When someone asks ChatGPT for a lawyer, who does it name?

Google is still the source most people say they would use to research a lawyer, and more of them now name an assistant too. iLawyer Marketing, a vendor that sells ChatGPT optimization to law firms, surveyed 1,110 people in the U.S. in 2026 about where they would research a lawyer for an important legal issue. 71.9% named Google, down from 86.7% in 2025, and 41.9% named ChatGPT, up from 28.1%. It is one vendor’s survey, so we read it as a direction rather than a measurement.

The shift matters because of what comes back. A results page lists ten firms and lets the reader choose. An assistant answers in a paragraph and names two or three. A firm that is fourth on a results page is still on the page, and a firm that would have been fourth in an answer is usually left out of it.

The searches that bring in this work are short and specific: a practice area and a place, such as an estate planning attorney in a named city, or a commercial lease lawyer in a named suburb. A firm based in a suburb often ranks for its own town and does not come up at all for the same search in the nearby city, where many of its clients live or work. That gap is the first thing we check.

Closing it takes a page whose subject is that practice area for the people in that place, written from what the firm actually handles there. A list of city names in the footer does not do it. We look at which of these searches the firm already comes up for, which it should, and which an assistant answers by naming somebody else.

An assistant deciding which firm handles a matter looks for pages that say plainly what a firm does and who does it. So each practice area gets its own page, with the matters it covers and the questions clients ask before a first consultation, and each attorney gets a bio page with their full name, bar admissions, education and the work they do, written as text a machine can read.

Structured data says the same thing in a form software reads directly: that the firm is a legal service at a real address, and that each attorney is a person who works there. It helps search engines and assistants tell the firm and its lawyers apart from similarly named ones. It does not rank a page by itself.

Directories, review sites and bar profiles all describe the firm, and an assistant reads them alongside your site. When the firm’s name, address, phone number and practice areas are written one way on the site and another way on a listing, the machine has two versions to reconcile and no reason to prefer yours.

We find every place the firm appears, correct what the firm controls, and give you the short list of profiles only you can edit. We do not write, buy or filter reviews.

Texas regulates lawyer advertising in Part VII of the Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, and a firm’s whole website has to comply with Rules 7.01 and 7.02. We write every page to those rules from the first draft. These are the Texas rules. A firm licensed in another state follows that state’s advertising rules, and we write to those instead.

Two examples. A lawyer may say they practice in, focus on or concentrate in an area of law, while saying a lawyer has been certified, or designated as having special competence, is limited to lawyers certified by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization or by an organization it accredits. So we do not call a lawyer a specialist unless they are board certified. And every advertisement has to name a lawyer responsible for its content and that lawyer’s primary practice location, which we put on the site by default.

Filing is the other half. Under Rule 7.04 an advertisement is filed with the State Bar’s Advertising Review Committee within ten days of going out, unless Rule 7.05 exempts it. On a website, only the contents of the homepage may need filing, and not even that if everything on it is exempt. A firm can also ask the committee to pre-approve material at least thirty days before it is first used. We flag what on your site may need filing and prepare it, and whether and what to file is the firm’s decision.

We control the site: its pages, its structured data, its speed and the words on it, all written to the rules above and approved by the firm before anything goes live. We advise on everything else, from directory profiles and bar listings to reviews, and we flag what may need filing, because those belong to the firm or to the lawyer whose license is on them.

We do not control what an assistant says or where Google ranks a page, and nobody does. What we commit to is the work and a measurement you can check: where you rank for the searches that matter, hand-verified logged out, and how many of nine runs across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI mode named you, with the date and the sources they cited.