People still search Google for a lawyer, and more of them now ask an assistant as well. We help small firms come up in both, with pages that say exactly what each lawyer does and where.
This page is for firms of two to fifteen attorneys in real estate, estate planning and business law, the kind of work clients research carefully before they call. It is the newest of our industry pages and we have no published legal results yet, so the results below come from other industries. We are not lawyers, nothing here is legal advice, and what your firm files with the State Bar is your decision.
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Someone with a will to write searches, asks an assistant who can help, then calls the firm both of them named.
on Google
A customer searches Google for “estate planning attorney austin”.
in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers
Who can help me write a will and a trust in Austin?
Marrow Creek Estate Law handles wills, trusts and probate.
Its site explains what a first consultation covers.
Quillfern Estate Planning is another option nearby.
marrowcreeklaw.example
the enquiry arrives
New call · from a Google search
To Marrow Creek Estate Law
Consultation request · just now
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.
Sources
The method behind this page is on our SEO and GEO page. We also work in property management, media & entertainment, finance, sports & recreation and tutoring & education. The foundations are shared; what changes per industry is which query gets typed and which page type answers it.
It can say the firm practices in, focuses on or concentrates in estate planning. Texas Rule 7.02(b) limits statements that a lawyer has been certified, or designated as having special competence, to lawyers certified by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization or by an organization it accredits, and a certified lawyer can say so in the form the rule sets out. Whether “specialize” on its own suits a lawyer who is not certified is the firm’s judgment, so our drafts say “focuses on” unless you tell us otherwise.
Usually only the homepage, if anything, as long as the whole site complies with Rules 7.01 to 7.03. Rule 7.05 exempts the information and links on a law firm website from filing, except the contents of the homepage, and even the homepage is exempt if it carries only the kinds of information the rule lists, such as the firm’s name, contact details, areas of practice and bar admissions. What does need filing goes to the Advertising Review Committee within ten days of going out, under Rule 7.04, and the whole site has to comply with Rules 7.01 and 7.02 either way. We flag what may need filing. Whether and what to file is your decision.
Every practice area a client would search for on its own does. Someone with a commercial lease and someone writing a will type different words, ask different questions before they call, and need different reasons to trust you. One page listing six practice areas competes with itself for all six. A page per area, with the matters it covers and the questions people ask first, gives each search somewhere specific to land. Areas you take on only occasionally can share a page.
Maybe nothing, and we will tell you if so. If your firm already comes up for its practice areas in the cities it serves and is named when an assistant is asked, the work is being done. What we look at first is the gap: the searches you should come up for and do not, what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI mode say about the firm, and whether your pages, listings and attorney bios agree with each other. You get those findings with the address and date behind each one, to share with your agency or to hand to us.
It can, and nobody can promise it will. Assistants tend to name firms whose pages answer the question clearly and whose details agree everywhere they appear. A small firm with a page for each practice area, a bio for every attorney and consistent listings gives an assistant more to work with than a larger firm with one general page. We measure it rather than predict it: three questions a client would ask, three runs each, in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI mode, and how many of the nine runs named you.
Tell us your practice areas and where your clients are, and we will show you who comes up on Google and in ChatGPT when they look for a lawyer.