AI visibility for law firms is whether an assistant names you when someone asks a question like “best employment lawyer in <city>”. It is decided by whether the engine can read your site and whether you are in the pages it retrieves — both are checkable, and the first is fixable from inside the site.
Four shapes of question decide AI visibility in law firms: best-for, alternatives-to, cheapest, and for-a-situation. The lines below are the kind an assistant hears every day; replace the brackets with your market.
An assistant answering those questions retrieves pages and names the companies in them. For law firms the pages it retrieves are usually:
A site that is not in those sources is not in the answer, however well it reads. A site that cannot be read is not in them either — and that part is checkable.
Law firms sites are most often built on WordPress, Squarespace, Wix. The checks they fail most are the ones that come with that:
What the agent does here: runs the 23 checks on your pages, switches on the fixes it can apply from inside the site — AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt, Organization schema in every page, a sitemap, /llms.txt — writes the answer-first opening and the search description for your approval, and counts every AI visit page by page so you see which questions already bring an engine to you.
Questions of four shapes: best-for, alternatives-to, cheapest and for-a-situation. For law firms that means lines like “best employment lawyer in
Avvo, Justia, Martindale and bar directories; Google Business reviews; the firm's practice-area pages; legal Q&A threads. Being in those sources matters as much as the site itself.
pages open with the answer — practice pages that describe the firm before answering the question a client typed. headings, dates and authorship are present — articles without an author or a date — unattributable legal content is rarely quoted. sameas links to external profiles are present — directory profiles that exist but are not linked from the site.
Write each practice page to answer the question in the first sentence: who it is for, what it costs to start, what happens first. Name the attorney and the date on every article. Link Avvo, Justia and the bar profile with sameAs and keep the firm name identical across them.
The free page check runs the 23 checks on your public pages — the ones above, measured on yours.