More people now ask an AI assistant for a lawyer recommendation before they open a search results page. They type something like "who is a good DUI lawyer in my county" into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity, and they get a short answer with a few names. If your firm is missing from that answer, or described wrong, you will not see a lost call in any report.
That gap is easy to close with a simple habit. Once a month, ask the same set of questions to the main AI tools, write down what they say, and fix what you can. The routine takes about an hour, and after a few months it shows you patterns that no single check would.
Start with ten to fifteen questions that a real client might ask. Mix in a few types so you see the whole picture:
Save the exact wording in a document and reuse it every month. If you change the questions each time, you cannot tell whether the answers moved or the questions did.
AI answers vary with location, account history and settings. You cannot remove that variation, but you can keep your own process steady. Use a logged-out or fresh session where the tool allows it. Note whether the tool searched the web for that answer or answered from its training data, since several assistants now show sources when they search. Run each question on the same day of the month.
Record the results in a simple table: the question, the tool, whether your firm was named, what was said about it, and which sources were cited. A spreadsheet is fine. The goal is a record you can compare across months.
The first pass is about accuracy. AI tools sometimes give an old office address, list a lawyer who left the firm, or attach the wrong practice area to your name. These errors usually trace back to something published somewhere: an outdated directory listing, an old bar profile, or a stale page on your own site.
When you find a wrong detail, look at the cited sources if the tool shows them. Fix the source you control first. Then update the third-party listings you can edit. Corrections can take time to show up in AI answers, which is another reason to keep a monthly record.
Once the facts are right, look at the firms that are named when yours is not. Read the sources the tool cites for them. Often the pattern is plain: the named firms have detailed charge pages, consistent listings across directories, and a steady stream of reviews. AI tools that search the web lean on the same pages that rank in regular search.
That overlap means your search data is part of this audit. If you have not set up Google Search Console yet, there is a guide to using Google Search Console as a defense lawyer in your first week that explains which reports to open first. Pages that already earn impressions in Google for a charge are the most likely to be read and cited by AI tools that search.
A monthly audit is only useful if it leads to one or two changes. Pick the biggest gap from the table and act on it. If a tool keeps describing your firm as a general practice, add clearer language to your homepage and attorney bios about the charges you defend. If no tool names you for a charge you handle often, look at whether you have a strong page for it at all.