AEO audit for a personal injury law firm

The firm

In Clio's survey of 1,000 U.S. adults, most recent hirers sought a referral, some searched the internet and used a firm's website, and more than half of consumers have used or would consider using AI to answer legal questions (2025; Clio sells legal software). One ChatGPT answer that Clio reproduces tells people to check reviews "on sites like Avvo, Martindale-Hubbell, or Google" and to confirm the lawyer is "in good standing" with the state bar. Each is a fact the firm can publish and others can confirm.

The questions clients ask assistants

The panel follows AEO HQ's measurement design: 40 client intents, each written three ways (120 unbranded prompts), plus 20 branded prompts about the firm and its lawyers. Fifteen intents are local: five case types in each office city. Local prompts name the city, because ChatGPT may use an approximate location based on the user's IP address, and OpenAI suggests including the city in the question; all runs use one fixed network location, recorded in the log. Prompts are written from generic situations, never from client files, because Florida's Ethics Opinion 24-1 says lawyers using generative AI must protect the confidentiality of client information.

Each prompt runs three times a week on each of the four assistants the audit measures (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews), in a new chat with a clean session; the ten most important run eight times a week. Results are reported as rates, because the same prompt returned the same list of brands less than once in 100 runs (2,961 runs; industry study; a co-investigator works for a tracking vendor). The table shows 13 of the 140 prompts. The wording is illustrative.

How the assistants reach the firm

A local question can draw on pages found through a search index and on local business information such as Business Profiles and listings. Google says Business Profiles "can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results", and ChatGPT may share a user's location with third-party providers of local information, "such as nearby business listings". How AI assistants find and cite sources covers every route.

• Google's local results are "mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity," and "there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking". See how to rank in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode.
• AI answers and Google differ on local queries. Across local-business categories, the cited domains shared by an AI engine and Google ranged from 0.1% to 20.6% (preprint; legal services were not among the categories reported). A strong Maps position does not settle what an assistant cites (our reading).
• Directories appear in legal answers. In one small test, ChatGPT and Perplexity relied heavily on Superlawyers.com and FindLaw.com for legal queries (20 searches in 10 industries; the publisher sells local SEO software).
• The other routes. Sites that block OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers, and Claude draws on Brave Search as well as Anthropic's own crawler. See the guides for ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

What the audit checks

One set of facts, starting from the bar record

Florida requires lawyers to advertise and practice under their official bar names, and The Florida Bar's lawyer directory lets the public search members by name, location, practice area, board certification, and language. The audit therefore treats the bar record as the reference and compares every other copy of the firm's facts with it.

• Business Profiles. Under Google's rules, a public-facing lawyer who can be contacted directly at the verified location during stated hours should have a profile, support staff should not, and no practitioner should have one profile per specialization; names must match the real-world name.
• Directories. Florida treats a directory, "publishing in any media a listing of lawyers or law firms together in one place," as a qualifying provider, and makes a participating lawyer responsible for its compliance if the lawyer did not check it before joining. The ABA's model rule treats paying for a communication that "endorses or vouches for a lawyer's credentials" as paying for a recommendation. Each directory profile is compared with the bar record.

Offices and city pages

Florida requires every advertisement to disclose the city, town, or county of at least one bona fide office, and its advertising committee has found an advertisement misleading when it lists offices in cities where the firm has no bona fide office; a lawyer may still say they are "available by appointment" at another location. Google's spam policies name "pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page" as doorway abuse. The audit compares the 24 city pages with the three offices.

Access and indexing

The audit reads robots.txt and firewall rules for the search crawlers, confirms that office details, bios, and fees are in the HTML the server sends (in Vercel's December 2024 data, none of the major AI crawlers rendered JavaScript), and checks those pages in Search Console's Page indexing report and in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Claims under Florida's advertising rules

The firm's website does not have to be filed with The Florida Bar, but it must follow the content rules, and a specific page may be filed for review voluntarily for $150. The rows summarize the Bar's advertising handbook (13th edition, effective December 10, 2025).

Legal explainers

Each explainer is checked for current law, its jurisdiction, a date, and a named reviewing lawyer. One example: Florida's limitation period for negligence actions is now two years under section 95.11(5)(a), and chapter 2023-15 applies the change to causes of action accruing after the act became law on March 24, 2023. Older pages may still give the four-year period that applied before.

Measurement setup

A call prompted by an AI answer leaves no referral trail, so the intake form and phone script should ask how the person found the firm, with each assistant as an option. GA4 setup follows how to track AI referral traffic in GA4.

Sample findings

These are sample findings for the hypothetical firm. They show the form a finding takes and the evidence it needs; they describe no real firm, and nothing in them was measured. Impact is our judgment of how directly a finding affects what assistants can find and state correctly, or how much rule risk it carries; it is not a forecast.

The deliverable

The report is a PDF with a 60-minute readout call:

1. Summary. Scope, dates, and the fixes to make first, with rule items marked.
2. Method. Panel, assistants, dates, network location, run counts, and matching rules.
3. Baseline rates by assistant and city. Mention rate, citation rate, share of voice against eight named firms, and branded accuracy, each with counts and 95% intervals. No pooled score and no rank.
4. Source map. Cited domains grouped as the firm's pages, directories, review sites, bar records, and publishers.
5. Profile inventory. Every Business Profile and directory profile, field by field, against the bar record.
6. Access and indexing. Crawler access, rendering, and index status.
7. Claims review. Each item with its URL and Florida rule, for the firm's lawyers to decide.
8. Findings and fix plan. Owners, effort, and how each fix will be verified.
9. Measurement plan and run log. The plan below, and every answer and citation from the baseline.

Measurement plan

Every measurement uses the same frozen panel, following the methodology page and how to measure AI visibility. Two weeks give 820 unbranded and 120 branded runs per assistant, 3,760 in all.

City rates rest on about 90 runs per assistant, so their intervals are wide: an observed rate of 10% at that size has a 95% Wilson interval of about 5.4% to 17.9% (AEO HQ calculation), before correlated runs widen it further. They order fixes; they do not show small differences between cities. A change counts only when the interval for the difference excludes zero, as the statistics section describes.

Engagement timeline

The pricing page gives the audit's current delivery time; this example assumes about two weeks from completed intake.

What this example does not show

• Results. No rates, calls, or cases, because the firm does not exist.
• How long changes take. A 2026 review of 45 studies found no technique with "a stable, longitudinal, cross-platform causal effect on organic discoverability" (preprint).
• Legal advice. AEO HQ flags items against the cited rules; the firm's lawyers decide. Rules in other states differ.
• Other advertising. TV, billboards, and direct mail are outside the audit, though Florida's rules cover them too; for example, unsolicited written communications about a personal injury must wait at least 30 days after the accident.
• Evidence specific to personal injury. The surveys and citation studies cover legal services or local businesses in general, and several come from companies that sell to law firms.

Next step

The audit's current scope, price, and delivery time are on the pricing page. SEO, AEO, and GEO for law firms covers the evidence and the rules in four states.