Ask Google’s AI Mode to name the best immigration lawyer and it hands back eight firms, grouped by case type, each one cited. Ask it the same question in Spanish and it names nobody.
It routes the reader to AILA, the state bars and the Department of Justice instead, then warns that notarios públicos are not attorneys. Same engine, same signed-out session, minutes apart, and not one source appears in both answers. At Lexicon Legal Content we spent August running immigration competitors in AEO and GEO through paired English and Spanish queries, and this is the split nobody has published.
Findings below come from eight queries run through Google AI Mode and Perplexity on 20 August 2026.
The immigration firms winning the English AI answer are largely absent from the Spanish one, because the engines build the two answers from source pools that share no domains.
Google AI Mode named eight firms in English and none in Spanish, on the same question, in the same session.
The English and Spanish Answers Share No Sources at All
The English and Spanish answers to the same immigration question share no source domains. The English shortlist ran on Best Lawyers, BCG Attorney Search, Justia and seven firm websites. The Spanish answer ran on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, with USCIS and AILA carrying the authority.
Those are two separate pools of the internet. A Best Lawyers listing buys visibility in exactly one of them, and no translation plugin reaches the other.
Two Languages, Two Price Lists for the Same Filing
AI engines quote different immigration legal fees depending on the language of the question. Google AI Mode puts standard flat fees at $1,500 to $7,500 in English and a full case at $1,500 to $15,000 in Spanish.
Perplexity splits harder. It prices naturalization at $2,500 to $4,000 in English, citing the FTC and Modern Law Group, and at $500 to $3,000 in Spanish, citing abogado.com and a different firm.
A prospective client already knows what the work costs before anyone answers the phone, and what they were told depends on the language they searched in.
Immigration Is Federal, and AI Engines Still Answer It Locally
Immigration practice is federal, and the engines localize it anyway. Under 8 CFR 1001.1(f), an attorney is anyone in good standing before the bar of the highest court of any state, territory or commonwealth, or of the District of Columbia. Admission in the client’s state is not required.
A query containing no city returned Chicago firms on both runs, and the second said so outright, offering the strongest options in the user’s current area. Chicago was the IP city. Even immigration court procedure, identical in every state, came back citing Illinois Legal Aid.
Every Study of Immigration AI Visibility Asks in English
Published research on immigration AI visibility measures city, not language. InterCore’s law firm AI visibility study ran 540 queries through Perplexity Sonar in July 2026, using three phrasings that all name a city and all ask in English. Immigration is one of its six practice areas with no breakout published, so none of its figures can honestly be quoted as an immigration number.
A Two-Year-Old Blog Post Outranked USCIS in the Answer
One firm’s 2024 blog post holds the lead citation on whether an out-of-state immigration lawyer can represent a client. Levin and Pangilinan PC, a San Francisco firm, takes that slot with a 2,000-word page under a single H2, no FAQ block, and no statute cited by name.
Perplexity, given the identical question, cited USCIS and AILA and named no firm, the same pattern that appeared when one firm owned an employment query outright on one engine. Modern Law Group led the fee answer on both engines, and its site publishes a flat-fee pricing page. Checkable claims get cited.
The Credentials AI Engines Repeat Come From Outside the Firm
AI engines repeat immigration credentials published by a third party, not the ones a firm writes about itself. A Houston query returned Business Profile entities with star ratings and a map, and five of six cited domains were firm websites with no directory leading, the same collapse the directory finding hit in family law.
Every trust signal there was a Google review score except one: Texas board certification in immigration and nationality law. The Spanish answers point the same way, routing to AILA, state bars and the DOJ list of accredited representatives under 8 CFR 1292.1. That is E-E-A-T in practice rather than in theory.
What Immigration Firms Should Change First
Immigration firms competing in AI search have three pieces of work, and none is a full site rebuild:
- Publish Spanish content as content. The Spanish answer draws from a separate source pool, and a firm with no Spanish pages is not in it, whatever its English rankings.
- Fix structured data. AISO Studio, which sells AI visibility auditing, audited 273 immigration websites in March 2026 and found 23 percent carrying none at all.
- Put one checkable claim on the page. A published fee schedule, a board certification, an EOIR recognition, a named attorney’s byline. Reputation adjectives were never quoted back.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does an immigration firm need Spanish content to appear in Spanish AI answers?
Spanish and English AI answers to the same immigration question shared no source domains, which indicates separate source pools. A firm with no Spanish content is not in the Spanish pool.
Can an immigration firm compete nationally in AI search?
Immigration firms can represent clients nationally under federal law, but AI engines still apply a location. A query with no city returned firms in the searcher’s IP city on both runs.
Do AI engines treat DOJ-accredited representatives as an alternative to a lawyer?
AI engines list DOJ-accredited representatives alongside attorneys. Asked who can help file a green card application, Google AI Mode named all three together, citing USCIS nine times and one law firm once.
How to Audit Your Immigration Competitors in AEO and GEO
Auditing immigration competitors in AEO and GEO takes one afternoon: run the questions clients type, in English and in Spanish, and record the domains inside the citation links rather than the names in the prose. What comes back is the list of pages standing where your firm should be.
Call 877-486-8123 and tell us which questions your clients ask, or see the content built to be quoted first. You can also contact us with the queries you want checked.
David Arato, JD is the founder of Lexicon Legal Content, an attorney-owned legal content marketing agency serving law firms since 2012. He has spent more than a decade arguing that legal content should be judged by whether a stranger in trouble can actually use it, which is a harder standard when the reader is working in a second language. David is a frequent contributor to Attorney at Law Magazine and Attorney at Work and a recurring guest on legal marketing podcasts.
