How Law Firms Get Recommended in AI Search: Key Takeaways

AI search now recommends law firms by name, and the firms it picks are not always the biggest ones. That was the big message from a November 6, 2026 webinar hosted by Hennessey Digital. Jason Hennessey was joined by Dan Hinckley and Clara Sherman from Herringbone Labs to walk through original research on how Google's AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT decide which firms to recommend.

I sat in on it, and it was one of the more useful hours I've spent on AI visibility this year. Here's what stood out.

How the Study Worked

The team asked AI the same personal injury questions 50 times in each of the 50 largest US metro areas. That's because one AI answer tells you very little. Ask the same question three times and you can get three different lists of firms.

Across all their work, they prompted AI more than 8,000 times. Each run was logged for the follow-up searches the AI ran, the sources it cited and every firm it named, in order. Answers were also checked against what the firms actually say on their own websites.

Two terms come up a lot in their findings:

• Locked firm: a firm that shows up in 80% or more of a city's answers
• Open market: a city where no firm has locked down that spot yet

Key Findings

AI recommends firms even when nobody asks for one

About 18% of the time, a purely informational question still got a law firm recommendation. Someone asks "do I need a lawyer after a car accident?" and a firm gets named anyway. So helpful informational content is still worth writing, because it can be the reason a firm gets recommended.

AI asks its own follow-up questions first

Before answering, AI runs a "query fan-out," which is a batch of extra searches, often around six of them. For personal injury, seven topics came up almost every time:

1. Ratings and rankings
2. How to choose a lawyer
3. Settlements and case results
4. Specialties and practice areas
5. Fees and consultation costs
6. Firm size and reputation
7. Directories and referrals

If your site covers these topics, you're more likely to be in the results AI pulls from.

AI is more consistent than you'd think

49 of 50 cities had at least one locked firm, and the average city had three. Portland was the only city with no locked firm at all, which makes it a wide-open market.

The top three spots are where the business is

Where a firm ranks inside AI answers made a huge difference in how often it showed up:

After third place it falls off a cliff, so the goal is to be one of the top three firms AI names in your market.

National TV brands don't win

The team expected the big advertisers to dominate. They didn't. National TV brands showed up sometimes but never held the top three spots in any city. Strong regional firms did, and even single-market firms beat the national names on their home turf.

Firm name beats attorney name, mostly

AI usually recommended the firm. It named individual attorneys when that person was very well known for a specialty.

What AI Says When It Recommends a Firm

AI always explains why it picked a firm. For personal injury, the reasons were very consistent:

• No fee unless you win: mentioned almost every time
• Free consultation: about three out of four times
• An award or directory badge: about three out of four times
• Case results or years of experience: about half the time

All of these can go right on your website. The team saw the same pattern when they repeated the study with dentists. Dental practices with all four key signals were recommended about 31% of the time, which is nearly three times more than practices with zero or one signal.

AI Gets Firm Details Wrong About One in Four Times

This one should worry every firm owner. About 27% of Google AI Overview answers and 20% of ChatGPT answers had something wrong about the firm. The main cause was vague websites. When a site left out a detail, AI often just made one up.

A few real examples from the study:

• One firm said you could "schedule a consultation" and AI told people it was free
• Another firm said nothing about cost and AI said it did not offer free consultations
• Of 59 businesses with no hours on their website, 46 had their Google Business Profile set to 24 hours, and that's what AI repeated

Google and ChatGPT Look in Different Places

Both platforms also looked for local sources. In San Francisco that meant local news and the bar association, while New York leaned on court data. Every city had its own mix.

What reviews really do

Good Google reviews are the price of entry, not the thing that sets you apart. The team didn't see firms below a 4.5 star rating get recommended. Above that, review count and how recent the reviews are matter a lot. A firm with ten 5-star reviews can still lose to a competitor with hundreds of fresh ones.

One easy tip from the Q&A: reviews that mention a staff member by name are more likely to get filtered out on Yelp.

AI Reads Your Site One Paragraph at a Time

Traditional SEO thinks about whole pages. AI works smaller than that. It may look at 100 pages at once, so it pulls out single passages and stitches them together into an answer.

That means the proof needs to sit together in the same passage. For a search like "best personal injury lawyer in [city]," AI is looking for a few things side by side:

• Awards, rankings and credentials
• Verdicts and settlements for that specific case type (car accident results for car accident pages, not one big firm-wide total)
• Clear signs you're a law firm and the kinds of clients you serve
• The city and state you serve

Passages that covered all of these got recommended much more often. When the team moved a missing results section into the right paragraph on a page, that firm's recommendation rate went up. It's one of the few levers here that's fully in your control, and it can be done with content you already have.

Old content matters too. Pages that cite outdated statutes or old rules send the wrong trust signal, so a legal accuracy review of older pages is worth the time.

What Law Firms Should Do Now

Here's a short checklist based on what the research showed:

1. Check your Google Business Profile hours today. Make sure they match your website.
2. Say what a consultation costs. If you offer "24/7" phone answering, be clear it's the phones and not the office.
3. Use one version of your hours and details everywhere. Website, Google, Yelp, directories.
4. Claim and complete your Google, Yelp, Super Lawyers and Justia profiles. Keep them accurate.
5. Cover the seven fan-out topics on your site. Ratings, how to choose, results, specialties, fees, firm size, directories.
6. Put the proof on the page. Fee terms, awards and case results by case type.
7. Close the gaps on your money pages. Keep credentials, results and location together in the same passages.
8. Find the local sources AI uses in your city. Local news, bar associations and regional awards.
9. Ask new clients how they found you. Add "AI tools" as an option on intake forms and calls.
10. Test more than once. One AI answer isn't a result. Check the same prompts many times a month.

SEO Is Still the Foundation

In all 8,000+ prompts, the first thing AI did was run a search. If you're not in the search results, you can't be in the answer. Good SEO is still the base everything else sits on, and AI optimization is the fine-tuning on top.

The firms that win in AI search aren't the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They're the ones with clear, accurate and complete information in the places AI looks.

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