Most firms find out whether they show up in AI search the hard way — a prospective client mentions they "asked ChatGPT for a lawyer" and your name wasn't in the answer. You don't have to wait for that. Ten questions, answered honestly, will tell you roughly where your firm stands before you spend a dollar on the problem.
This isn't a scorecard with a magic number at the end. It's a diagnostic. Each question maps to something an AI engine actually checks when it decides which firms to name, and each one you can inspect yourself. Work through them and you'll know which parts of your foundation are solid and which are quietly costing you referrals.
1. Can an assistant find you without your name?
Open a fresh, logged-out chat and ask the way a client would: not "what is [your firm]," but "who should I call for a [your practice area] matter in [your city]." If your firm isn't named, you have a visibility gap — and it's the gap that matters, because that's the question your future clients are actually asking.
What good looks like: your firm named in the answer to a problem-first question, not just when someone searches your name directly.
2. Are you one consistent firm everywhere?
AI engines have to be confident that the firm on your website, the firm in the directories, and the firm in the bar records are all the same entity before they'll name it. Inconsistent names ("Smith Law" vs "Smith & Associates, LLP"), old addresses, or a phone number that varies by listing all introduce doubt — and doubt gets you left out.
How to check: pull up your Google Business Profile, your top three directory listings, and your site footer side by side. Name, address, and phone should be character-for-character identical. If they're not, that's your first fix — more on why in entity consolidation for law firms.
3. Do the legal directories list you accurately?
AI engines lean heavily on a handful of legal directories when they answer "find me a lawyer" questions. If your Avvo, Justia, Martindale, or Google Business Profile entries are missing, unclaimed, or wrong, you're invisible in exactly the sources the engines trust most.
What good looks like: claimed, complete, and consistent profiles on the directories that matter for your practice area. Which ones carry the most weight is covered in the directories ranked for AI search.
4. Does your site carry correct structured data?
Structured data is the machine-readable layer that tells an engine, unambiguously, what your firm is, where it operates, and who its attorneys are. Without it, the engine is left to infer from prose — and inference is where firms get confused with other firms.
How to check: run your homepage and an attorney page through Google's Rich Results Test. You want to see Organization and Attorney (or Person) data resolving cleanly. The subset that actually earns citations — versus the long checklist most SEO guides hand you — is in schema markup for law firms.
5. Is each attorney a resolvable person?
Engines increasingly weigh who wrote and stands behind the content, not just the firm as a whole. An attorney with a complete bio, a link to their state bar record, and a consistent name across the web reads as a real, verifiable person. An attorney who appears only as a name on a team page does not.
What good looks like: every named attorney has a bio page, a consistent name everywhere, and a link to their official bar listing.
6. Does your content answer the questions clients actually ask?
AI answers are assembled from passages an engine can lift cleanly and attribute confidently. Content written to rank — long, keyword-dense, with the answer buried at the end — extracts badly. Content written for people states the answer plainly and early.
How to check: take a real question a client asks in a consultation. Is there a page on your site that answers it directly, in plain language, near the top? If the answer is three scrolls down under a wall of keywords, an engine will skip it.
7. Is your content fresh?
Recency is a signal. A firm whose core pages haven't been touched in two years looks less current to an engine than one that updates as the law and its practice change. This matters more in fast-moving areas — immigration, tax, anything tied to shifting regulation — than in stable ones, but it's never nothing.
What good looks like: your core practice and service pages show genuine updates within the last several months — real revisions, not a changed date.
8. Can AI crawlers actually reach your site?
This one is invisible until you check, and it's the most common own-goal we see. A single line in your robots.txt file — or a host setting that blocks AI crawlers by default — can quietly wall the engines out of your site entirely. Everything else on this list is moot if the door is locked.
How to check: visit yourfirm.com/robots.txt and look for Disallow rules aimed at bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, or PerplexityBot. If AI crawlers are disallowed, that's a same-day fix worth making before anything else.
9. Is your public content compliant with your state bar's rules?
Everything on your site is lawyer advertising, and AI raises the stakes in two directions. Structured data and directory profiles restate your claims in machine-readable form, and AI-drafted content tends to introduce exactly the superlatives and outcome predictions that advertising rules prohibit. A technically visible firm with non-compliant content is a liability, not a win.
What good looks like: no unqualified "best" or "top" claims, results presented with proper disclaimers, and a review step before anything publishes. The specifics start with ABA Model Rule 7.1 and your own state's overlay.
10. Are you measuring across engines, not guessing?
Checking Google once and calling it done tells you almost nothing — AI answers vary by engine, by session, and over time. A firm that's named in one assistant can be absent from another, and a single screenshot proves neither presence nor absence. Real measurement means a fixed set of buyer questions, run across the major engines, tracked over time.
What good looks like: you can say how your firm shows up across the major AI surfaces, not just whether it appeared once. What that measurement actually involves is laid out in how we measure AI visibility.
What your answers tell you
If most of these are already true, your foundation is stronger than most firms' and the work ahead is refinement. If several gave you pause, that's not bad news — it means the gaps are fixable and largely within your control, and closing them is what moves a firm from invisible to named.
The fastest way to turn this self-check into a real read is to see where your firm actually stands across the engines rather than guessing question by question. That's what the free AI Visibility Audit does — a 60-second starting point, no call required. If you'd rather have the full picture worked through with you, that's the AI Visibility Audit service. Either way, the checklist above is the map; the audit is where you find out how much ground you actually have to cover.
