional technical requirements created solely for those AI features.
Firms should therefore check their indexing, robots.txt instructions, sitemaps, internal links, canonical pages and page content before buying a specialist “AI visibility” solution.
A brilliant insight hidden in a PDF, blocked page or abandoned microsite is still hidden.
2. A clearly defined specialism
A firm that describes itself as commercial, client-focused and solution-driven has said almost nothing that distinguishes it from its competitors.
Authority becomes easier to understand when the firm is precise about:
- the clients it advises;
- the legal problems it handles;
- the sectors and jurisdictions it understands;
- the kinds of matters its lawyers have worked on; and
- the situations in which its expertise is particularly relevant.
This does not mean narrowing the firm until it rejects suitable work. It means giving different audiences clear routes into the expertise that applies to them.
A broad firm may need many specific signals. It does not need one vague one.
3. First-hand professional evidence
The strongest content does not simply explain the law. It demonstrates professional judgement.
That may include:
- recurring mistakes the firm sees;
- questions clients routinely ask;
- decisions that tend to create delay or risk;
- changes in commercial behaviour the lawyers have observed;
- practical distinctions between apparently similar situations;
- anonymised lessons from matters, where appropriate; and
- informed commentary on legislation, judgments or regulatory developments.
Google explicitly identifies first-hand experience as an important element of useful content. It also warns against producing large quantities of material that adds little originality or value.
The safest editorial test is straightforward:
Could this article have been written by someone who has never done the work?
If the answer is yes, it is probably not revealing much authority.
4. Verifiable regulatory and professional information
For regulated firms, some of the strongest trust signals are also the most ordinary.
The Solicitors Register describes itself as the definitive impartial source of information about the firms and individuals regulated by the SRA.
The SRA clickable logo provides another verification mechanism. It confirms that the website belongs to a regulated firm and links visitors to information about the protections that regulation provides. Its use is mandatory for regulated law firms with websites.
Firm names, SRA numbers, office details, lawyer biographies and practice descriptions should therefore be accurate and consistent across the firm’s website, regulatory records and reputable third-party profiles.
This is not glamorous reputation management. It is basic identity hygiene. Machines, much like people, struggle when a firm appears to describe itself differently everywhere it is found.
5. Credible independent corroboration
A firm’s website is naturally self-published. Independent sources can help confirm parts of the story.
Depending on the firm and its market, this might include:
- properly researched legal directories;
- professional accreditations;
- respected trade or sector publications;
- commentary in established news outlets;
- contributions to professional bodies;
- conference participation;
- peer-reviewed or editorially reviewed publications; and
- authentic client reviews.
The objective should not be to accumulate the largest possible number of mentions. It should be to develop a body of relevant, accurate and defensible corroboration.
A poorly governed directory, a pay-to-play badge and a thin sponsored article do not become valuable merely because they sit on another domain.
The more useful question is:
Would a thoughtful potential client regard this source as credible evidence of the claim being made?
6. Reviews that show the quality of the service
The SRA encourages firms to engage with reviews and comparison websites. Its guidance says that proactively publishing service-quality information can help the public choose a provider and can also help a firm win business.
In a regulatory pilot involving more than 6,000 members of the public and 250 firms, the SRA found that customer reviews were more widely used than legal price-comparison services. It also found that many firms encouraging reviews regarded them as commercially beneficial.
Reviews require careful handling in legal services. Confidentiality, dissatisfied opposing parties, outcome-based criticism and misleading reviews are genuine concerns.
The answer is not to ignore the entire review environment. It is to establish a responsible process for:
- requesting reviews at an appropriate point;
- guiding clients towards commenting on service rather than confidential details;
- monitoring important platforms;
- responding proportionately; and
- learning from repeated feedback.
A collection of authentic, recent and specific reviews can help demonstrate how a firm communicates and delivers its service. It cannot independently prove the technical quality of its legal advice.
That distinction matters.
What law firms should not do
The growing interest in AI visibility will inevitably produce a market for shortcuts. Firms should be particularly cautious about:
- guarantees that a firm will be recommended by ChatGPT or another assistant;
- rankings that do not disclose their prompts, platforms, weighting or testing process;
- mass publication of generic AI-written articles;
- buying low-quality mentions simply to increase apparent presence;
- manufacturing or selectively manipulating reviews;
- rewriting every page into an unnatural format supposedly preferred by AI; and
- treating one favourable answer from one platform as meaningful evidence of market visibility.
Academic research into generative engine optimisation is developing, but the findings need to be interpreted carefully.
The original GEO research found that techniques such as including credible citations, quotations and statistics could improve visibility within its experimental setting. It also found that results varied by subject area.
A 2026 review of 45 studies concluded that the evidence remains narrow. In particular, improving how already-retrieved content is used or cited does not yet prove a stable, long-term improvement in organic discovery, traffic or commercial outcomes across platforms.
There is something here worth studying. There is not yet a dependable recipe.
How to measure progress without pretending certainty
Law firms should not abandon measurement simply because AI answers vary. They should improve the quality of the measurement.
A sensible baseline could include:
- Selecting a fixed set of realistic client questions across the firm’s priority services.
- Testing them on several relevant platforms.
- Recording whether the firm is mentioned, accurately described and cited.
- Repeating the exercise over time rather than drawing conclusions from one test.
- Reviewing which competing firms and sources are repeatedly present.
- Using Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance reporting where available.
- Tracking referral traffic from ChatGPT and other identifiable sources.
- Connecting visibility data to branded searches, enquiries, consultations and instructions.
The firm should also separate four different outcomes:
- being discoverable;
- being cited;
- being described accurately; and
- being chosen.
These are not interchangeable.
A page may be cited without generating a visit. A firm may be mentioned inaccurately. A visitor may arrive without making an enquiry. An enquiry may come from someone the firm is not well placed to serve.
The final measure remains commercial and human: did the right client understand why this firm was relevant and decide to make contact?
Authority is earned before it is optimised
The legal sector is right to take AI-assisted discovery seriously.
Potential clients will increasingly encounter law firms through generated answers, summaries and recommendations rather than through a simple list of blue links. Firms need to understand how their information travels through that environment.
But the answer is not to manufacture a new version of authority for machines.
A firm’s authority still comes from the work it has done, the judgement of its people, the clients it has helped, the professional recognition it has earned and the evidence others can verify.
The online task is to reveal that authority without flattening it into generic marketing language.
That means doing two things well.
The technical work makes the firm findable.
The strategic work makes it understandable and worth choosing.
AI may have changed the interface through which people discover expertise. It has not removed the need to earn it.
Download the free ebook
The authority you already have: Why your firm is good, known, and still not being chosen — and how to close the gap
Many professional services firms do not have an authority problem. They have a leak between the expertise inside the firm and what potential clients can see, understand and trust online.
In this short executive ebook, Larysa Hale explains:
- the three layers of authority that need to work together;
- why genuinely good firms remain invisible;
- what firms should and should not do about AI-assisted search;
- why meaningful results take time; and
- how a clear value proposition connects visibility with being chosen.
