Found in AI search: how professional firms get named in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google

How AI answers about firms come about

On its own, a language model knows little about your firm. Its training data is months or years old, and a sole practice in Klagenfurt or Kassel barely appears in it. But as soon as web search is switched on, which is now the norm for questions about recommendations nearby, the system first searches the web, reads the results and writes an answer from them with source links. Google calls this grounding: the AI features in Search retrieve relevant, up-to-date pages from the search index using the normal ranking systems.

This leads to the most important sentence of this guide: if you are hard to find in classic search, you will rarely be named in AI answers either. Which search runs in the background depends on the system.

Where the systems get their facts

For the question “Which firm is right for me?”, AI answers combine facts from several sources. The more often the same information appears in trustworthy places, the more likely it is to be used.

• Your website: practice areas, location, languages, team, availability, information on fees. It is the only source you fully control.
• Google Business Profile: address, opening hours, category, reviews. Google explicitly names an up-to-date profile as good practice for the AI features in Search. How to set it up is explained in the guide to the Google profile.
• Official registers: the lawyers' directory, chamber lists, the notary search, the Ministry of Justice's list of mediators in Austria. They confirm that you are admitted and where you are based.
• Private directories and portals: business directories and review portals. More on this in the article online directories for firms.
• Reviews: their content and number feed into answers such as “firms with good reviews”. How to ask for reviews in line with professional law is explained in the guide to the Google profile.
• Mentions: expert articles, talks, interviews, chamber and association pages. They show what you are known for.

The same facts everywhere

Contradictions are the most common reason for wrong AI answers. If your website says “appointments by arrangement”, your Google profile says “Mon–Fri 8 am–5 pm” and a business directory still shows the old address, the system picks one of the variants at random or leaves the firm out. So draw up a list of core facts and check all profiles against it.

You can also make these facts machine-readable with structured data. Google stresses that no special markup is needed for AI features, but the markup must match the visible text. What that looks like for firms is shown in the guide structured data for professional firms.

Clear fact pages and a genuine FAQ

AI systems like to pick up sentences that answer a question directly. “We advise employees and works councils in Graz and Styria on employment law, in German and English” is such a sentence. “Your strong partner in every situation in life” is not. Every page should therefore say in its first lines what the firm does, for whom and where.

Google explicitly warns against breaking content into small chunks or building a separate page for every conceivable search variant. Many similar pages can violate the scaled content abuse policy. Write for people, at length where the topic requires it. Which pages a firm website basically needs is summarised in the article content of a firm website.

Becoming quotable: first-hand experience instead of common knowledge

In its guide to AI features, Google distinguishes between interchangeable content that anyone could write and content with genuine expertise or first-hand experience. For professional firms, that is an advantage: general information on “What is inheritance tax?” is available a thousand times over online. How probate proceedings at the district court in your region typically run, which documents are really needed at the first appointment, or which mistakes you keep seeing in club accounts: that can only be found with you.

• Be specific: give figures, deadlines and procedures with a source, such as the section of the law or the authority.
• Show experience without revealing mandates: “In practice, the land register extract is often missing at the first appointment” is fine; details of an identifiable case are not without consent.
• Name the author: with professional title and a link to the team page. More in the article expert articles for firms.
• Keep it current: legal and tax content goes out of date quickly. An outdated answer quoted by a chatbot reflects on you.

Technology: be crawlable, do not lock out

For a system to quote your pages, it has to be allowed to read them. For AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google only requires what applies to normal search results: the page is indexed and may be shown with a snippet. Other providers have their own crawlers, which you control separately in the robots.txt file.

Check your robots.txt, especially after a relaunch or if a security plugin offers to “block AI bots”. Whether you allow training crawlers such as GPTBot or Google-Extended is a separate decision; according to the providers, the search functions depend on the search crawlers. You do not need an llms.txt file for Google: according to its own documentation, Google Search does not use it. Fast loading, text instead of images and a clean mobile display matter more, see loading speed and mobile website.

When AI exaggerates: professional law

Language models like to sharpen their wording. “Practice area: traffic law” becomes “specialist in traffic law” in the answer, a lawyer in Vienna becomes a “Fachanwältin für Familienrecht” (certified specialist in family law), a tax firm becomes “one of the best in Graz”. What a chatbot writes of its own accord is not your advertising. It becomes your advertising as soon as you adopt it: as a quote on your website, as a screenshot on LinkedIn or as a sentence in a brochure.

• Fachanwalt: in Germany only after the title has been awarded by the chamber (§ 43c BRAO), “specialist” only under the conditions of § 7 BORA. In Austria there are no certified specialist titles. Details in the guides to advertising law for lawyers in Germany and in Austria.
• Rankings and superlatives: “the best firm” is not objective for any profession. Under the recommended guidelines of the Bundesnotarkammer, notaries in Germany may only be listed in directories that are equally open to all notaries, see advertising for notaries in Germany and in Austria.
• Success rates and guarantees: if an AI invents “98 % of cases won”, that figure must not appear anywhere in your own presence.
• Confidentiality: do not give client data to AI tools you use for writing texts, and do not publish case examples that make clients identifiable.

The best prevention is a website that says exactly what is true: “practice areas” instead of “specialist fields”, awarded titles with chamber and year, professional title and chamber as in the legal notice. The more precise your source, the less the AI has to fill in. How to describe practice areas objectively is shown in the article practice areas on the firm website.

What you cannot control

To be honest: less than some agencies promise. AI answers change from question to question and from day to day. The same question can name your firm today and not tomorrow. Nobody outside the providers knows exactly how sources are weighted, and Google does not guarantee any page a place in its AI features, even if all requirements are met.

• Wording and order of the answer are decided by the system, not by you.
• Third-party content such as reviews, forum posts or press articles feeds in, even if it is outdated or one-sided.
• Errors can be reported via each service's feedback function, but a correction is not guaranteed. It is more effective to correct the wrong information at its source.
• Models without web search answer from old training data. They will only know a new address after months.

Test and monitor

What you should measure over time, and how to do it without tracking cookies, is described in the article measuring the success of your firm website. The basics of being found in your region are covered in the guide local SEO for firms.