How to Get Your Law Firm Cited by ChatGPT

Step 1: Let the crawlers in (AI Access Unlock)

Assistants read the web through crawlers. If your robots.txt or your firewall blocks them, your firm does not exist for that assistant, and no other step matters. This is the most common silent failure we see, and it is usually an accident: a developer copied a restrictive robots.txt, or a security plugin blocked bots wholesale.

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for the AI crawlers: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot (Claude), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), and Google-Extended (Google's AI). You want no Disallow rules against them. A minimal, welcoming file looks like this:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://yourfirm.com/sitemap.xml

Then verify the fetch actually works, because a CDN or security plugin can still block the request after robots.txt allows it. From any terminal:

curl -A "GPTBot" -I https://yourfirm.com/
curl -A "ClaudeBot" -I https://yourfirm.com/
curl -A "PerplexityBot" -I https://yourfirm.com/

Each should return HTTP 200. Save the output with the date; that is your proof of the before state. If you get a 403 or a challenge page, the block lives in your hosting, CDN, or security plugin settings, not in robots.txt. Fix it there and re-run the check.

Step 2: Publish a one-page AI business profile

An assistant assembles its picture of your firm from fragments scattered across the web. Give it one page that states the whole picture directly, at a stable URL such as /about/ or /ai-profile/, linked from your footer. Write it in your own words and your own order. It must state:

• Your firm's canonical name (one version, used everywhere)
• A one-line summary: what you do, who you help, and where
• Practice areas, listed plainly
• The cities and counties you serve
• Your attorneys, with bar admissions and years of practice
• What a client should do first (call, form, free consultation) and the phone number
• Office address and hours
• A short line on reviews or results only if you already publish it elsewhere

Keep it factual and current. This page is not marketing copy; it is the cheat sheet an assistant reads before it describes you. When anything on it changes, update it the same day.

Step 3: Pin your identity with schema tags

Schema markup labels the facts on your pages so an assistant knows which business they belong to. Add an Attorney (or LocalBusiness) JSON-LD block to your homepage and your profile page, and keep the values identical to the profile page:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Attorney",
  "name": "Your Firm Name",
  "url": "https://yourfirm.com/",
  "telephone": "+1-555-555-5555",
  "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "...", "addressLocality": "...", "addressRegion": "CA", "postalCode": "..." },
  "sameAs": ["https://www.google.com/maps/...", "https://www.yelp.com/...", "https://www.avvo.com/..."]
}

Be clear about what this does. The tags pin your identity: they stop an assistant from mixing your firm up with a similarly named one. They do not earn mentions by themselves, and anyone who sells schema as a citation lever is selling you a story. Identity is the floor, not the lever.

Step 4: Build an answer bank

Assistants quote text that reads like an answer. Collect the questions your clients actually ask. Sources that work: your intake call notes, your Google Business Profile questions, the 'People also ask' boxes on Google for your practice areas, and your front desk's memory. For a personal injury firm the list usually starts with questions like: What does a car accident lawyer cost? How long do I have to file a claim in California? What should I do right after a crash? Should I talk to the other driver's insurance company?

For each question, write the answer your firm would give on the phone: two to four sentences, plain words, your voice, facts you already stand behind. A partner or the responsible attorney approves every answer. Publish them on the matching service page and on an FAQ page, short answer first and detail below. Forty honest answers beat four hundred generated ones; assistants can tell filler from knowledge, and so can clients.

Step 5: Complete your Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile is the single most-read summary of your firm, by people and by assistants. Fill every blank: primary and secondary categories, every service you actually offer, hours including holidays, attributes, a real description in your own words, current photos of the office and the attorneys, and the Q&A section (seed it with your answer bank questions and your own approved answers). A half-empty profile reads as a half-closed firm.

Step 6: Make every listing agree

Pick the canonical version of your name, address, and phone number (the one on your profile page) and audit the places assistants cross-check: Google, Yelp, Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Apple Maps, and Bing Places. Fix every variation: old addresses, tracking phone numbers, a partner's name in the firm name in one place and not another. When sources disagree, assistants hedge or name a firm whose facts are clean.

Step 7: Stay fresh, and say when you changed

Assistants lean on search indexes, and indexes reward honest freshness signals. Show real dates on your pages and keep them true. Keep your sitemap's lastmod accurate. When a page changes, ping IndexNow (it notifies participating search engines, and Microsoft says it helps keep information fresh across search and AI experiences; OpenAI's help center says ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers, with Bing the named one). IndexNow takes ten minutes to set up:

1. Generate a key: any 32-character hex string. Keep it in a file.
2. Host the key at https://yourfirm.com/<key>.txt with the key as the file's only content.
3. When a page changes, POST the changed URLs as JSON to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow with your host, key, and keyLocation.

curl -X POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"host":"yourfirm.com","key":"YOURKEY","keyLocation":"https://yourfirm.com/YOURKEY.txt","urlList":["https://yourfirm.com/ai-profile/"]}'

Step 8: Measure like it matters

AI answers vary from run to run, so a single check proves nothing, in either direction. Before you change anything, take a baseline: write down 10 to 20 questions a client would ask an assistant ('best personal injury lawyer in Irvine', 'who should I call after a car accident in Orange County'), ask each one at least five times on each platform you care about, and tally how often your firm is named. That tally is your baseline. Repeat the same protocol monthly and compare tallies, not individual answers.

Expect a lag. Changes take weeks to reach AI answers, not days; in Vizaeo's own attribution we allow a 14-day lag before a change can claim credit for a movement. And expect concentration: in our Orange County study (331 answers, measured September 2026), one firm appeared in 36% of answers while another appeared in none. The gap between named and invisible is the whole game, and it is mostly built from the unglamorous steps above.

About Vizaeo

Vizaeo is an AI visibility service for law firms. It measures whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity name your firm when clients ask for a lawyer, then applies the fixes that make a firm readable and quotable by AI assistants, with proof of each change. The Vizaeo sprint is $499 for 14 days of done-for-you fixes, with re-measurement at 30, 60, and 90 days against your baseline. If we miss the fix list, you get a refund.