6 Ways Lawyers Can Show Up In ChatGPT

ChatGPT is taking real market share from Google — and it's changing how law firms get found. Impressions and clicks are down across Google, and top-funnel searches (the emotional, "what do I do" questions) are migrating to ChatGPT fast.

So how do you actually get your law firm cited and recommended inside ChatGPT? It shares about 80% of its ranking logic with Google SEO — but there's a 20% difference that matters. In this video I break down the 6 factors ChatGPT looks at to rank and recommend your firm, why your old blog-traffic playbook is dead, and what a modern search program actually looks like.

15 years working only with law firms. Here's what's working right now.

👉 Want an analysis of your firm's search visibility? Book a call with me: https://webris.org/get-started/

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Timestamps

0:00  ChatGPT is eating Google's search share
0:48  Why all search is one umbrella (Google, YouTube, ChatGPT)
1:05  The 80/20 overlap between ChatGPT and Google SEO
1:35  How people search ChatGPT vs Google — linear vs conversation
2:00  Why AI Overviews killed your blog traffic
2:15  What Google is still good for (bottom-funnel)
2:40  The queries migrating to ChatGPT (top-funnel + emotional)
3:45  The 6 things ChatGPT looks at to rank your firm
4:00  1. Entity authority (press, Reddit, Wikipedia)
5:00  2. Consistency across your profiles
5:24  3. Reviews & reputation (beyond Google)
6:00  4. Content as credibility, not traffic
7:20  5. Freshness — the 13-week rule
9:00  What it all comes down to: brand
10:00  Why the "checklist agency" fails you
10:32  Want an analysis of your firm?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There's no denying that Chat GPT and LLM search engines have taken a massive bite out of Google's market share. We see this not only just in the data. Impressions and clicks are down in Google, just in general for our client counts. But if we're being honest, it's just in our own behavior. I use Chat GPT pretty much as my main search engine for a lot of different queries. So when we approach this for clients, clients always ask us, they're like, Do you do chat GPT called GEO as a part of your process? And I say, Yeah, absolutely, because we look at search as an umbrella. So in that umbrella, you've got Google, right? And within Google, you've got local SEO, Google Maps Pack, you've got traditional website SEO, you've got local service ads, you've got pay-per-click ads, you've got all four of those products within the Google search bucket. Then you've got like YouTube as a search engine, then you've got LLM search engines as well. So chat GPT, to me being the main one, those all fall under the umbrella of search. And what's really cool about that too is that you picture like a Venn diagram, right? Of like overlapping concentric circles, ChatGPT search and Google search optimization, they have about an 80% overlap, but there is a 20% distinction. And we're going to talk about that in that video in terms of what is ChatGPT looking at to actually rank your law firm's website and what can you do to get more visibility in ChatGPT. ChatGPT also recently relaunched ads too, which we're testing for clients, still very early on, but I'll be making more videos about that in the future in terms of how that works. So the first thing that I think is important that we need to talk about and understand is that the way that people use ChatGPT is different than Google. We need to understand that. So ChatGPT versus Google, I always say Google's a little bit more linear, right? People go to Google, they type in a keyword search that we can track too, right? Like we can go to a tool and we can see what people are searching for, how much they're searching for, etc. ChatGPT, we can't do that. And also with Google, it's very linear too, in terms of they go, they type in, they might refine, but that's pretty much it with ChatGPT. It's a conversation, right? So if we if we look at something like if you're a personal injury lawyer and how people are using Google to potentially find you, traditional SEO back in the day, we were building like a lot of blog content to try and get like top funnel traffic, like hey, what to do after a car accident, blah, blah, blah, etc. Like blog content, right? Informational content. The challenge is now is that Google's AI, those AI overview answers, are just gobbling all that up. You can build it and you should still build it, but don't expect to get traffic for it because it just doesn't reach your website anymore. People just get the answer that they need, they scan it and then they move on. It's whatever. Now, what Google's really good for still is bottom funnel query. So car accident lawyer near me, money in the bank, right? The challenge is just getting that click because there's local service ads, there's four pay-per-click ads, there's maps pack. It's it's hard to get that click because there's so much fractured attention. Now, the difference is Chat GPT is that it's much more of a conversational platform. So that top funnel informational query for me, anyways, has migrated very heavily to ChatGPT because I think the results are better. And the ability to refine that query and get information from multiple different sources is much faster, much easier, and just is much cleaner. A lot of those top funnel queries are migrating into Chat GPT. I hurt my neck, my neck's been hurting. Uh, I got in a car accident a year ago, my insurance won't cover it. What can I do? I don't know. That's a hypothetical query, something like that. And when we start talking about like business law or family law, right? We're talking about deeply emotional conversations. You know, like if you're going through a dispute with a business partner, ChatGPT is is is gobbling those up, right? Because there's so much that you want to know, and it's so much easier to get that information and it stores the context of that conversation as well. It knows you so chat GPT is much more of a conversational, almost like a spider web, right? Again, Google's very linear, we track the keywords, we know the volume, uh, and the search behavior is much simpler to understand. With ChatGPT, there's really no way to get data on that because it's so hyper-personalized to the user, but you can still show up in Chat GPT for these things, and more and more people are using ChatGPT also for bottom funnel queries. I've been using it a lot more personally for shopping stuff. You know, if I'm looking for, I don't know, like a pair of running shoes, it's much easier to query ChatGPT than you go to Google and type in like running shoes, it's like like my God, like uh it's a lot to look at, right? And there's so many ads in there. ChatGPT, you know, can ask you questions about what you're looking for, how long you're running, your weight, your composition, all that stuff, and then make very succinct recommendations based on that. So those recommendations that are called citations is really what we want to focus on here. And let's talk about what those things are. So I got about six of them here that are ranking factors that you're gonna want to focus on. Uh, so number one is what Chat GPT calls entity authority. So this in layman's terms basically means just getting your name across the web, right? Press is really good. Getting featured in press release, news, features, podcasts, directories, bar associations, sponsorships, all those things are really, really good. Why? Because what it does is it shows that these platforms that you're an authority on what you do, right? If you're getting mentioned in all these different places, you're probably pretty popular. And if you're popular, then you probably deserve to be shown in surface, and your content and your voice deserves to be shown in in in inside of ChatGPT. Uh, Reddit, Wikipedia are highly cited, right? So I know it's hard to like get active on Reddit, but like if you think about why Reddit and Wikipedia are so important is because one, Wikipedia is a verifiable source of information. Uh in Reddit, it's like an organic, it's like pre-influencer mentions, right? So the more the web vouches for you, the more AI is going to treat you like a trusted bear. And that's really what that goes down to. So two is going to be consistency. So making sure that all of your entity profiles, your Facebook, your Yelp, your Avo, just consistent, right? Same address, same name, same description, same services, same practice areas. Having consistency helps again with the authority. It helps to show that you're up to date, you're managing things, you mounted these things, you care about these things. Three, which to me is probably one of the biggest ones, is reviews and reputation. So when we talk about traditional SEO, we're talking about Google Business Profile reviews. Still highly important, still very important. But ChatGPT is looking at more. They're looking at Yelp, they're looking at Avo, they're looking at Fine Law, they're looking at all these different platforms, uh, and they're considering into one. It makes sense why Google's mainly looking at Google Business Profile because they own that, right? That's an asset that they own. But with ChatGPT, it's looking at all these different things because the more reviews you have from the more platforms, the more credible you are, the more of an authority that you are, uh, and the better that your reputation is. And honestly, like where these platforms are really looking is they're really looking to build like trust and reputation scores. Uh, and reviews, press mentions, citations like that are a very, very important and powerful way for them to do that. Another one is just content, right? So this it's a bit of a double-edged sword because it's like you still have to build content on your website, but you're only building content not really for visibility and traffic anymore. You're building it more as kind of like a check on the box as a as a means to show that you are an authority on a subject. So it's tricky because of the resource allocation and the investment that it does take in order to do this, right? We're talking about creating blog, resource, video, podcast content, not necessarily for views, but almost more as a as credibility. If you have nothing on your website, if you have no content, why would these platforms want to show you as an authority on complex legal situations? It's just not gonna happen, right? It doesn't make sense. So it's tough because it's like what's the balance between how much to invest in terms of time and resource into creating content that two people are gonna see, or maybe no one's gonna see, but these search engines are using it to really build an understanding of your credibility. So it is still important, but it's not like a traffic getting tool anymore. It's much more of a trust brand. And also, too, I mean, it's good for people who come to your website, it's good for people who know you are, and people are gonna see it. I'm being a little bit facetious here. Um, but it's it's different. Like back in the day, we used to build blog content that would get thousands of views a month, and now it's like, yeah, it's you're not gonna get the views on that content anymore, but it's still an important part of the ecosystem, the process in order to get visibility, and that visibility is obviously worth a lot of money. And the final one is freshness, and this one's a little bit tricky. So, freshness meaning uh there's a lot of data and studies that show that 50% of content cited in AI answers is under 13 weeks old. And that's important, but it's also very tricky because it's like you have content on your website, you have videos, they're old. How do you keep them all updated while you're still trying to build more? This becomes more the complexity of building and managing a modern search practice because there's so much that needs to get done, but the tracking and the mechanisms have changed so much in terms of how we view and look at this stuff. But going through on a quarterly basis and making sure that content is not just fresh, being like, hey, we updated the page title or we like, you know, fixed the typo, but are all of the external links that you're using, are they still live? Are they still relevant? You know, you we're talking about legal things here. So are you linking and citing the right source? Is that up to date? Have laws changed, have things changed, right? If you're in the car extent space, it always surprises me how much laws are shifting and changing. I find out about this stuff through clients. They're like, oh man, like the state changed this and that. So we no longer want these types of cases anymore. I'm like, why are you talking about that? Right? Like, you should be talking about that. That should that should be something that should be on your website. You should be talking about the changing laws for consumers to know and understand this stuff. Um, so they're not calling you if they don't have a case, all these different things, but these platforms are looking at it too and being like, oh, you know, Stuart and Jones, LLC over there is is on top of this stuff. They're providing a ton of good legal information. We're gonna cite them more and more because they're using factual data that's real, up to date, and relevant. But again, this is not easy to do. So it's important that you do have a partner and agency who understands these things. It's not just about cranking out a ton of content anymore. Really, what it's about is putting together a content roadmap that says this is the breadth of the topic that you should have on your website. You should have these pillars, you should have these posts tackling these topics and subjects. Over the next year, we're gonna build these out. And then the following year, like if there's more stuff, we'll add to it for sure. But we're gonna start refreshing this stuff. We're gonna go through, we're gonna be constantly making sure that this content is up to date. We're gonna change the published date, we're gonna change internal links, we're gonna update everything that needs to be updated, make sure that these platforms are surfacing this in a relevant way. So, you know, like I don't want to oversimplify this into a checklist because it's much more complicated than that. We're talking about the most advanced AI algorithms that continue to evolve on a daily basis. But if I was gonna boil it down into one thing and where we're moving, it just in general, it's brand. And brand in the in the legal space is so hard to quantify. So many people think that it's I hear top of mind awareness, I hear billboards, I hear radio. Yes, yes, yes, all the above. But it's so much bigger than that. Uh, it's so, so, so much bigger than that. Your your brand, your authority is the sum of every review, every profile, every piece of content, every press mentioned, every attorney that you have, uh, every win that you have, every billboard, every campaign, everything. It's it's the sum of all those things. And it's really hard to measure and quantify input into something where in the past with marketing, it's been a bit more of a checklist base, right? Like, we've been able to attack an SEO campaign as a checklist, but now it's like this is bigger than that. Um, you need to be more involved and you need to be aware too. Like, it's good that you're hopefully you're still watching this video at this point because it's good that you know these things because most agencies are gonna come in with a checklist and you're gonna be like, dude, it's not working and be like, Yeah, well, we we did everything that we could and we got paid for it, so it's whatever, but it's earned over a long period of time, is what it is too. So, all these things are incredibly important. I know it's hard, but this is what it takes to run a successful marketing and advertising program in a law firm right now. So, if you're interested in learning more about this, I'd be happy to do an analysis on your law firm. You get to sit down and have a conversation with me. I have a wealth of knowledge on this stuff. I've got 15 years of experience working only with law firms. At least have a conversation with me. Let's see where it goes. There's a link below this video to do that. If not, like it subscribe, and I'll see you in the next video.