When ChatGPT Looks for a Lawyer, What Is It Really Looking For?
Imagine you're a Houston divorce attorney with years of experience handling complex cases. Your website looks great, your clients leave excellent reviews, and you're easy to find on Google.
Then someone asks ChatGPT:
"Can you recommend a Houston divorce attorney who can help protect my business during a divorce?"
ChatGPT recommends three firms. Yours isn't one of them.
Naturally, you'd want to know why. But the more interesting question might be: What did ChatGPT go looking for before it made those recommendations?
One Question Can Lead to Several Searches
When ChatGPT searches the web to answer a question, it can break the request into several related searches. This is sometimes called query fan-out.
In our divorce example, ChatGPT might look for attorneys experienced in business valuations, complex property division, high-asset divorces, or protecting business ownership during divorce proceedings.
The client asked one question, but ChatGPT may have investigated several different aspects of the problem before suggesting anyone.
Now imagine your firm has extensive experience protecting business owners during divorces, but your website describes that work simply as "family law."
Meanwhile, a competing firm has detailed information about business valuations and complex property division.
Could that difference affect which firms ChatGPT discovers? Potentially. The available information gives the search system different ways to find and evaluate relevant candidates, although we can't determine exactly how it weighs that information.
Houston Research Reveals Another Surprise
A study by legal marketing agency Forward Push examined nearly 2,800 AI responses across 25 Houston legal practice areas.
The researchers found that the three most frequently mentioned firms in a typical practice area accounted for only about a third of recommendations. They also reported substantial differences between the firms appearing across AI platforms.
For smaller law firms, that's an intriguing finding. Recommendations aren't necessarily reserved for the biggest or best-known practices.
But the study also raises a question that a simple list of recommended firms cannot answer: What information was each AI assistant finding about those businesses along the way?
There's More to Monitor Than Who Gets Recommended
Most business owners could test their visibility by asking ChatGPT a few questions. They'd learn whether their firm appeared, but not necessarily what opportunities they were missing.
More sophisticated monitoring can provide additional clues. Depending on the AI platform and tools available, it's possible to examine or estimate related searches, identify frequently referenced websites and directories, and track which competitors appear across different customer questions.
Imagine discovering that questions about business valuations repeatedly lead to competing law firms, while your own firm rarely appears. You might investigate whether your website adequately explains that service or whether relevant professional directories accurately describe your expertise.
That gives you somewhere useful to focus your attention.
It doesn't guarantee that changing a webpage will earn you a ChatGPT recommendation. But it provides a more informed starting point than simply guessing which marketing improvements might help.
The practical approach is to monitor what prospective clients are asking, identify gaps worth addressing, make focused improvements, and monitor again.
And the next time ChatGPT recommends a competitor, you may have a better question to ask than why your firm wasn't on the list.
What was ChatGPT looking for that it didn't find about yours?