Is AI search different from SEO for a law firm?

Google: grounding and fan-out on the normal index

Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features, added on May 15, 2026, says AI Overviews and AI Mode use core ranking systems to pull relevant pages from the Search index, then write a response with links to the pages that support it. Google calls this retrieval-augmented generation, or grounding.

It also describes query fan-out: the model runs several related searches at the same time. A question about contesting a will might fan out into searches about deadlines, capacity and court costs, so a firm that has answered those neighboring questions has more ways in.

Google on "AEO" and "GEO"

Google names both terms in that guide and says that, from its side, the work is still SEO. It sends anyone weighing outside AEO or GEO services to its page on evaluating third-party SEO advice, which tells you how Google thinks about the label.

Bing: two goals, one set of guidelines

Bing's Webmaster Guidelines define SEO as improving a site's technical quality, clarity and accessibility, and Generative Engine Optimization as making content eligible for grounding and reference in AI responses. The same page says SEO doesn't promise rankings and GEO doesn't promise citations.

Those guidelines cover Bing search and Copilot together. For a law firm, the Microsoft side is one set of rules, not two.

The answer names a few firms, not ten links

A results page lets a person compare. An AI answer usually picks a handful and explains why. Being fifth on page one still earns some clicks; being sixth in a list the AI trimmed to three earns nothing.

Other people's pages carry more of the weight

For local lawyer questions, AI answers often cite legal directories, review sites and bar listings next to firm websites, or instead of them. Your site is still the source you control, but the picture the AI forms comes from everything it finds. Our guide on which sites AI tools use when they recommend a lawyer goes through them.

Bing counts for more than it used to

Copilot's answers are grounded in web search results, and Bing's guidelines cover Copilot. OpenAI's help page also points to Microsoft's privacy statement when it explains which search providers ChatGPT sends queries to.

A firm that only ever set up Google can rank well there and be thin everywhere Microsoft's index feeds. Our Copilot guide covers the Bing setup.

A new decision about AI crawlers

SEO only asked whether search engines could crawl you. Now there are training crawlers like GPTBot and Google-Extended, and search crawlers like OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, each with its own robots.txt setting. Blocking the wrong one removes the firm from an answer while its rankings stay where they were.

Visibility without a click

Bing's guidelines say content can surface as impressions, citations or grounding references in Copilot without a click, and that a drop in clicks doesn't always mean a loss of visibility. People read the answer, then search the firm's name or call. Tracking that takes different tools, which our guide to measuring AI search traffic covers.

Google also warns about third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use internal Google metrics, and says no outside tool has access to its ranking or AI systems. That's a fair test for any AI search pitch, ours included: ask which official page supports each step.

The llms.txt question comes up often enough that we wrote it up separately in does a law firm need an llms.txt file.

A family law client of ours now shows up first in ChatGPT, which over the last three months has added 50 to 100 calls a month, and the firm is signing a lot of them. Another client moved from family law into estate planning, and prospective clients started finding it inside ChatGPT and similar tools while we built the new reputation.

Neither result came from a trick SEO lacked. Both came from the overlap: crawlable pages that answer specific questions, plus listings, reviews and Bing set up to agree. A new business and labor law firm took the patient route, with six months of credibility work everywhere a prospect might look.

When we audit a law firm site, the problems we find most are plain SEO problems: made-up addresses that return the home page instead of a real "page not found", a missing sitemap, practice pages with barely any links between them. Fixing those helps Google's regular results and every AI tool that reads an index, at once. That's why we fold the work into AI search instead of selling it as its own line.