How AI Answers Choose Which Law Firms to Quote
Short answer
An assistant builds its answer from pages it can fetch and facts it can verify. Firms get quoted when their pages are readable by crawlers, their identity is unambiguous, their answers are short enough to quote, and their facts agree everywhere and stay current. Firms get skipped when any of those fail, usually without any sign that it happened.
Readability: can it fetch the page at all?
Every answer starts with retrieval. If the crawler is blocked by robots.txt, a firewall, or a bot filter, the firm is not in the pool, full stop. This is binary and it is the most common failure we find.
Check it yourself: Fetch your homepage with a crawler user agent (curl -A "GPTBot" -I yoursite.com). Anything other than a clean 200 means you are invisible to that assistant.
A profile it can read in one pass
Assistants assemble a firm's story from fragments. A single page that states the firm's name, practice, service area, and attorneys in plain sentences gives the assistant something coherent to work with. Without it, the story gets assembled from directories and review snippets, in whatever order the assistant found them.
Check it yourself: Read your own About page as if you knew nothing. Could a stranger say what you do, where, and for whom, in one sentence each? If not, neither can the assistant.
Identity: which firm is this, exactly?
Plenty of firms share similar names. Schema identity tags and consistent naming pin facts to one business: this address, these attorneys, those profiles. Understand the limit clearly: identity tags stop mix-ups. They do not earn mentions. A perfectly tagged firm with nothing quotable to say is still not quoted.
Check it yourself: Search your firm name plus your city in an assistant and read what it says. Wrong partners, old addresses, or a merged identity means your identity signals are losing to someone else's.
Quotable answers
An assistant writing a reply needs text it can lift: a direct answer to a real question, in plain words, near the top of a page. Marketing adjectives cannot be quoted. 'We are aggressive advocates for justice' gives the assistant nothing; 'In California you generally have two years from the date of the injury to file a personal injury claim' gives it a sentence it can use and attribute.
Check it yourself: Pick your five most common client questions and search your own site for the answers. If the answer is not on the page in words a client would recognize, it does not exist for the assistant either.
Corroboration: do the sources agree?
Assistants trust facts that repeat. Your Google profile, your directories, and your site telling the same story (same name, address, phone, practice areas) reads as one confident fact. Disagreement reads as risk, and the assistant moves on to a firm it can describe without hedging. A complete Google Business Profile matters because it is the summary most sources copy.
Check it yourself: Google your firm and open the first ten results. Count how many show a different address, phone, or firm name. Each one is a small vote against naming you.
Freshness: is this still true?
Answers lean on search indexes, and indexes keep what is current. Pages with honest, current dates and an accurate sitemap get re-read; changed pages that ping IndexNow reach participating search engines faster (Microsoft's own description), and OpenAI's help center notes ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers, with Bing the named one. Freshness is also why results lag: a fix today may take weeks to appear in answers, which is why serious measurement repeats the same questions over time and counts consistent mentions.
None of this is a trick, and none of it is guaranteed. It is the difference between a firm an assistant can describe and a firm it has to guess about. Assistants do not guess when money and injuries are involved; they name the firm they can describe.
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.