This article covers PR and visibility strategy only. It is not legal advice, and nothing here addresses attorney advertising rules, which vary by state bar and should be checked with counsel before any firm changes how it markets itself.
By showing up in the sources an AI answer engine actually pulls from when someone asks it to recommend a lawyer, not by ranking on Google alone. A 2026 consumer survey shows people are already asking ChatGPT and other AI tools that question in large numbers, and the share doing so is growing fast enough that a firm's AI visibility is no longer a future problem to plan for later.
Source: iLawyer Marketing's 2026 survey of 1,110 US adults, linked in the article.
How many people are actually asking AI to help them find a lawyer?
More than four in ten, and the number is moving quickly. iLawyer Marketing's 2026 survey of 1,110 US adults ages 18 to 65, which asked which sources people would use to research a lawyer for an important legal issue, found that ChatGPT use rose from 28.1% in 2025 to 41.9% in 2026. That continues a trend the same research series has tracked since 2023, when ChatGPT use for this purpose sat at 9%: 21% in 2024, 28% in 2025, and 41.9% in 2026. Over the same single year, Google use for attorney research fell from 86.7% to 71.9%, a 14.8-point drop, while Yelp fell from 24.3% to 13.6% and Reddit fell from 20.1% to 11.7%.
Taken together, 50.1% of respondents said they would use at least one AI answer engine, meaning ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or Grok, to research attorneys. Of those, 15.5% said they would use an AI engine but skip Google entirely, and 9.5% said they would rely on AI sources only. Google remains the single most-used source. It is no longer the only one that matters.
Does trust in AI's legal answers actually hold up?
Not fully, but it is high enough to change behavior. In the same survey, 53.5% of respondents said they trust AI more than they did a year ago, against 16.4% who trust it less. Asked directly whether they would trust an AI to give accurate, legally sound information, 47% agreed and 29% disagreed. That gap between "trust has grown" and "I'd actually rely on it for legal accuracy" is exactly where a law firm's own visible, verifiable information matters, since it is the material an AI system has to draw on when a user pushes past a simple answer.
There is also a quieter shift inside the data. Last year, 94% of people who used ChatGPT to research attorneys said they would also check Google to validate what it told them. This year, that fell to just over 70%. Fewer people are double-checking the AI's answer, which raises the cost of being described inaccurately, and raises the value of making sure the accurate version is what gets surfaced in the first place.
Does age change how someone searches for a lawyer with AI?
Sharply, and not in the direction many firms assume. The iLawyer data breaks ChatGPT use for attorney research down by age: 35% among 18 to 29 year olds, rising to 46% for 30 to 44, peaking at 57% for 45 to 60 year olds, then falling to 16% for 60 and older. Willingness to use AI more broadly to research which law firm to hire follows the same pattern: 48%, 62%, 76%, then 38% across those same age bands. The common assumption that AI-assisted research is mostly a younger-client behavior does not hold here. The 45 to 60 group, which includes a large share of a typical firm's highest-value clients in categories like estate planning, business law and family law, is the most likely to be asking an AI assistant first.
Does ranking well on Google still matter if people are moving to AI?
Yes, more than most firms would guess. A separate analysis by Hoverboard AI, which examined 102,000 AI responses across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Grok, found that a brand's Google ranking still correlates directly with how often AI systems mention it. Across every platform tested, a result ranking first on Google got mentioned in a meaningfully higher share of AI answers than one ranking tenth, roughly 5 to 7 percentage points higher between rank one and rank three alone, with Google AI Overviews mentioning the top-ranked result 49.0% of the time versus 41.2% for the tenth-ranked one.
That finding matters because it closes off a tempting but wrong conclusion: that a firm can treat AI visibility and search ranking as separate projects, or deprioritize one for the other. SEO and AI citations are not the same discipline, but they are not unrelated either, and a firm that lets its organic ranking slide while chasing AI visibility is working against its own data.
What should a law firm actually do with this?
Treat AI-assisted legal research the way the data says consumers are already treating it: as a parallel channel running alongside Google, not a replacement for it, and one that leans on the same inputs AI systems trust elsewhere. That means earned coverage from legal and local press, which AI systems weight heavily because it exists independently of the firm describing itself. It means a bio, practice-area and results page clear enough that an assistant can lift an accurate summary from it rather than guessing. And it means knowing which sources a given platform actually pulls from, since the iLawyer data itself shows meaningful differences across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity in how much people trust and use each one for this exact question.
This is a different problem from the one covered by the hallucination risk inside legal AI tools, which is about an AI system getting a case citation wrong inside a legal document. This is about whether a prospective client searching for a lawyer sees your firm named accurately, or not named at all, when they ask an assistant instead of typing into a search box. Both are real risks. They require different fixes.
The direct answer, for anyone who read this far
A law firm's AI visibility now rests on the same two things it always has, being accurately described in sources an outside system trusts, and being easy to find through ordinary search, because the data shows those two channels reinforcing each other rather than competing. The firms losing ground here are not the ones ignoring AI. They are the ones assuming their Google ranking alone still tells the whole story. If you want help checking what ChatGPT, Gemini and the rest currently say about your firm, get in touch.
