What does ChatGPT say about your firm?
Your clients are asking it. You have probably never checked.
When someone needs a solicitor now, a lot of them no longer start with Google. They ask ChatGPT, or Perplexity, or they read the AI answer sitting at the top of the search page.
They type something like:
And they get back a short, confident answer naming two or three firms.
If you are not one of them, you never find out. There is no missed call. Nothing appears in your figures. You were simply not mentioned, and the person went and rang somebody else.
This is not about how good your firm is
Ask these tools about your firm by name and they will often speak warmly about it. They have read your reviews. They know your accreditations. They will happily tell somebody you are worth a call.
Ask them the way a client asks, with no firm name in the question at all, and you can be missing from every single answer.
They think well of you. They just never bring you up. Those are two separate things, and only one of them decides whether a stranger ever hears your name.
Why that happens
These tools do not work like each other, and neither of them works like Google.
ChatGPT leans on a local listings card that sits above its answer, and that card appears to run on Google Business Profile data. Your star rating is not what decides it. In the first checks I have run, firms with almost identical ratings appeared or did not. What looked different was the number of reviews, the category the listing sits in, and how complete the profile is.
Perplexity barely touches that data. It reads specialist review and comparison sites instead. The firms it recommended had three things in common: prices published on their own website, accreditations named with the year they were awarded, and an entry on the comparison sites it happens to rely on.
So here is what turned up when I looked:
- Reviews sitting on a platform these tools do not read, while the one they do read is thinner
- Fewer reviews than comparable firms nearby, whatever the average score says
- A business listing sitting in a different category from competitors
- No prices published anywhere on the site
- Accreditations mentioned with no year attached
- No entry on the comparison sites these tools rely on
- A firm history told in a way that reads as contradictory
None of it is dramatic. All of it is the sort of thing that can be put right.
Fixing this is what I do for a living. Nobody is going to ring you to say you were left out of an answer, so if you want that changed, it starts with knowing where you stand.
That list is what I found, not a diagnosis of your firm. I would have no idea which of them applies to you, if any, until I checked.
The answers are not always right either
Asked where to find help after a death in the family, one of these tools answered with no search at all, purely from memory, and recommended a firm that was bought by a listed group four years ago and no longer trades under that name anywhere.
Somebody grieving was pointed at a firm that does not exist. That is the environment your clients are searching in, and it is why not being in these answers matters more than it looks.
What I do
I write five to eight questions your clients would actually ask, in the words they would actually use, and I put them to ChatGPT and Perplexity. Each one in a fresh conversation, so nothing carries over from the question before.
I write down what comes back, every firm named, in the order it named them. Then I ask the same questions again naming a firm down the road doing the same work as you.
Then I go and find out why there is a difference, and I check every fact I use against the source it came from.
What you get
One page. What I asked. What came back. What is wrong. And why.
In plain English, not marketing language. No sales call, nothing to sign, and no obligation of any kind. If you read it and do nothing, that is a perfectly reasonable outcome.
These tools never give the same answer twice, so what you get is a dated snapshot rather than a ranking. I will tell you exactly what I asked and when, so you can go and try it yourself.
Who is doing the checking
I am Maria, based in Leicester. I spent seven years running digital marketing for a Top 50 law firm, across ten offices, and eighteen years in digital marketing altogether. I know how law firms make decisions, and what actually gets read and what does not, because I worked inside one.
AI search is new for everybody, including me. I am not going to pretend I have ten years of experience in something that has existed for three. What I do have is the habit of going and looking properly rather than guessing, and telling you plainly what I find.
Send me your website and I will research it
Send me your firm’s name and your website address. I will reply to tell you when I can get to it, and you will get one page back by email. I will use your details for that and nothing else. No mailing list, no follow-up sequence, and I will not pass them to anybody.