Law firms cannot control whether ChatGPT or Perplexity will cite them on a given day—but they can control the inputs those systems prefer: crawlable expertise, clear entities, structured answers, and trustworthy off-site corroboration.
In your control
- On-site answer quality and freshness
- Attorney/firm identity consistency
- Technical access for crawlers (unless you intentionally block)
- Earned mentions and accurate profiles
- Measurement cadence for mentions and referrals
Out of your control
Model routing, training cutoffs, and competitors’ publishing velocity. Treat citations as a probabilistic outcome of good systems.
See AI search optimization, GEO explained, and August 2026 field notes.