There’s no such thing as getting recommended by AI.
There are four systems that answer the question differently, and when we asked them all for the best criminal defense lawyer in Phoenix on the same afternoon, ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode came back with two lists that had nobody on them in common. Not one overlapping name.
So we stopped reading the answers and started reading the firms’ websites instead. That’s where criminal defense GEO across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini turns into something you can act on.
No criminal defense firm was named by all four AI engines in either city we tested, but every firm that three of them agreed on states a state bar board certification on its homepage.
Only one of those four firms displays an aggregate review count, so review volume is not what these engines are reading.
AI Citations vs AI Recommendations for Law Firms
Citation and recommendation aren’t the same problem, and criminal defense firms tend to solve only one.
An engine cites you when it needs a source for a legal question. It recommends you when someone asks for a lawyer and it has to produce names. What these engines cite on criminal defense questions follows rules that don’t carry over to who they’ll name.
InterCore Research found a directory cited first in 77.8% of answers across 540 legal queries in July, on one engine, using phrasing that asks for a list. It held up on ChatGPT when we checked. It fell apart on Google.
Why No Criminal Defense Firm Made All Four Lists
Across Phoenix and Houston, on four engines each, the number of criminal defense firms named by all four was zero.
Four firms turned up on three of the four Phoenix lists. Two did in Houston. Nothing cleared all four, which is the first thing an AI search audit tends to surface.
That’s the finding a criminal defense firm should sit with before buying anything. Being the top result in one engine tells you almost nothing about the other three.
What the Four Most-Cited Criminal Defense Firms Share
Four criminal defense firms were named by three engines out of four: DM Cantor and Gurion Legal in Phoenix, DeGuerin & Dickson and Neal Davis Law Firm in Houston. Two states, one pattern.
We opened all four and checked the same seven things. Five showed up every time: a state bar board certification on the homepage with a badge, named attorneys with profile pages, practice areas split by charge type across dedicated pages, an FAQ, and the county named rather than just the city.
The sixth is interesting for being absent. Only DM Cantor shows an aggregate review count. The other three run individual testimonials and no total, which is awkward for the large part of this category selling review volume as an AI visibility lever.
Two of the four don’t just claim the certification, they price its scarcity. DM Cantor says no firm in Arizona has more board certified attorneys. Gurion Legal says fewer than a hundred attorneys in the state hold it.
Why Board Certification Beats Review Count
Here’s the mechanism, because a correlation without one isn’t worth acting on.
Board certification is the only claim on a criminal defense homepage that somebody else publishes. The State Bar of Arizona runs a public search of board certified attorneys with criminal law among the ten areas listed. The Texas Board of Legal Specialization does the same. Anyone can check in about forty seconds, and no amount of money moves you onto either list.
Everything else on that page is the firm’s word for itself. Years of experience, trial record, results, awards from properties that sell awards. An engine repeating any of it is repeating marketing copy and carries the risk of being wrong, which is the same reason outside verification does more for a law firm page than adjectives do.
Repeat a board certification and the worst case is that you’re accurate. That asymmetry is doing the work, and it sits comfortably inside what attorney advertising rules already allow you to claim.
The Criminal Defense Firms No Engine Named
A correlation among winners proves very little on its own, so we pulled four criminal defense firms that rank on page one for the same terms and were named by no engine at all.
Named attorneys, charge-type breakdowns, FAQ sections: nearly all of them had all of it. Those aren’t differentiators, they’re table stakes, and any advice built on them is advice to match the field.
Board certification was the row that split the two groups. Four of four among the firms that got named. One of four among the firms that didn’t.
That one exception matters and we won’t bury it. Orent Law Offices in Phoenix carries the certification prominently, plus named attorneys, an FAQ, charge segmentation, the county twice and a 4.9 rating from 54 reviews. No engine named them. The credential looks necessary and it clearly isn’t sufficient, so treat it as the floor rather than the plan.
Why We Run Every Engine Twice
A single clean Denver session in August showed Perplexity matching cited firms to the searcher’s city. It looked solid enough to write up.
A second session from Chicago returned Ohio firms, California firms, and on one query a full relocation to Memphis. One run is a hypothesis. Two runs are a finding, and the pages we’d already published were updated the same week.
That’s why every sentence below names the engine and the conditions rather than describing how AI works in general. Engine behaviour moves, and a single session will tell you almost anything you want to hear.
How ChatGPT Picks Criminal Defense Firms
ChatGPT cited Super Lawyers in Phoenix, then Expertise.com, Best Law Firms and Super Lawyers in Houston. That’s the complete list.
It explains why its shortlists looked nothing like anyone else’s. If those properties don’t have you, ChatGPT effectively doesn’t either, which is the practical case for treating directories and content as one system rather than a choice.
One correction worth passing to whoever runs your site. OpenAI documents four separate crawlers. OAI-SearchBot surfaces sites in ChatGPT search; GPTBot handles training. Blocking GPTBot does not take you out of ChatGPT results, and a lot of firms have blocked it thinking it does.
The rest of getting a law firm into ChatGPT is less technical than that.
Claude Argues With Its Own Sources
“Most of the pages that answer this question are pay-to-play directories or law firms ranking themselves.”
Claude wrote that, unprompted, before naming a single Phoenix firm. Then it pointed out that two of the top results were firms’ own best-attorneys listicles with themselves on the list, named State Bar of Arizona certification as the filter that actually matters, and sent us to azbar.org to verify it.
In Houston it did the same to Expertise.com and OnToplist.
No other engine behaved this way. On Claude, a credential somebody else publishes beats directory presence, and leaning on directory rankings gets a firm marked down by the engine reading them.
Gemini, Google AI Mode and the Three-Slot Problem
Gemini agreed with Google AI Mode more than it agreed with anyone else. In Phoenix the two shared four names; Gemini and ChatGPT shared one.
Gemini also has the least room. Testing across 1,200 buyer-intent prompts by Attrifast, which sells AI citation tracking, put its median at 2.4 citations per answer against 3.1 for ChatGPT and 6.4 for Perplexity. Three slots. Fourth place is nowhere.
AI Mode was the only engine leading with firm websites in both cities. It’s also running ads above the organic names now, four sponsored firms on the Phoenix query alone. Factor that into how local AI search strategy gets costed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Do Criminal Defense Firms Appear in Some AI Engines and Not Others?
The engines read different sources. In our August 2026 audit ChatGPT cited only directories, Google AI Mode cited firm websites first, and Claude cited directories while telling readers to distrust them.
Does Claude Recommend Law Firms Differently From ChatGPT?
Yes. Claude named firms and then argued against its own sources in both cities tested, directing readers to state bar certification records instead of directory rankings. No other engine did this.
Is Board Certification Necessary for Criminal Defense GEO?
Four of four firms that three engines agreed on state it. One of four firms nobody named does. It looks necessary and clearly is not sufficient, on a sample of eight firms in two cities.
How Many Sources Does Gemini Cite Compared With Other Engines?
Independent testing across 1,200 prompts put Gemini’s median at 2.4 citations per answer, the lowest of four engines measured, against 3.1 for ChatGPT and 6.4 for Perplexity. Three slots leaves no room for fourth place.
Where Criminal Defense GEO Across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini Starts
Search your own firm name, then your city plus criminal defense lawyer, in all four engines. Takes twenty minutes. Write down which ones name you.
Then open your homepage and answer one question. Is there a credential on it a stranger could verify from a public record in under a minute? If not, fix that first, ahead of reviews and well ahead of schema.
The certification pages and charge-type coverage that change the answer are slower work, and that’s what our criminal defense content programs do for the 300-plus law firms across North America we’ve worked with. Book a strategy call and ask for the four-engine name check. We’re on 877-486-8123.
David Arato, JD is the founder of Lexicon Legal Content, an attorney-owned legal content marketing agency serving law firms since 2012. He built Lexicon a decade before any of these engines existed, and its research now tracks what they changed. David is a frequent contributor to Attorney at Law Magazine and Attorney at Work and a recurring guest on legal marketing podcasts.
