Reading AI answers about your law firm, practice area by county Start with one afternoon

Start with what your own pages say today

Before the first question, write down what the firm's site says on the day of the check, because every answer that afternoon is read against it. Four things are enough:

• the attorneys the site lists, and which of them practice at the firm today;
• the counties and courts each practice area page names;
• the consultation terms on the contact page and on each practice area page;
• the fee basis each practice area page states, matter by matter.

Then compare that list with the firm as it is, before any assistant is asked anything. A bio for a lawyer who has left, a county the firm stopped covering, a free consultation the firm no longer offers: each is a finding already. An answer read against a page that is itself wrong proves nothing, so fix the page first, or mark it on the sheet so the afternoon's readings account for it.

Questions from last month's intake calls

Take the questions from the way callers describe their matters, which is what intake notes hold if the firm keeps them: the first sentence a person says on the phone. Write one for each practice area, set in the county where those cases are heard, and add two that name the firm or an attorney, to see what an answer says about them. For a firm with three practice areas that makes five questions, which test whether the firm gets an AI recommendation for the matter and what comes attached to its name:

• "who handles contested custody cases in [county]"
• "[matter] lawyer near the [county] courthouse with a free first consultation"
• "employment lawyer in [county] who takes unpaid overtime cases on contingency"
• "is [attorney] at [your firm] taking new [matter] clients"
• "how does [your firm] charge for [matter]"

These questions are not a panel. Next month's check can use different ones, and that is why one afternoon cannot say how often: nothing in it is held still. The fixed panel that makes months comparable is in AI visibility for lawyers.

Four assistants, one new conversation per question

Put each question to four AI assistants, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, typed the way a caller would type it, and keep everything:

1. Open a new conversation for every question, so that no earlier question sits in the same thread.
2. Type the question as written, with no follow-up and no correction.
3. Paste the whole answer into the record with the date, the assistant and the question.
4. Open every link or source the answer shows, and save the address of each.
5. Note an answer that names no lawyer at all, such as one that explains a process, suggests the bar or law society referral service, or asks for more detail. That is a result too.

Five questions on four assistants make twenty answers. Read them the same afternoon, while the site as it stood that morning is still the site.

Five readings for each answer

Each answer is read five ways, and each reading is held against a page the firm controls. The table says what to compare, and what a wrong answer looks like for a law firm.

Mark each reading right, wrong or not stated. "Not stated" is not a failure: an answer that names the firm without mentioning fees has said nothing wrong about them.

When a directory or rating site answers in the firm's place

A directory can stand in for the firm in two ways, and the record should keep them apart. In the first, the answer names a directory or a lawyer-rating site instead of any firm and sends the person there to choose. In the second, the answer names the firm, but its link or source citation for the firm's facts is the firm's profile on a directory, so the consultation terms or the attorney list a caller reads are the profile's, not the site's.

Across all trades, directories were rare as names in our probe. In our audit of 9,483 small business websites, 0.6% of the names Claude gave on one buyer question per business were directories or aggregators and 99.4% were businesses (9,240 questions, late August to early September 2026). The probe has no law firm cut, and it counted names, not the pages an answer cited, so it says nothing about the second case.

For the second case, open the profile the answer cited and read it against the site. Where the firm controls the profile, bring it into line with the site that day. Where it does not, the firm's own page is the one place it can state the fact in its own words, so check that it does. This page does not rank directories or rating sites; they differ in what they let a firm edit.

Where each kind of wrong answer is still written

Trace each wrong answer to a page or profile that still states the old fact, and fix it there. The answer itself cannot be edited; the pages behind it can.

When the same wrong fact comes back from one assistant and not the others, open the pages that assistant linked first. When it comes back from all four, start with the firm's own site and its Business Profile, the pages the firm controls completely. The overview for law firms lists what those pages should state in the first place.

From one afternoon to a monthly reading

One afternoon is one run on one day. Answers vary from run to run, so a firm named when a question is asked once can be missing when it is asked again an hour later, and a single reading cannot tell a steady state from a lucky one. That is why the afternoon is a snapshot and not a rate.

Change is read by a monthly panel of your own: fixed lines, four assistants, three runs of each, and the same record every month, as the article on AI visibility for lawyers sets out; our methodology page scores a narrower panel, twelve questions put to Claude once per reading. Over months the share of answers that name the firm, its mention rate, becomes a number that can move. The afternoon's use is to find the wrong facts worth fixing before the first monthly reading, so that the baseline is taken against pages that are right.

For Google's AI features there is one more count the firm can read without asking anything. Since August 31, 2026, Search Console's generative AI performance report shows impressions of the site's links in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, date and device. It has no query dimension, so it shows which practice area pages appeared, not for which questions.

If you would rather someone else took the first pass, the free visibility check takes one with Claude: a person runs it for your site and writes back within 48 hours.