Law Firms & Attorneys

The GEO and AI visibility agency built for law firms and attorneys.

Half of consumers now use at least one AI assistant to research an attorney before they ever pick up the phone. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for a family law attorney or an estate planning firm, your name should be in that answer. That does not happen from a bar listing alone. We build it.

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Law firm clients are asking AI before they call anyone.

Legal services are a high-consideration category, and consumers research carefully before they ever pick up the phone. According to Clio’s 2026 Legal Trends Report, 50.1% of consumers would now use at least one AI assistant to research attorneys, and nearly one in ten would use AI sources exclusively, no Google, no Yelp, no Avvo browsing on their own.

We call this AI visibility, or GEO, short for Generative Engine Optimization. The premise is simple. When AI tools are asked about your practice area, your firm should be a clear, specific, credible answer instead of a generic list of “top attorneys near you.” Right now, for most law firms, it is not.

Cited Co is a boutique AI visibility agency founded by Lauren Lerner in Scottsdale, Arizona. We are not a legal marketing directory and we do not run paid ads. We build the entity foundation and content that gets law firms named, specifically and accurately, when ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude answer a client’s question.

What we see across legal scans: When we run baseline AI visibility scans on law firms, attorneys typically score in the mid-range, roughly 35 to 48 out of 100. Bar association listings and directory profiles give AI tools something to work with, which is why attorneys start ahead of categories like interior design. But most of that data is generic. A Martindale profile does not tell ChatGPT what kind of client a family law attorney serves best, or why your firm is the right fit for a contested custody case instead of an uncontested one.

What Cited Co does for law firms and attorneys.

We are a boutique AI visibility agency focused entirely on one question: when someone asks an AI tool who to hire, does your firm show up, and does it show up with the right details attached? See the full process.

The work has three parts. We build the structural foundation that lets AI tools understand your practice areas, your credentials, and your jurisdiction. We publish content designed to be cited by those tools as the authoritative answer for the specific questions your clients ask. And we measure your visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini every month, so you know exactly where you stand instead of guessing.

Entity Optimization

Schema markup, bar admission and license documentation, practice area mapping, and NAP consistency across every directory your firm appears on. AI tools pull from structured data. We structure yours so it cannot be missed or misattributed.

AI-Cited Content

Practice-area content written to be referenced by AI tools as the credible answer for a specific legal question, not generic “5 tips for choosing an attorney” filler that gets used without ever naming your firm.

Monthly Visibility Tracking

Eight to ten targeted queries per month across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, matched to the practice areas that actually drive your caseload. A scored report shows what changed and what to fix next.

Foundation Build

Month one is setup: baseline audit across all four platforms, schema implementation, content calendar, and a look at how competing firms in your market are currently being cited. Everything is reviewed and approved before anything goes live on your site.

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We built this system on a Scottsdale business first.

Living with Lolo is a full-service luxury interior design and design-build firm in Scottsdale, not a law firm, but the underlying problem was identical. Three-time Phoenix Magazine Best Interior Design award winner. Active Arizona ROC general contractor license. A serious firm with a serious reputation that AI tools simply were not citing.

When we ran the baseline AI visibility scan, the results did not match the reputation. The pattern is the same one we see in law firms every month: real credentials, real experience, and none of it structured in a way a language model could use. We built the entity architecture, implemented schema, and wrote content specific enough to be quoted rather than paraphrased.

Within 60 days, the visibility score moved from a baseline of 22 to 71 across all four platforms, and to 75 by the end of that summer. Read the full Living with Lolo case study. The mechanics transfer directly to legal services: a credentialed professional with real proof points, invisible to AI tools until the entity foundation exists to support the citation.

Who we work with in the legal space.

We focus on practice areas where reputation and trust drive the hiring decision: family law, estate planning and probate, business and corporate law, personal injury, immigration, and elder law. If a prospective client researches carefully before they call, whether that research happens on Google or inside ChatGPT, AI visibility matters for your firm.

We keep a small roster by design. Each client gets a strategist who understands legal marketing and ethics rules, not an account manager running the same template across twenty unrelated businesses. Learn about how we work. If we do not have capacity when you reach out, we will tell you directly rather than taking you on anyway.

Legal search rewards specificity in a way generic marketing does not. A response that says “there are many good family law attorneys in Arizona” is not a citation. A response that names your firm, references your bar admission and specific practice focus, and mentions a relevant credential is. That level of specificity is what we build toward, for firms based in Scottsdale and the greater Phoenix metro and for firms nationally.

What the Research Shows

50.1%

Clio’s 2026 Legal Trends Report found that 50.1% of consumers would now use at least one AI assistant to research an attorney, and 9.5% would use AI sources only, with no Google, Yelp, or directory browsing at all.

41.9%

iLawyerMarketing (2026) reports that ChatGPT usage for attorney research climbed to 41.9% in 2026, up from just 9% in 2023, while Google usage for the same research fell from 86.7% to 71.9% over the same period.

76%

Clio (2026) found that consumers ages 45 to 60, not the youngest adopters, are the most likely to use AI to research a law firm, at 76% versus 48% for consumers ages 18 to 29.

The Legal AI Visibility Index (2026) found that when ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini recommend a lawyer, the answer draws from a tight cluster of roughly seven ranking directories: Chambers, Legal 500, Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers, Martindale, Avvo, and Justia.

28%

Clio (2026) found that 28% of consumers were directed by an AI tool to actually contact a lawyer, evidence that AI-driven legal research is already converting into real client outreach, not just idle curiosity.

35-48

Cited Co proprietary scan data (2026): attorneys we scan through tool.citedco.ai typically score 35 to 48 out of 100 for AI visibility, ahead of visually driven categories but still well short of the 60-plus threshold that reflects a genuinely competitive position.

Common questions from law firms and attorneys.

How do I get my law firm to show up when someone asks ChatGPT for an attorney recommendation?

Getting cited by AI tools starts with consistent entity data: your firm name, address, bar admission, and practice areas need to match exactly across your website, directories, and bar association profiles. From there, schema markup and content written to directly answer the specific questions clients ask make the difference between a generic mention and a real citation. Cited Co builds all three for law firms and tracks citation frequency across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude every month.

Which practice areas benefit most from AI visibility optimization?

High-consideration practice areas see the biggest lift: family law, estate planning and probate, personal injury, immigration, and elder law, where clients research extensively before ever calling a firm. These are exactly the categories where an AI-generated recommendation now carries real weight, since Clio’s 2026 data shows 28% of consumers were directed by AI to actually contact a lawyer. Cited Co specializes in these high-consideration legal categories specifically.

Does being listed on Avvo or Martindale actually help with AI recommendations?

Yes, directory listings matter more for law firms than for almost any other category we track, since research shows AI tools draw heavily from a small cluster of ranking directories including Martindale, Avvo, Justia, Super Lawyers, and Best Lawyers. A listing alone is not enough, though. The firms that get cited with real detail are the ones whose directory profiles, website content, and schema markup all say the same specific, credible thing about their practice.

How long does it take for a law firm to start appearing in AI-generated attorney recommendations?

Most Cited Co legal clients see measurable improvement in AI citation frequency within 60 to 90 days of starting. Entity and schema work tends to move fastest, often within the first month, while content-driven improvements take longer because AI tools need time to index and weight new pages. We track your visibility score monthly across all four platforms so you can see exactly what is moving and what still needs work.

Is AI visibility different from the legal SEO or directory marketing my firm already does?

Yes. Legal SEO and directory marketing optimize for Google rankings and directory placement. AI visibility optimizes for what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude actually say when a prospective client asks for a lawyer recommendation, which depends on entity clarity and citation-ready content rather than backlinks or directory spend alone. The two disciplines overlap, but a firm can rank well in Google and directories while still being invisible in AI-generated answers, which is the gap Cited Co is built to close.

Is Cited Co an AI SEO agency for law firms?

You will hear the term AI SEO agency used for this work, and the search intent behind it is the same, but the work itself is not traditional SEO. Cited Co is an AI visibility agency that does generative engine optimization for law firms: entity optimization, schema markup, and content built to be cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Traditional SEO ranks your pages in Google. We get your firm named inside the AI answers themselves, which is a different, newer discipline entirely.

Original Research

We track AI visibility scan data across every service category, including legal.

Attorneys score 35 to 48 out of 100 on average in our scans, ahead of visually driven categories, but still well short of a genuinely competitive position. See the full breakdown across categories and what separates the firms that clear 60 from the ones that do not.

Read the Report →

Find out where AI searches rank your law firm right now.

We work with law firms nationally from our home base in Scottsdale, Arizona, including firms across the greater Phoenix metro. Five minutes to fill out the form. A real report back, not a sales pitch. If we see a genuine opportunity, we will say so. If we do not, we will say that too.