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AI visibility for law firms

A person gets hurt in a crash on a Friday night. On Saturday they open ChatGPT and ask for a personal injury lawyer near them. A parent in the middle of a divorce asks it what a family lawyer costs in Denver. A son asks it who can help with his mother's will.

Each of those questions can end in a signed client. This guide covers how ChatGPT finds law firms, the schema a firm site needs, the ethics rule that still applies, and six fixes. It uses what we found when we scanned 21 small law firm websites on October 24, 2026. No one can promise ChatGPT will name your firm. These checks remove the reasons it can't.

How ChatGPT answers "lawyer near me"

ChatGPT can search the web when a question needs current facts. OpenAI's help page on ChatGPT search says it can use your approximate location from your IP address and rewrite the question into a search. "Divorce lawyer near me" becomes something like "divorce lawyer Denver CO."

ChatGPT reads the pages that answer that search and cites them. Those pages may be your site, a lawyer directory, or a review site. OpenAI says "Placement is not guaranteed."

That gives a firm three jobs:

Let ChatGPT's crawler read your site.
Say what you practice (personal injury, family law, estate planning, criminal defense) in plain text.
Say where you practice, where your office is, and when you are open, in plain text and in schema.

The schema a law firm needs

Schema.org has a type built for firms. LegalService is "a business that provides legally-oriented services, advice and representation, e.g. law firms." It sits under LocalBusiness, so it takes the same fields as any local business.

There is also an Attorney type. Schema.org marks it deprecated: "LegalService is more inclusive and less ambiguous." If your site uses Attorney alone, switch the firm block to LegalService.

Give the LegalService block the fields that tell a machine who you are:

name, url, telephone, and the full office address
areaServed with the counties or cities you take cases in
openingHoursSpecification with your office hours
a short description that names your practice areas

Google's local business guide lists the name, address, phone, and hours fields it reads. Our HVAC guide has a copy-ready example with areaServed. Swap the type to LegalService and list your practice areas.

The ethics rule still applies

Schema, llms.txt, and FAQ answers are communications about your services. ABA Model Rule 7.1 says: "A lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer's services." Your state's version of the rule is the one that binds you.

So write machine copy the way you write a web page. State facts you can back up. Skip "best" claims and results you can't stand behind. An AI tool may quote a line from your llms.txt word for word.

What we found on 21 small law firm websites

On October 24, 2026 we ran our free check on 21 small law firm websites. They came from public search results in four US metros and four practice areas: personal injury in St. Louis, family law in Denver, estate planning in Columbus, and criminal defense in Charlotte. We are not naming them.

Finding	Sites	Share
Our checker could not read the homepage (bot challenge or host error)	4 of 21	19%
No llms.txt	12 of 17	71%
No LegalService or Attorney schema type	6 of 17	35%
No business schema type at all	5 of 17	29%
Schema with errors, or none	6 of 17	35%
Attorney type only (deprecated), no LegalService	2 of 17	12%
Offer in schema with no price	3 of 17	18%
No JSON-LD at all	1 of 17	6%
robots.txt blocks OAI-SearchBot	0 of 17	0%
robots.txt blocks GPTBot (training only)	1 of 17	6%
No sitemap	0 of 17	0%

The 17 sites we could read scored 84.5 out of 100 on average. The median was 85. Four scored 100. Five scored under 80. The low was 55.

Law firm sites scored higher than the lawn care sites (81 average) and HVAC sites (83) we scanned on October 23. They scored lower than the roofing sites (90). Every site had a sitemap, and none blocked ChatGPT search. The gaps were in what the site tells a machine. Seven in ten had no llms.txt. One in three gave no legal business type. Two of the four we could not read sat behind a bot challenge page. A crawler that hits that wall may see nothing at all.

A real scan, name removed

One family law firm in Denver scored 55. Its homepage had 6,435 characters of readable text, a sitemap with 50 URLs, and every AI crawler was allowed. But it had no llms.txt, no JSON-LD, no meta description, and no Open Graph tags. Its three H1 headings read "Trust," "Expertise," and "Compassion." None named a practice area or a city. A person could tell what the firm does. A machine had few structured facts to go on.

What to fix this month

Run the free scan. It tests OAI-SearchBot and seven other AI crawlers, checks your server time, and tells you when a firewall or bot challenge blocks the checker.
Add one LegalService block. Include name, phone, address, areaServed, and openingHoursSpecification. Replace a lone Attorney block. Match every field to what the page says.
Fix or drop broken Offer blocks. Three firms listed an Offer with no price. An Offer needs price and priceCurrency. If it is free, set price to 0 and priceCurrency to USD. If you can't state a price, remove the Offer.
Write one page per practice area and city. Put the practice area and the city in the H1. ChatGPT rewrites "near me" into a place name. Give it a page that names the place.
Answer the cost question. People ask what a lawyer costs. State your fee model in plain text: contingency, flat fee, or hourly, and what a first consult costs. Keep it true under Rule 7.1.
Add an llms.txt file. An llms.txt file is a short Markdown file at yoursite.com/llms.txt. It is a proposed standard, and OpenAI does not say ChatGPT uses it. List your practice areas, office, counties, and your key pages. See our llms.txt example.

OpenAI's crawler docs say sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers." If your host or firewall runs a bot challenge, ask it to allow OAI-SearchBot. Our AI crawlers guide lists the user agents.

When to hire it out

If your site runs on a builder you can't edit, or the scan shows a firewall problem, you can pay us to do it. Fix it for me is $499 one time to fix the issues your scan found, or $1,500 to rebuild the site.

If you want to track what AI says when people ask for a lawyer in your area, the Monitor is $29 a month. It asks 25 buyer questions each week and shows who AI names: you or up to 5 competitors. It runs on an open model preview today. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude are not live in it yet.

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FAQ

Does ChatGPT recommend law firms? Yes. ChatGPT can search the web and use your approximate location to find local results. It cites the pages it reads. OpenAI says placement is not guaranteed.

What schema type should a law firm use? LegalService. Schema.org names law firms as the example for it. The Attorney type is deprecated in favor of LegalService.

Do ethics rules apply to schema and llms.txt? They are communications about your services. ABA Model Rule 7.1 bars false or misleading communications. Check your state's version of the rule.

Do I need llms.txt for a law firm site? It is optional. It is a proposed standard, and OpenAI does not say ChatGPT uses it. It takes ten minutes to write. 12 of the 17 law firm sites we read did not have one.

Can a bot challenge page hurt my firm's AI visibility? It can. If a firewall shows a challenge page to automated readers, an AI crawler may get the same wall. 2 of the 21 firm sites we tried showed one to our checker.

What score should my law firm site get on the AI Ready Check? Aim for 90 or higher with no failed crawler checks. The law firm sites we read averaged 84.5.

Checked 2026-10-24. Prices and policies change. Confirm on the source before you buy.

Sources

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