SEO for law firms: getting clients from Google and from AI search
Six steps for a firm to show up when someone looks for a lawyer on Google Maps, in Google’s results or by asking an AI assistant, and how to check that it is working.
Published 6 November 2026
Short answer
SEO for law firms is the work that makes a firm appear when a prospective client looks for a lawyer on Google or asks an assistant such as ChatGPT. It rests on six pieces: the Google Business Profile, one page per practice area and office, client reviews, a presence with bar associations and legal directories, content that answers real questions, and LegalService structured data. All of it has to stay within the advertising rules that each country sets for lawyers.
What is SEO for law firms
DefinitionSEO for law firms is the practice of getting a firm found where people now look for a lawyer: the Google map, Google’s organic results and the answers of AI assistants. The goal is not traffic but a client with a specific matter finding the firm and getting in touch.
It differs from SEO for a shop or a publisher in two ways. First, nearly all the demand is local: someone who needs a family lawyer looks for one in their own city. Second, lawyer advertising has its own rules, so not everything that works in other sectors can be published.
The part that works on presence in AI assistants is usually called GEO. What GEO is and how it differs from SEO has its own article; this one covers only what changes for a law firm.
An example: a family law firm with offices in Manchester and Leeds wants more divorce enquiries. It needs a Google profile for each office, a divorce page that names both cities, recent reviews, and a presence with the regulator and the directories that assistants read when someone asks for “a divorce lawyer in Manchester”.
How clients look for a lawyer today
ContextClients now look for a lawyer in two ways: on Google, above all in the map and the local results, and increasingly by asking an AI assistant. Using assistants to ask for local business recommendations has shot up in a single year.
According to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, published in February 2026 with a sample of 1,002 US adults, 45% of consumers used ChatGPT or another generative AI tool for local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before. It is a US survey covering every sector, not only legal services.
For a law firm, the practical consequence is that there are two shop windows. On Google, the firm competes to appear in the map and the top results. In an assistant, it competes to be one of the few names the answer mentions, and that list is built from what the assistant finds about the firm on its own site and elsewhere.
How each assistant works inside, with its crawlers and sources, is covered in the guide on how to appear in ChatGPT step by step. What follows are the steps that work for both shop windows at once.
How to rank a law firm on Google and in AI search, step by step
StepsRanking a law firm on Google and in AI assistants takes six steps, ordered from what pays off first to what takes longest. The first three move the Google map; the last three shape what assistants know and say about the firm.
- 01 / PROFILE
Step 1: the law firm’s Google Business Profile
The Google Business Profile is what appears on the Google map. Google puts it this way in its help centre: “Local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity.” So the profile has to be complete: the right category, a real address, opening hours and practice areas. Google’s guidelines treat lawyers as individual practitioners, who may have their own profile alongside the firm’s, but not several profiles to cover each specialisation.
- 02 / PAGES
Step 2: one page per practice area and per office
Every practice area the firm wants to sell needs its own page: family, employment, criminal or whatever applies, with the cases it takes, how it works and which cities it has offices in. A page per city only makes sense where there is an office or lawyers who serve clients there. Google’s spam policies list pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page as an example of doorway abuse.
- 03 / REVIEWS
Step 3: client reviews on Google
Reviews count both on the map and in what assistants read. According to Google’s help centre, a business’s prominence takes into account how many reviews it has, and more reviews and positive ratings can help its local ranking. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey adds that 47% of consumers won’t use a business with fewer than 20 reviews. When asking for reviews and replying to them, the limit is client confidentiality under the professional rules of each jurisdiction. Why reviews also matter in AI answers is covered in brand mentions in AI search.
- 04 / DIRECTORIES
Step 4: bar associations and legal directories
When asked for a lawyer, assistants lean heavily on bar associations and directories. In a study by 5W and Haute Lawyer Network updated in October 2026, covering 288 answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity to questions about finding a lawyer in the United States, state bar associations appeared in 165 answers (57.3%), Martindale-Hubbell in 47.6% and Avvo in 46.2%. Outside the US, the equivalent is the bar or law society each lawyer is registered with, with up-to-date details, plus the country’s legal directories.
- 05 / CONTENT
Step 5: content that answers clients’ questions
Clients ask specific things before they call: how long an uncontested divorce takes, what happens if child support goes unpaid, how long someone has to bring an unfair dismissal claim. A page that answers one of those questions in its opening lines, naming the firm and the city, is the page an assistant can cite. How to write one is covered in how to optimise content for LLMs.
- 06 / MARKUP
Step 6: LegalService structured data
Structured data is an invisible block of code that describes the firm to machines: name, address, phone, opening hours and practice areas. Schema.org defines LegalService as a business that provides legally-oriented services, advice and representation, for example a law firm. Google recommends using the most specific LocalBusiness subtype possible. Schema.org also has an Attorney type, but marks it as deprecated because LegalService is more inclusive and less ambiguous.
Local SEO, organic SEO and AI search for law firms: how they differ
ComparisonA law firm can appear in three different places, and each one is worked on and measured in its own way. The Google map depends mostly on the profile and reviews; organic results, on the site’s pages; AI assistants, on the site and on what others publish about the firm.
| Route | Where the firm appears | What weighs most | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local SEO | Google map and local results | Complete profile, distance and reviews | Google Business Profile performance |
| Organic SEO | Google and Bing results | Practice area pages and useful content | Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools |
| AI visibility | Answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity | Bar associations, directories, reviews and citable pages | AI crawler logging and a fixed set of questions per assistant |
What rules limit lawyer advertising online
RulesLawyer advertising is regulated country by country, so each firm has to check the rules of its own jurisdiction. In England and Wales, paragraph 8.8 of the SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors requires any publicity about a practice to be accurate and not misleading, including on charges.
Two other examples show how much the rules vary:
- In Spain, articles 19 and 20 of the General Statute of the Spanish Legal Profession (Royal Decree 135/2021) allow lawyers to advertise freely, but not to reveal facts covered by professional secrecy, promise results that do not depend solely on the lawyer, or mention clients without their consent.
- In France, article 10 of the Règlement intérieur national (RIN) bans domain names that generically evoke the title of lawyer or an area of law, and reserves the word “spécialiste” for lawyers holding a specialisation certificate.
This article does not replace reading the rules or checking with the relevant bar or regulator.
How to know whether Google and AI assistants recommend your firm
MeasurementFor Google, the answer lies in Google Business Profile performance and Search Console. AI assistants offer no provider report, but there is a technical way to know which of the firm’s pages they read: logging their crawlers’ visits in the site’s firewall or CDN.
Crawler logging is a firewall or CDN rule that records, without blocking, every request from the assistants’ crawlers, identified by their user agent (the name they present) and verified by IP where the provider publishes its ranges. Those logs show which pages each crawler visits and when.
Each crawler tells you something different. According to OpenAI’s documentation, OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in ChatGPT’s search results, ChatGPT-User opens a page when a person asks for it in a conversation, and GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train its models. A ChatGPT-User visit to the divorce page is the closest thing to knowing that an assistant read it to answer someone. This is what DoGeo sets up for each client.
What the logs do not show is what the assistant writes in its answer. That still takes a fixed set of questions, such as “divorce lawyer in Manchester”, asked every month in each assistant. Before measuring anything, it is worth checking whether AI crawlers can read the firm’s site.
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