GEO, generative engine optimisation, is the practice of making a page likely to be quoted by an AI assistant rather than merely ranked by a search engine. For law firms it matters early, because legal questions are exactly the kind people now ask a chatbot before they ask a lawyer, and because an assistant that summarises the answer may never send the reader to anybody's website. The good news for a firm already doing careful work is that most of what helps is what a credible legal page should contain anyway. The bad news is that the tactics most confidently sold in this space are the ones the evidence does not support.
What the research actually found
The GEO research paper by Aggarwal and colleagues, published on arXiv and presented at KDD in 2024, tested which changes to a page altered how often generative answers cited it. According to that paper, the interventions that moved citation visibility meaningfully were citing sources, quoting authorities directly and including relevant statistics, which together shifted visibility by roughly a third, while the interventions that did approximately nothing were adopting an authoritative tone and stuffing keywords, both of which are what most optimisation advice still recommends. For a law firm this is unusually convenient: quoting the statute, citing the rule and linking the source is both good legal writing and the thing that demonstrably increases the chance of being the answer. Vague reassurance written in a confident voice is the pattern that fails.
The prerequisite nobody mentions
None of this matters if the AI crawlers cannot read the site. Many hosting and security platforms now block AI crawlers by default, and an edge block cannot be overridden by anything in robots.txt, so a firm can publish immaculate, quotable content that no assistant will ever see. Check this before commissioning any content work: confirm which crawlers your host or content delivery provider blocks, and decide deliberately which ones to allow. Google publishes documentation on how its own AI features interact with a site and which controls apply. The decision is a business one, since allowing crawlers means answers may be summarised without a visit, but making it by accident is the worst option available.
What a law firm should actually do
Write pages that answer one specific question completely, with the relevant statute, rule or deadline named and linked, the jurisdiction stated explicitly, and the date the page was last reviewed shown plainly. Attribute anything factual to a source a reader can follow. Name the author, with credentials and a real biography. Keep the structure clean enough that a machine can extract a self-contained answer: a direct response near the top, then the nuance. Keep the jurisdiction visible in the text rather than only in the page title, because an assistant summarising a paragraph will otherwise apply your state's rule to somebody in another. Firms already investing in law firm search work will find this is a change of emphasis rather than a new programme.
What to be sceptical about
There is a growing market in GEO services promising placement inside AI answers, and no assistant sells that placement, which makes the promise structurally unfulfillable. Be equally sceptical of tools reporting your visibility across assistants: the answers vary by user, by phrasing, by session and by model version, so a single tracked figure is closer to a weather report than a ranking. Measure what you can control instead: whether your pages are crawlable by the assistants you have chosen to allow, whether they contain quotable and attributed answers, and whether referral traffic and direct brand searches move. Treat anything else as an interesting signal rather than a target.
Questions people ask about geo for law firms
Is GEO different from SEO for a law firm?
It overlaps heavily. The technical foundations are identical, and the content difference is one of emphasis: assistants favour material that quotes and attributes, states its jurisdiction and answers one question completely. A firm doing careful legal writing with real citations is most of the way there already.
Should we block AI crawlers to protect our content?
It is a genuine trade-off. Blocking preserves the visit but removes you from answers where a competitor will appear instead. Most firms conclude that being cited is worth more than the summarised visit, but the point is to decide it deliberately rather than to discover a default block after a year of content work.
Can we measure whether AI assistants cite us?
Only roughly. Answers differ between users and sessions, so spot checks are anecdotes rather than measurement. Watch the things you can verify: crawler access, referral traffic from assistant domains, and whether brand searches rise. Treat vendor visibility scores with the same scepticism you would apply to any unaudited ranking claim.
Does structured data help with AI answers?
It helps machines parse the page reliably, which is worth doing, but it is not a substitute for a clear, quotable answer in the visible text. Mark up what genuinely applies, keep it accurate, and spend the remaining effort on the substance of the answer itself.