Everything we've learned about getting law firms cited, ranked, and chosen.

Answer Engine Optimization. The practice of getting your firm cited inside the AI-generated answers that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI Overview produce. Different from SEO because the goal is being quoted, not being clicked.

Generative Engine Optimization. Often used interchangeably with AEO. Same idea, different acronym. The marketing world hasn't settled on which one sticks.

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Google's quality framework for evaluating who deserves to rank, especially in YMYL categories like legal. AI engines weigh similar signals.

A real-world object (your firm, an attorney, a city, a practice area) that an AI engine has decided is identifiable. Modern search ranks entities and the connections between them, not just keywords on pages.

JSON-LD code embedded in your site that tells search engines exactly what each page describes. For law firms the relevant types are LegalService, LocalBusiness, Organization, Person, and FAQPage.

Google's AI-generated answer that appears above the blue links. Now triggered on a large and growing share of question-based legal queries. Citation inside an AI Overview is the new top-of-page real estate.

"Your Money or Your Life." Google's category for queries where bad answers cause real-world harm. Medical, financial, and legal advice all qualify. YMYL pages face a higher trust threshold before ranking.

The boxed answer at the top of a Google search results page, lifted from a single source. Still appears on definitional and factual queries; absorbed into AI Overviews on multi-step ones.

The three local business listings shown above organic results for "near me" and city-based searches. Dominated by Google Business Profile signals: reviews, completeness, proximity, and category match.

Name, Address, Phone. The three identifiers that have to match exactly across your website, bar listing, GBP, Avvo, Justia, and every directory. Inconsistent NAP splits your firm into multiple weak entities in the AI engine's graph.

Large Language Model. The kind of AI behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, trained on huge amounts of text to generate answers in sentences. When people say "AI search," they mean a query answered by an LLM instead of a list of links. AEO is the work of becoming one of the sources it draws on.

The bots AI companies use to read the web: GPTBot (OpenAI), Google-Extended (Google), PerplexityBot, and ClaudeBot (Anthropic), among others. If your robots.txt blocks one, the matching engine can't read or cite your site. Allowing them is the price of admission to AI answers.

A plain-text file at the root of your domain that points AI crawlers to your most important pages, the way robots.txt guides search crawlers. An emerging standard, not yet universal. Low cost, easy to add, and a small help in making your key pages easy for an engine to find.

Google's three page-experience measures: how fast the main content loads, how quickly the page responds to a tap or click, and how much the layout shifts while loading. They feed ranking and, indirectly, how readily an engine trusts and crawls a page. Failing them holds back otherwise strong content.

Google's database of entities (people, places, organizations) and the relationships between them. When your firm is a recognized node, Google and AI engines can describe it with confidence. Consistent NAP, schema, and citations are how an entity earns its place in it.

Search Engine Results Page. What Google returns for a query. In 2026 it's a stack: an AI Overview, a map pack, featured snippets, ads, and the classic blue links, all competing for the same screen. "Ranking number one" means less when the first thing a searcher sees is an AI answer.

Largest Contentful Paint. How long until a page's main content (usually the headline and hero image) actually appears. One of the three Core Web Vitals; aim for 2.5 seconds or less.

Interaction to Next Paint. How quickly a page responds when someone taps or clicks. A Core Web Vital that replaced the older First Input Delay in 2024; aim for under 200 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift. How much a page jumps around unexpectedly while it loads. A Core Web Vital; aim for a score below 0.1. Bad CLS is when a button moves right as you go to tap it.

The schema.org structured-data type for a law firm as an entity. The right primary type for a firm's markup, replacing the deprecated Attorney type, with LocalBusiness properties nested inside it.

Structured data marking up an individual attorney: name, job title, credentials, the firm they work for, and links to verified profiles. Makes your named experts machine-readable, which feeds authority.

OpenAI's web crawler, the one that gathers content for ChatGPT. Block it in your robots.txt and ChatGPT can't read or cite your site. ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended are the equivalents for other engines.

An HTML tag that tells search engines which language a page is written in. Essential for multilingual firms, so the Spanish version of a page ranks for Spanish searches without competing with the English one.

A plain-text file at your domain root that tells crawlers what they can and can't access. A too-broad rule here can quietly hide your site from search and AI engines without any visible sign.

A permanent redirect that points an old URL to a new one. Preserves the search rankings tied to a page when it moves. Skipping redirects during a site rebuild is how firms lose years of ranking equity overnight.

A link from another website to yours. A long-standing authority signal: earned links from real, relevant sites (a bar association, a news story, a directory) still count. Bought links are a risk, not a shortcut.

An HTML tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the official one when several are similar. Prevents duplicate-content confusion, which matters for firms with near-identical location or practice pages.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation. The method AI search tools like Perplexity use: retrieve live web sources for a query, then generate an answer constrained to what those sources say, with citations attached.

A mention is when an AI answer names your firm in its text. A citation is when it links to a page on your site as a source. The linked citation is the stronger signal, and the one that can send you traffic.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The de-facto standard (version 2.1, level AA) courts use to judge whether a website is accessible under the ADA. The target law firm sites should build to.