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Ask an answer engine what happens when a spouse refuses to sign divorce papers and it will credit law firm websites. Ask the same question with a state named and it credits a different set of law firm websites. Neither answer credits a court. That is the good news, and it is narrower than it […]

Two procedural immigration questions, both with a federal answer on the record. One sends its citations to the agency and none to a law firm. The other sends several to firms, including the filing fee the government sets. What separates them is not the agency and not the page format, and it decides which immigration FAQ pages are worth building.

Law firms are being pitched AI SEO, AEO, AIO and GEO with no clear answer on what any of it costs or whether it differs from what the firm already pays for. The ranges below are the ranges being quoted. That is a smaller claim than it looks, and it is the honest one. No […]

Bankruptcy is the one practice area where winning an answer engine turns a firm’s page into a regulated advertisement. The fee and payment questions go to law firm pages. The procedural ones go to the Department of Justice and the federal courts. And the paid slots above both belong to a debt relief industry selling the alternative. What the cited firm pages share, and what almost none of them gets exactly right, is a sentence federal law writes out in full.

Personal injury firms have bought recommendations for decades, and the newest source of them cannot be bought at all. Ask an answer engine to name the best lawyer in a city and a paid placement sits inside the response. Ask it a question about the law and the answer comes from firm pages, with no advertisement anywhere in it. The firms named in the second answer paid nobody, and ABA Model Rule 7.2 explains why that matters more than it sounds.

A proposal for answer engine optimisation arrives and there is no honest way for a law firm to test a sentence in it, because every source the buyer could check is written by somebody selling the same service. There is one disinterested source. Google’s guidance on its generative features addresses three of the deliverables sold most often, by name, and says none of them is required. Here is how to hold a proposal next to the documentation.

An employment firm writing FAQ content is competing with a federal agency that publishes the same format on the same questions, at addresses whose slugs read questions and answers. On the topics the EEOC has covered that way, firm websites are absent from the result. On the topics it has not, including wrongful termination, firm pages take the citations and paid placements appear alongside them. The brief is whatever the agency left open.

An AEO content audit on a law firm website does not find a technical problem. It finds a question clients are asking, an answer engine already answering it, and no page on the firm’s site that answers it. The clearest version shows up on cost: the firms an engine names have a page whose whole subject is the cost, and the firms it does not name have the word affordable on a homepage with nothing behind it. An adjective is not an answer.

A local AEO and GEO strategy turns on one distinction most law firms have never had to make. Ask an answer engine for a lawyer in your city and it reaches for homepages. Ask it how long someone in your state has to file a claim and it reaches for the one page on a firm’s site that answers that question. Both are your website, only one can be cited for anything specific, and most firms have built only the first.

Answer engines do not hand every bankruptcy question to law firms. Some go to the federal courts, some to financial publishers, some to video, and a specific handful go to firm websites. The cited page is almost always one whose web address repeats the client’s question back, and the question firm sites rarely win is the one about how to find a lawyer at all. Bankruptcy AEO is mostly a matter of knowing which questions are available and writing a page for each one.