Answer engine optimisation
AEO for solicitors: the client has asked an AI four questions before they ask you one
A house sale, a separation, an estate: the first questions are now put to ChatGPT, Google's AI or Perplexity, weeks before a firm is contacted. Whether a solicitor is needed, what it costs, how long it takes, how to check a firm is regulated, and finally who to instruct. Each answer is assembled from what the engines can find, and the last one contains names. AEO is the work of being one of those names, and for a law firm most of it is doing the Transparency Rules properly and making sure the record agrees everywhere the engines read.
- ChatGPT
- Google AI Overviews
- Google AI Mode
- Gemini
- Perplexity
- Microsoft Copilot
- Claude
Every one of them answers from a search index, Bing behind ChatGPT and Copilot, Google behind the rest, so there is no separate door to knock on. Get the record right in both indexes and the answers follow.
A client's month
Four questions in the order they are asked, and who gets named at the end
Week 1
"Do I need a solicitor to sell a flat?"
The engine answers from firms whose conveyancing pages explain the process plainly, and names them as sources.
Week 2
"How much does conveyancing cost in 2026?"
The Transparency Rules mean a compliant firm has already published the answer. The engine quotes the pages where the figure is in plain text and skips 'contact us for a quote'.
Week 3
"How do I check a solicitor is regulated?"
SRA number, the badge, the Law Society record, dated reviews. The firm that shows all four together is used as the example.
Week 4
"Recommend a conveyancing solicitor near Chester."
Two or three firms, one sentence each, and the sources: the office profile, the reviews, the firm's own fee page.
What the engines read
Six sources, where each lives, and what we do to each
| Source | Where it lives | The monthly work |
|---|---|---|
| Office profiles | Google and Bing | Categories per practice, the published fees as services, photographs of the office, reviews with the work named. One profile per office, kept identical to the site. |
| Practice and fee pages | Your site | The process, the stages, the cost or its basis, the person, in the first paragraphs. The transparency pages written to be read are the pages the engines quote. |
| The registers | Law Society, SRA | Find a Solicitor and the SRA record, with the firm's name, address and offices matching the site exactly. |
| Review sites | Google, ReviewSolicitors | Reviews that mention the kind of matter and the office, answered within a day, without discussing the matter. |
| Structured data and llms.txt | Your site | LegalService, Attorney, Service and FAQ markup, and a file that tells crawlers where the practice pages are. Crawler access checked monthly. |
| Local mentions | Press, directories | The local paper when there is a story, the chamber of commerce, the accreditation bodies. Sources the engines already trust. |
Then the check: each month we put the firm's prompts to every engine, note which firms are named and what is cited, and put it in the report next to the Search Console figures. This site scores 100 on the AI-readiness check in Quence, our free audit tool; a firm's takes a minute.
Worth it this year?
Fewer enquiries than the map, better prepared, and almost no one competing yet
Referral and the office profile still bring most of a firm's work. The AI answers send a different client: one who has read the process and the cost before ringing, at the start of a matter, and who arrives having already chosen. The volume is modest today and growing each quarter, and few firms have done anything about it. The cost is nothing extra: it is inside every tier on the pricing page, because the pages, the markup and the mentions are the same work done with the engines in mind.
Questions firms ask us
Do clients really put these questions to an AI?
About the process, the cost and the time limits, yes, and increasingly they ask for names. It is still a smaller channel than referral and the map, but it reaches the client at the very start of a matter, and firms named at that point are the firms instructed later. The same work lifts the ordinary rankings, so none of it is wasted.
Is AEO a different service from SEO?
It is the same foundations with a different finish. Roughly two thirds of the work is the SEO done properly; the rest is writing pages clearly enough to be quoted and being cited by the sources the engines trust. It sits inside every tier; there is no separate charge.
Will you guarantee the firm is recommended?
No. The engines decide and they change. What we do is put the firm in every source they read, write the pages they quote, and record each month which prompts name the firm and which do not.
Does the transparency information really matter for this?
It is the single most quotable thing a firm publishes. A cost question is answered from pages that state the cost. Firms that hide the fee in a PDF are invisible to that question; firms that publish it as a page are the answer.
How is it measured?
A monthly prompt check run by a person and written down; referral visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and the rest in Analytics; and the AI-readiness score in Quence, our free audit tool.
Ask us what the engines say about the firm today
Send the firm's name and the town. We put a client's four questions to the engines, record who is named and what is cited, and send it with the quote.