Using AI to Attract New Clients
Not long ago, someone who needed a lawyer opened Google and typed their query. Today, they are increasingly opening ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Claude or Perplexity and simply asking: “Who’s the best attorney near me?”
The AI answers with a short list of firms, a reason for each and often no need to click anything at all. Is your law firm showing up?
In this webinar, I introduce Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)—the concrete steps your firm can take to appear in AI search results.
If your firm isn’t there, you’re not losing to a bigger ad budget. You’re losing to a firm that figured out the new rules first.
I’ve spent 35 years in law firm marketing, and I don’t say this lightly: AI search is the biggest change to the internet since Google. And it rewards a very different kind of firm than Google did.
At Firmidable, we can show you how to gain a real competitive advantage in this pivotal moment.
Watch the webinar “Using AI to Attract New Clients” for a full discussion.
For a summary of what all of this means for your legal marketing, keep reading below.
Key Takeaways from “Using AI to Attract New Clients”
| AI search rewards reputation over size. | Unlike Google’s emphasis on size, AI platforms favor firms with strong reputations and deep expertise—a real opening for small and mid-sized firms to compete with national giants. |
| AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the new SEO. | Strong SEO is still required, but AEO adds new demands: quotable writing, front-loaded answers, named expert authors, content clustering and clean schema code in the background signaling what a page covers. |
| AI reads your reviews—it doesn’t just count them. | When AI recommends a firm, it often quotes patterns from the firm’s online reviews, making genuine, recent reviews more valuable than ever. |
| Third-party authority signals matter. | Board certifications, podcast guest appearances and press mentions tell AI you’re a real expert—because someone other than you is confirming it. |
| AI is already supercharging Paid Search. | Google’s “Enhanced Conversions for Leads” is driving record results right now in PPC (pay-per-click) ads, and tools like AI Max are placing firms into AI Overviews. |
Why AI Search Is Good News, Especially for Smaller Law Firms
I discuss in this presentation how traditional Google search assumed bigger meant better. The national names spending millions on legal marketing—the ones that roll into your market from out of town—often benefited in their search engine optimization (SEO) because of their sheer size.
AI doesn’t think that way. It looks for who actually has the best reputation and deepest expertise.
We already have small and mid-sized firms appearing in AI results ahead of the 800-pound gorillas in their markets, and pulling in cases from it. If you can’t outspend the giants, this is your opening.
(If you are a larger firm, there’s a flip side worth knowing: AI sometimes assumes “big” means “impersonal” and quietly marks you down. That’s fixable—but it takes deliberate content to correct.)
The new discipline of getting your law firm found in AI searches has a name: AEO.
You know search engine optimization. Now we’re talking about Answer Engine Optimization. The good news: strong SEO still helps. The catch: AEO asks for more.
How to Sharpen Your Law Firm Website for AEO
Here are a few tactics that power your AEO:
Write to be quoted. AI lifts clear, authoritative answers to the exact questions people ask. If you use plain, quotable writing on your website—not dense legal prose—and answer real client questions head-on, AI models are more likely to cite you as the go-to local firm for the client’s needs.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Put your most important point in the first sentence. Both Google and AI give content high on the page extra weight. (Old newspaper trick. Still undefeated.)
Build expertise signals. Put a real attorney’s name on content, especially items like blog posts. Rewrite your “About” page so it actually explains who you are, what you’re known for, and why you do the work you do. AI rewards you for having a clear identity.
Cluster your content. Instead of one thin page per topic, build a pillar page with deeper supporting pages around it. Depth tells AI you are a valuable resource on the subject.
Get the technical foundation right. Have experts in digital marketing do your website’s schema markup, which is code signaling to bots, both search engine and AI, what your web pages are about. Make sure you have consistent listings across websites with directories of attorneys and a fully optimized Google Business Profile. None of this is glamorous. All of it matters.
In AEO Results, Your Law Firm’s Online Reputation Does the Talking
Here’s something that surprised even me.
When I asked ChatGPT for the best attorney in a given city, it named five firms—and for four of them, it quoted their online reviews to explain why. AI doesn’t just count your reviews the way Google did. It reads them, and repeats what they say about you.
So a steady stream of genuine reviews—the kind you earn by texting a happy client a simple link right after a win—has never mattered more.
The fifth firm? It got cited for being board certified. Third-party proof that you’re an expert—such as certification from a legitimate body—carries real weight with AI models.
Another valuable signal for AEO is media coverage. Making a podcast appearance could give you clout with AI. A mention in serious press is also potent. As a line I once overheard at a conference puts it: nothing helps AEO like being in The New York Times.
AI Isn’t Just Changing Organic Search—It’s Supercharging Your Paid Online Ads
If you run Google Ads, pay attention. A tool with an unfortunately clunky name—”Enhanced Conversions for Leads”—has quietly become a game changer in Google PPC (pay-per-click) ads.
Our clients this year kept posting record months in their Paid Search. When we investigated, the reason clicked: The AI-driven tools were genuinely outperforming what even smart humans could do alone.
This isn’t “coming soon.” It’s working right now.
How to Start Adapting to the AI Age in Legal Marketing
You don’t have to do everything at once.
Make sure your most important pages answer your clients’ real questions clearly. Build a habit of asking for reviews. Get someone skilled to handle the technical adjustments to your website.
Then measure. Digital measurement tools are complicated and imperfect, but they can show whether you’re going in the right direction. If your visibility is trending up, keep doing what’s working.
This shift is happening with or without us. We see it at Firmidable, where our law firm marketing agency has already expanded from TV marketing to digital marketing and now to AEO.
If you get out in front of it, AEO could be a big opportunity for your law firm to compete and grow like never before.
Talk to Firmidable about bringing AEO to your law firm marketing.
Using AI to Attract New Law Firm Clients Webinar Transcript Summary
Welcome to Firmidable’s webcast: Using AI to Attract New Clients.
Our presenter is Nathan Chapman, president of Firmidable, a strategy-driven marketing and digital agency that works exclusively with law firms. Nathan holds an MBA in marketing and has over 35 years of experience helping law firms across the country meet their goals for growth and revenue.
Nathan opens with a quick audience poll on AI marketing expertise—the largest group (about 50%) reports being “below average,” setting up the webinar’s goal of bringing everyone up to speed.
While the presentation focuses on AI and search, Nathan notes Firmidable also experiments with AI in TV advertising, including recreating archival footage rather than reshooting scenes—though a recent AI-generated St. Patrick’s Day-themed concept was ultimately shelved by the client.
The Coming AI Tsunami
AI is described as the biggest change to the internet since Google, largely because it’s conversational—unlike traditional search, AI remembers context within a conversation and lets users refine their query in real time. Usage data shows ChatGPT still dominant at roughly 54%, with Gemini second and Claude (from Anthropic) third but growing fast among power users and businesses. Google’s own search results now frequently surface AI Overviews even without the user asking, pulling from cited sources—meaning firms that already rank well organically have a real chance to also appear in those AI-generated summaries. A key theme: unlike traditional SEO, AI doesn’t favor firms based on size or ad spend, which creates a meaningful opening for small and mid-sized firms to compete with larger, better-funded competitors.
AI and Organic Search
Nathan traces the evolution from Google helping people find websites, to helping people find information directly (zero-click search), to AI now delivering complete answers without a click at all. The emerging discipline for showing up well in this environment is called AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)—which builds on, rather than replaces, good SEO practice.
Key website content priorities: naming a real author (usually an attorney) on content, writing in a clear and quotable style rather than dense legal prose, answering the specific questions clients actually ask, and front-loading the most important information (“don’t bury the lead”). Beyond the website itself, AI weighs off-site authority signals heavily—traditional PR, industry influencers, and podcast guest appearances all help establish third-party validation of expertise.
Nathan also discusses rewriting “About Us” pages to genuinely explain a firm’s history, mission, and culture rather than functioning as another sales pitch, since AI treats these pages as a primary source of firm information. He touches on AI’s focus on entity relationships (clearly stating what a firm is and isn’t known for), the value of clustering related content into hub-and-spoke page structures, the risk of thin/low-value pages getting de-indexed, and the technical importance of clean schema markup.
Consistency of business information (citations) across directories and listings, claiming and optimizing legal directory profiles, and maintaining a strong Google Business Profile all factor into local AI visibility—illustrated with an example of a multi-location Michigan firm building geo-specific cluster pages around each community it serves.
How AI Picks “The Best Attorney”
Nathan shares a personal test: asking ChatGPT for the best attorney in a given practice area and city returned five firms, four of which were justified using direct quotes and patterns pulled from the firms’ online reviews—a notable shift from Google simply counting review scores. The fifth firm was cited specifically for the attorney’s board certification, reinforcing that third-party validation (such as certification bodies) carries real weight with AI. Practical advice for growing reviews includes texting clients a review link immediately after a case win, since a phone-based ask converts especially well.
Measuring AI Visibility
Since no single reliable tool yet exists for measuring “share of prompt,” Nathan describes using a combination of GA4 (which captures some but not all AI referral traffic), Microsoft/Bing and Copilot reporting, and Semrush for broader (if less transparent) visibility tracking—with the general philosophy that consistent upward trends indicate the right strategy is working.
Digital Ads and AI
While AI-native advertising within chat platforms is still emerging (mostly benefiting large e-commerce players so far), Nathan emphasizes that AI is already dramatically improving traditional Google Ads performance through a feature called Enhanced Conversions for Leads, which has driven record-setting paid search months for Firmidable’s clients this year. A newer, still-maturing tool, AI Max for Search, uses AI to suggest new ad targeting terms—useful but requiring human oversight, since it can also generate poor suggestions (such as an overly broad geographic term for a personal injury client).
Improving Intake
Nathan notes that AI is also being used to summarize recorded client intake calls, helping firms spot problems—like callers reaching voicemail and hanging up before ever being logged as a missed lead—so more leads convert into actual cases.
Closing and Q&A
Nathan closes by tracing Firmidable’s own evolution from a traditional TV agency to a digital-first firm (now roughly 70% of revenue) and, most recently, into what he calls “Firmidable 3.0″—an AI-first approach the agency believes is essential for both its own and its clients’ continued growth.
In the Q&A, Nathan addresses whether AI will replace Google (his view: the two are merging, with Google itself becoming a major AI player) and how AEO services are priced (dependent on a firm’s goals, competition level, and market—with a complimentary consultation offered to attendees).
Watch “Using AI to Attract New Clients” on YouTube.
Curious how your firm shows up in AI today? We’ll take a look and talk it through—no charge. Reach out to Firmidable.