You’re a law firm.
You invested in SEO & LinkedIn.
AI will now decide if that work
pays off—or gets buried.
VERDICT AEO
Searches may start with a referral, LinkedIn connection, or Google search… but increasingly, they end with an AI query.
“Who’s the best at civil litigation in Denver?”
“I was referred to Finch, Woods, & Gambini for criminal defense representation. Are they good?”
“Is there a lawyer in Miami who specializes in forfeitures for non-citizens?”
AI won’t say who’s “best,” but it will provide a recommended short list based on queries like these—including when asked about a specific referral someone’s already received.
Do this: open ChatGPT and search “best [your primary practice area] attorney in [your city].” The results are what your potential clients are seeing. Whether they’re searching on their own or getting a second opinion on a friend’s referral, this is the information they’re using to make their decision. How do you show up? Who’s being recommended instead of you?
WHY THIS EXISTS
I run marketing teams, my father’s an attorney. We compared notes.
When my dad asked me to look at what his marketing agency was delivering for SEO, what I found was a basic Excel spreadsheet with monthly total clicks and a separate keyword list. Nothing that connected to a single case or answered the most important question: what business came from this?
The agency added “AI search” to its service menu in 2024 but their “free” audit was just a slightly dressed up SEO audit.
We’re building Verdict to do attorney AEO correctly.
The only service Verdict offers right now is an AEO audit. No upsells, no retainer bloat. Just a clear picture of what it will take to get your firm surfaced in AI search results.
You can take our report and hand it to your marketing agency or team. It’s the blueprint for what they should do next—and how to measure it.
AI is coming for referrals faster than for actual legal work.
Forty-two percent of people consult AI on legal matters before talking with an attorney, yet still want a human giving them legal advice—but make no mistake: choosing a lawyer is a purchasing decision, not a legal one.
In the realm of marketing, people already trust AI recommendations over those from family and friends by nearly a 2:1 margin (at least for consumer purchases). With about 60% of people researching legal referrals online, this is a trend worth watching.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the practice of structuring your online presence so AI systems cite your firm when answering questions about law firms in your market. AI marketing overlaps with but is distinct from traditional SEO marketing.
And because of how it works, AI can make or break your investments in Google, LinkedIn, and other channels.
The attorneys who take control of their AI presence in the next 12 months will be hard to displace. The ones who wait will be playing catch-up against competitors who have created a self-reinforcing marketing wall.
of legal queries now trigger a Google AI Overview above all the blue links (seranking.com)
legal consumers already uses AI to research attorneys before contacting one (americanbar.com)
WHAT WE DO
We create AEO audits you can give to your existing partners. No upsell.
A VerdictAEO audit becomes the statement of work or accountability document for your agency or marketing team. Use it to add AI-related initiatives to your marketing mix with confidence. Then, use it to help your content-creating attorneys hone their online presence and get better leverage from their LinkedIn posts, articles, and PR placements. This professional diagnostic will show you how to prioritize the optimizations that will get your attorneys cited where clients are searching.
It is not a loss-leader or marketing tool. It’s the one audit you need, focused on what moves the needle in 2026. Scope scales with your firm’s size and complexity.
PRICING
| Component | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Base audit | $15,000 | 3 practice areas · 1 market · up to 10 attorneys |
| Additional market | $5,000 each | Each city or metro region, defined at engagement |
| Additional practice areas | $1,500 / 3 areas | Per market — billed separately per market |
| Additional attorneys | $5,000 / 10 | Each attorney's bio, schema, entity authority, and citation presence reviewed individually |
WHAT THE AUDIT COVERS
AI visibility snapshot: are you cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews for your primary practice areas and markets—and if not, who is?
Competitive gap: what the firms showing up instead of you are doing differently, and why AI platforms are citing them.
Google Business Profile health: completeness, review velocity, citation consistency across legal directories.
On-site AEO readiness: schema markup, FAQ structure, content question-coverage, E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals on attorney bio pages.
Priority fix list: ranked by impact, with anticipated timing for when to expect impact.
Not sure where your firm falls? Email jason @ jasonseiden . com with your number of attorneys, markets, and practice areas for an estimate.
FAQ
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. It's the practice of structuring your website, content, and online presence so that AI systems (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overview, and Gemini) cite your firm when someone asks for a recommendation.
The way people find attorneys changed. Potential clients no longer just scroll ten blue links and pick one. They ask AI systems who to call and the attorneys who get cited in those answers get the calls. The ones who don't, don't—regardless of how much they're spending on traditional SEO or Google Ads.
An AEO audit establishes where you actually stand: are you showing up in those answers, who's showing up instead of you, and what's driving the gap. It's the honest starting point before any optimization work begins.
Three things. First, you'll know exactly where you stand. This is more than a health score or dashboard. It's a clear answer to whether you're being cited in AI search for your practice areas and core markets, and if not, why not.
Second, you'll have a prioritized, actionable fix list. The audit ranks issues by impact, so if you're going to do anything, you'll know what to do first. This is literally the statement of work and accountability document for your agency or marketing team.
Because free audits aren't real audits. They're sales tools—automated crawls dressed up as analysis, designed to surface enough problems to justify a pitch. You've probably seen one.
The Verdict audit is a professional diagnostic. In addition to the technical crawl, we run actual queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overview for your specific practice areas and cities. We also map your content against the questions your potential clients are actually asking AI systems, compare you to specific competitors who are showing up instead of you, and review your profile across 3rd party directories. We then synthesize these findings into a document that tells you how AI perceives you and what exactly is driving the gap between where you are and where you need to be to get cited and/or recommended.
This work takes hours and expertise. Against the value of a single signed case, it's a rounding error. Against the cost of continuing to pay for marketing that won’t deliver because it’s invisible to AI platforms, it's overdue.
SEMrush is a tool—and a good one. We use it ourselves. What it produces is a technical readiness score: it can tell you whether AI crawlers can access your site, whether your schema is valid, whether your pages load quickly. What it can't tell you is why (or why not) one of your attorneys is being recommended when someone asks ChatGPT who to call.
As for what your current agency provides: ask them how many cases came from your marketing last year. If they can answer that question with a number you can verify, they're doing good work. If they send you a report with green arrows and traffic graphs, you already know the answer.
It depends on what we find and what you decide to do about it. The audit tells you what's driving the gap. It doesn't obligate you to fix anything.
Some findings are quick: a missing schema block, a GBP category set to the wrong value, a directory listing with an inconsistent phone number. Those your current web team can often fix in an afternoon at no additional cost.
Structural gaps such as missing FAQ content, attorney entity schemas, or practice area pages built for AI citation, require ongoing content and technical work.
If the audit shows your situation is solid, we'll tell you that. The audit is designed to tell you the truth, not to generate follow-on work.
Honestly: if your AEO foundation is currently weak (missing schema, no AI citation presence, thin content, inconsistent directory listings) and you fix it consistently over ~12 months, yes. Organic leads from well-executed AEO convert to signed retainers at consitently higher rates that traditional search (Pioneerly). People who find you through AI answers have already pre-qualified themselves and have received an actual AI recommendation along with your firm's name.
Industry data puts law firm SEO ROI at 526% over three years when executed with discipline. AEO compounds on top of that: the authority you build to get cited in AI answers is the same authority that improves your Google rankings. You're not choosing between them.
What we won't do is promise you a specific number of cases. Anyone who does is guessing. What we can promise is that if potential clients are asking AI systems for an attorney in your practice area and city, and you're not showing up, that's a solvable problem — and the audit tells you how big the problem currently is.
Request the audit. Know where you stand.
You’ll get 15-20 page report within 5 business days, showing you your current AI visibility, which competitors are outperforming you, what you can do to improve your position, and a prioritized improvement roadmap that tells you exactly what to do next and what to expect from each action.
Verdict AEO is an offering of Jason Seiden.