Does AI recommend your law firm? How to check

Prospective clients already ask AI for lawyer recommendations. Whether the answers include you is checkable in about ten minutes. Here is the honest way to do it by hand, and the honest limits of doing it by hand.

The 10-minute manual check

1. Write the question a client would type, not your firm name. Practice plus place plus situation: "best personal injury lawyer in Brooklyn", "I was rear-ended on the BQE, the insurance company is lowballing me, who should I call". If you search your own name you are testing brand recall, not recommendations.
2. Ask all three engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, and a Google search for the same question (watch whether an AI Overview even appears; it triggers only some of the time, and for some phrasings never).
3. Use a fresh chat each time, signed out or incognito where possible. Chat history biases follow-up answers toward firms already discussed.
4. Repeat each question at least three times and note every firm named each time, including yours, and where in the list it appears.
5. Vary the phrasing once or twice per question. Same intent, different words.

Why one look misleads

Everything below is measured across our daily NYC tracking, many samples per question per engine:

• Answers vary between identical asks. The same question, asked repeatedly, returns overlapping but different firm lists. A firm that appears in 4 of 10 answers is genuinely visible, and a single spot-check misses it more often than not.
• Phrasing flips leaders. Rewording one Brooklyn car accident question flipped which firm ChatGPT named most. Your client does not phrase it the way you do.
• The engines disagree. In our July 2026 Brooklyn personal injury data, each of the three engines had a different top firm. Checking only ChatGPT tells you nothing about the other two.
• The market moves. We have watched the most-recommended firm change on all three engines inside a month. A check from last quarter is history, not status.

What "recommended" actually means

Because answers vary, visibility is a share, not a yes or no: out of many sampled answers to the questions that matter for your practice, how many name your firm. That is the number worth tracking, and the number that tells you whether the changes you make are working.

See the market first, free

We publish monthly leaderboards of which firms the AI engines recommend, borough by borough, from the same tracking data: the AI visibility leaderboards. If your firm is not on the board for your borough and practice, the manual check above will usually agree.