Can your SEO agency get you recommended by ChatGPT?

Partly. A good law firm SEO agency already does the work that gets you into Google's AI answers, and most of the groundwork ChatGPT needs. What a standard SEO scope rarely includes is the rest: ChatGPT's own crawler, the directories and review sites it reads about lawyers, and regular testing in each engine. Whether your agency covers that is a question about its scope, and you can settle it in one meeting.

My position, for a managing partner who already pays a retainer: do not fire anyone yet, and do not assume you are covered. Put seven questions to the agency you have. The answers will tell you whether to keep the arrangement as it is, add to it, or look elsewhere.

What does your SEO agency already do that AI engines use?

More than most AEO sales pitches admit. Google's own guide to optimizing for generative AI search says its AI Overviews and AI Mode are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems, and that to be eligible a page must be indexed and able to show a snippet in regular Search. If your agency keeps your practice pages crawlable, indexed and well written, it is doing the Google half of this job already.

Four pieces of ordinary SEO work carry straight over:

• Technical access. Pages that load, render without heavy scripts and are not blocked from crawling can be read by every engine, not only Google.
• Practice-area pages that answer the question. A page that states who you represent, in which matters, in which counties and on what fee basis gives an engine a fact it can repeat.
• Google Business Profile. Google's guide says a Business Profile can help a local business appear in AI responses as well as regular results.
• Reputation on the open web. The same guide says Google's AI features can show what is being said about a service in blogs, videos and forums, so earned coverage and genuine reviews count there too.

So if your agency does this well and your signed cases from organic search are steady, that is a reason to keep it. Nothing below changes that.

What does a standard SEO retainer leave out?

Four things sit outside the classic SEO scope of technical work, content, links and Google Business Profile. Your agency may cover some of them, so check your own statement of work for each one before you take my word for it.

The other engines' crawlers. ChatGPT does not read your site through Google. OpenAI documents a separate crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and says sites that opt out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. A security plugin or CDN rule can block that crawler while Googlebot passes untouched, and an SEO report built on Google data will never show it.

Legal directories and profiles off your site. SEO agencies usually treat directories as a place to get a link. AI engines treat them as evidence. BrightLocal's 2026 study of local AI answers recorded 13,354 citations for its lawyer category across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT, and the most cited third-party sources were google.com, which in that study is mostly Google Business Profiles (42% of the category's citations), Yelp (7.9%), Justia (3.2%), Avvo (2.5%), Lawyers.com (1.8%) and FindLaw (0.9%). Two cautions: that category covers a small number of firm locations in the US, UK and Australia, and BrightLocal sells listing management. Read it as a list of profiles to keep accurate, not as a ranking formula.

Reviews beyond Google. The same BrightLocal study found Yelp appeared as a source in 80% of ChatGPT's local answers across all business types. If your review program asks for Google reviews only, that is the right first priority, and it can leave the sources ChatGPT leans on thin. Any review request still has to follow your state's rules: nothing of value in exchange, and testimonial rules that vary by state.

Testing in each engine. Rank trackers measure positions on Google. Nobody is told which firms ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot name for "who handles contested custody cases near me" unless someone asks, on a schedule, and writes it down. Ahrefs put 15,000 prompts through four assistants and found that only 6% to 8% of the pages ChatGPT cited ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt (data from July 2025). A good ranking report tells you little about that answer.

Does this matter for your intake yet?

It matters enough to check, and not enough to panic. In iLawyer Marketing's 2026 survey of 1,110 U.S. adults, 41.9% said they would use ChatGPT to research a lawyer, up from 28.1% the year before, while Google led at 71.9%. The firm that ran it sells marketing to lawyers, and the survey asked what people would do, not whom they hired. Google is still where most of your prospects start. The share that starts elsewhere is now large enough that someone should be responsible for it.

A worked example: one retainer, read line by line

For example, suppose a four-attorney family law firm pays an illustrative $4,000 a month for SEO. The statement of work lists a monthly technical check, two practice-area articles, Google Business Profile posts, link building and a ranking report. The firm ranks well for "divorce lawyer" in its county. Nothing in that scope is wrong.

Now suppose the managing partner asks ChatGPT the five questions her intake team hears most, and the firm is named in none of the answers. Reading the scope against the four gaps shows why this is possible. No one checked whether the firm's firewall admits OpenAI's crawler. The Avvo profile still lists a partner who left. The firm has many Google reviews and almost none anywhere else. No one has ever run those five questions, so no one knew. Every item is fixable, and none of it was in the contract. This is an illustration, not a client result. The point is that a firm can be well served on Google and absent elsewhere without anyone having done a bad job.

"But Google says AEO is just SEO"

This is the agency's best argument, and it deserves a straight hearing. Google's guide says in plain words that, from Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." The same guide tells site owners they can ignore llms.txt files, content "chunking" and rewriting pages for AI, and warns that seeking inauthentic mentions is not as helpful as it might seem. Google's hiring guidance now lists "optimizing for generative AI" among the services an SEO provides. If an AEO vendor's proposal is mostly special files and reformatted content, your agency is right to call it repackaged SEO, and you should not pay twice for it.

Here is the answer. That guide speaks for Google Search only. It says so itself: the list of things to skip is introduced as things "you can ignore for Google Search." It does not describe ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot, which run their own crawlers and choose their own sources. OpenAI's eligibility rule is about its crawler, not about your Google position, and the Ahrefs overlap figure above shows how little of ChatGPT's source list comes from Google's first page. Microsoft reports Copilot citations in a separate AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, which is worth opening if you never have.

So the agency is right about Google and about gimmicks. The disagreement is narrower: who checks the other engines, who keeps the outside profiles accurate, and who tests the answers. If your agency says "we do," that is good news. Ask to see it.

Seven questions to put to your current agency

Send these in writing before your next review call. Each one has an answer that is either a document or a silence.

1. Which AI crawlers can reach our site today? Ask for the robots.txt lines and the hosting or CDN bot settings for OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, not only Googlebot.
2. Which client questions do you test, in which engines, and how often? Ask for the dated log: the question, the engine, the firms named, the sources cited.
3. Which outside profiles do you keep accurate? Google Business Profile, Yelp, Justia, Avvo, Lawyers.com, FindLaw and your state bar listing: attorneys, practice areas, address and phone, checked on a schedule.
4. What is the review plan beyond Google, and how does it comply with our state's advertising rules?
5. What do we see beyond rankings? Google's guide points to a generative AI performance report in Search Console, and Bing Webmaster Tools has its own. Are both in our monthly report?
6. How do you earn mentions of the firm, and what do you refuse to do? Paid or planted mentions are the kind Google calls inauthentic.
7. What would it cost to add what is missing, and which current line items would it replace?

If the agency answers most of these with work product, you have a good agency and no reason to move. If it answers honestly that the scope is Google only, that is also useful: you now know what to add. Be wary only of the third outcome, a confident yes with nothing to show.

How to check where you stand

Before the call, run your own test. Take the five questions your intake team hears most, add your city, and ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode. Note which firms are named and which sources are linked. Our post on how law firms get recommended by ChatGPT explains what the engines are looking for, and what law firm SEO costs in 2026 covers what a retainer should contain.

A disclosure, since we sell this work: ElytraCo offers traditional SEO alongside AI visibility, and firms on an AEO program may qualify for preferred SEO pricing. We review what you pay your current SEO provider and show how both can run under one strategy, potentially for less. That comparison covers equivalent services and is subject to qualification. Our published AEO price range is on the pricing page. If your current agency passes the seven questions, staying put is the right call.

If you want a second set of eyes first, our free AI visibility audit runs your practice-area questions across five engines and shows which firms are named and which sources the answers rely on. More on how we work with firms is on the law firms page.

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