You don’t need software or an agency to get a first read on where your firm stands in AI search. You need about an hour, a notepad, and the same tools your prospective clients are already using.
Step 1: Ask the questions a real client would ask
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google (to see the AI Overview) separately. For each one, ask a handful of realistic questions:
- “Who’s a good estate planning attorney in Fort Worth?”
- “What should I look for in a family law attorney in Tarrant County?”
- “Do I need a will or a trust in Texas?”
- “How do I find a divorce lawyer near [your neighborhood]?”
Write down, plainly, whether your firm’s name shows up anywhere in the answer — not just at the top, anywhere.
Step 2: Note who does show up
If your firm doesn’t appear, look at who does. Open their site and skim for a pattern: do they have named attorney bios? Detailed FAQ content? Consistent listings across directories? This isn’t about copying a competitor — it’s about noticing what these tools currently trust enough to quote.
Step 3: Check your own content honestly
Pull up your three or four most important pages — your homepage, your top practice-area page, your attorney bio — and ask plainly:
- Does this page directly answer a specific question, or does it just describe services in general terms?
- Is there a real named attorney attached to this content?
- Would this page make sense if only one paragraph of it were quoted out of context?
If the honest answer is “not really” on more than one of these, that’s usually the actual gap — not a technical problem, a content one.
Step 4: Check consistency
Search your firm’s name and pull up your Google Business Profile, your website footer, and one or two legal directory listings side by side. Look for anything that doesn’t match exactly — a slightly different firm name, an old phone number, a suite number that’s missing in one place. These small mismatches are more common than most firms expect, and they quietly undercut trust signals across the board.
Step 5: Write down three fixes, not thirty
Resist the urge to try to fix everything at once. Pick the three most obvious gaps from what you just found — usually one content gap, one consistency gap, and one structural gap (schema, headings, etc.) — and treat those as this month’s actual project.
Related reading
If your audit turns up content gaps, FAQ Pages That Get Cited by AI Tools is the practical next step. For consistency issues, see why your Google Business Profile matters more now. For the bigger picture, start with our AI search overview for Fort Worth attorneys.