The Law Firm Marketing Minute
The best podcast for law firm owners looking to grow their firms.
We specialize in any topics surrounding content marketing, but we also have expertise to share in other areas that could impact your firm.
If you get any value out of today's episode, we simply ask that you share it with a friend!
Thanks for listening!
The Law Firm Marketing Minute
How to Get Found on ChatGPT (Part 2)
Did you like this episode? Dislike it?
📲 Think your law firm’s website is enough to get found by ChatGPT? Think again. In this Part 2 conversation, Danny Decker and Dylan Stebbins break down the real mechanics behind how AI platforms like ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini choose which lawyers to recommend — and why your firm might be invisible. From Reddit signals and schema markup to the exact content format ChatGPT favors, this episode is a roadmap to becoming discoverable in the AI age.
📌 Key Takeaways
- ChatGPT pulls heavily from Reddit, review sites, and blogs — not just your homepage.
- Content format matters: conversational questions and executive summaries beat keyword stuffing.
- Schema, site speed, and consistent contact info are make-or-break factors for AI visibility.
📆 Schedule Your Strategy Session
📱You can check out the video component by following us here on
Instagram or TikTok
really the money question right, which is all right. Awesome if ChatGPT is citing your blog entries to answer questions. But how does ChatGPT decide which law firms to recommend?
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Law Firm Marketing Minute, the go-to podcast for solo and small law firms who want to level up. We're excited for you to join us this episode and remember remember if your law firm needs more clients and better clients, be sure to go to growmylawfirmfastcom. That's growmylawfirmfastcom.
Speaker 1:All right, let's get right into the episode this is not something that we can do full justice to in five minutes, um, it's not something I could do full justice to period, just because it is deeply complex and a lot of it is actually confidential. But the big platforms, right, gemini, grok, perplexity, chatgpt all function slightly different, right? And so ChatGPT, which is kind of the you know that's what we're focused on today is trained from a variety of data sources. Right of data sources, right, and I say trained because ChatGPT basic, in its current iteration, is not actively crawling the live internet in the same way that a search engine does. This gets confusing because ChatGPT Pro can do that and a lot of people are on ChatGPT Pro. Also, chatgpt 5, which is apparently coming out today, is probably going to use the live web. So this is all changing fast.
Speaker 1:But ChatGPT is trained from public websites and it gives a lot of preference to public websites. If you guys think back to that example I showed, asking about the patent process, you know it had four sources. All of them were the USPTO right, so it is going to look at government websites. It's going to look at credible media websites, but is also absolutely 100% pulling content from private websites, right From individual businesses. There was language on those examples that I showed you when it was recommending law firms from those law firms' homepages. Right, so it is absolutely pulling from, you know, websites from your website, from our website. Chatgpt is pulling from forums like Reddit and Quora Dylan, I think you and I were talking about this. Reddit is maybe the sort of most cited forum on ChatGPT. Does that sound right? Is that what you told me?
Speaker 3:Yeah, reddit's definitely number one, um, just because a lot of those conversations are happening, uh, more actively, I mean, there's a lot more users there, um, and there's a ton of stuff on reddit, like what we showed you that people are doing with chat tpt. People are also going to write and saying, hey, I need a lawyer. They're using it as their community, they're their neighborhood, they want to know I need a lawyer in this area. Anyone have any good experience? So to that end, like if you can have people clients, past clients talking about you on Reddit, that's a huge bonus. Or people with the firm can also do the same, because Reddit is definitely a strong source for chat GPT.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Stacey. How can we add info to Reddit without breaking our bar rules? I don't know, like I don't know what the exact rules are in your state, right, and they're different in all 50 states. But I can't imagine a scenario where, you know, honestly, answering a question on Reddit is going to create issues, create issues. And the best way to feed chat GPT through Reddit is not going and making posts, right, it's not going and like creating a thread. It's typically it's answers to popular threads.
Speaker 1:So I wouldn't look at it as you know, going in and posting a bunch of content. I would look at the opportunity more, as maybe somebody on your team is. You know, on your local, like, there's a Charlotte Reddit subreddit, right, and every once in a while you will see questions about you know, a family law firm and answering that question and you could put in parentheses like, yes, I own this firm and yes, this is advertising. And to Jerry's point, you know, see a lawyer as a good general response. But, yeah, this is obviously evolving quickly. I do not want to tell you go use Reddit in exactly this way, but I will tell you that ChatGPT is leaning heavily on Reddit comments and Reddit threads as part of how it answers questions on Reddit comments and Reddit threads. As part of how it answers questions, it's also pulling from video content. Chatgpt and other platforms do have the ability to transcribe and add video content, right, even if there's not a transcript, provided it can decode and pull video content into its answers. It pulls blog content into its answers, right.
Speaker 1:There are many different data sources. Some platforms Gemini, chatgpt, pro are also in addition to whatever it was trained on. The training happens once. But some of these platforms are also crawling the live internet. Okay, and I get that this is like a little bit murky, but like, for example, chat GPT-4 was trained on a specific data set several months ago and that data set is not updated, right, unless they, behind the scenes, do something that they're not telling us about. It was loaded and it was trained and it was set loose and it was trained and it was set loose. And but Grok, gemini, certain versions of chat GPT also crawl the live internet. My advice here is assume they're all going to be doing this eventually, right? So don't get too caught up in. You know well, when was chat GPT you know 4.0 trained? Just assume that the vast majority of these AI platforms are going to be crawling the live internet, and some of them are already crawling social media. Some aren't, but they're going to get there eventually, right? That is 100% the track that we're on.
Speaker 3:Okay and I think it's important, like, if you do get traffic, if you get phone calls, emails, whatever it is, from potential clients or people that are just asking questions that come to you from chat gpt, be prepared for that, be prepared for the possibility that they're using just the basic public available version and that there might be some outdated information.
Speaker 3:It is kind of funny sometimes because it is stuck in a static point in time until eventually. As danny said, they probably will change that, um, so you'll ask certain questions and it doesn't know. As Danny said, they probably will change that. So you'll ask a certain questions and it doesn't know the actual answer to that, because it was trained on, say you know, april could have been a cutoff. I don't know what the exact cutoff of Chet Chibouti 4 was, but it could be a cutoff months ago and there was even a point where it was cut off before the election. So it didn't even know the election had already taken place. So if you're asking it questions related to that, it has no idea who the president is or it assumes that the president is still whoever used to be kind of thing.
Speaker 2:So just be prepared for that.
Speaker 3:Be prepared that they might have a little bit of outdated information when they do come to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in addition to what we just talked about here. So basically, there's a whole lot of content that goes into educating these AI bots, right? So how do they prioritize it? They use something called trust signals, right? They are doing their best to determine how accurate and reliable this information actually is. So what do those trust signals look like?
Speaker 1:From what we have seen, government sites are highly prioritized In the legal space. When you ask a question like how to get divorced, how to file a patent, how to get an EB-5 visa, things like that, and then you ask it to cite its sources, it is almost always pulling from state judicial websites, federal websites. When possible, it seems to look at government sites first, similar to search engines. It does matter to ChatGPT when a bunch of other websites link to this one web page. They assume that there is a level of credibility and accuracy there. So links from third party sites is part of it.
Speaker 1:We have seen, depending on the type of question, recent content is more important, obviously, when it comes to things like current events, but, like as a general rule, chatgpt likes fresh content and seems to prioritize fresh content. There are some really interesting things that Dylan and his team have sort of dug into, which is the format of your articles, your pages, your blog entries really matter? Dylan, I'll let you. Do you want to kind of explain these next few points? This is kind of something that you pulled from your research.
Speaker 3:Yep, yeah, it definitely prefers a more conversational tone. I know, I know we haven't touched on SEO yet, but SEO was. A lot of people were cramming keywords because that was they were just trying to catch the attention of Google, whereas chat GBT wants to look for things that are gonna be formatted in a way that's a little more conversational. So typically, in an ideal world, your, your, your title of your blog, your title of your content is going to be a question. If it's not going to be a question, it should be conversational. So we're not saying that every single blog post you have or every article on your website needs to be a question. More often than not, I would say that it should be.
Speaker 1:But if it's not going to be a question, it should be conversational about the subject. That you're actually Right. So instead of saying you know five five steps to get divorced in North Carolina, say you know, make your title quote what are the first five steps to getting divorced in North Carolina? Question mark, for whatever reason. Formatting in that way is more light, gets you more likely to get cited on chat GPT, yep, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:And then the executive summary portion of that is you've all seen it. I think most of you might even know what it is. A lot of, especially with modern attention spans, people want a quick answer and chat GPT is going to appreciate that. Chat GPT is going to connect to that. And executive summary is before I even get into reading this article, it's going to tell me hey, this is what's in the article. It might even tell you from top to bottom all the pertinent information that's going to be in that article. But it can also just be like hey, first we're going to tell you that this is what you should do in step one, this is what you should do in step two. It's just a summary of what they're about to read. It shouldn't be a replacement for people reading the entire article. It's more of just a hey, prepping you for what's to come.
Speaker 2:ChatGPD loves that.
Speaker 3:The format matters so much, because scrollable content is going to be really important. It needs to be able to read it clearly, it needs to be able to understand what it's actually using as a source before it recommends it. Um, and it's not just the title of your blog either. The other headlines typically the first two are also going to be important. Those don't have to be questions necessarily, but, again, absolutely should be conversational now, yeah, whereas before we were kind of getting away from that with SEO and the way people were trying to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I was going to say, and that's like the the. A really important thing to understand is that you know there was a time with, with, when you were optimizing content for SEO, when, like you were, you were trying to stretch a three sentence answer into a thousand words of content, because that's what Google wanted. Um, chat GPT is really looking for the opposite. It is looking for. Give me, give me the executive summary, give me the main idea. If you want to go ahead and then use 500 to 1,000 words to answer the question, go for it, but that's not what ChatGPT is looking for. It really is looking kind of to your point, lisa. Yes, I don't think there's a coincidence that the type of content that ChatGPT spits out is similar to the content that it uses to train itself or that people use to to train it. Okay, so the format of your content really matters and we are in a minute here, guys, I'm going to get even more specific and and we're going to talk about how to make sure it's your firm specifically. That's that's getting recommended, but just in general, right, helping to hopefully, you know, pull back the curtain on this a little bit.
Speaker 1:There are also some technical pieces that are important. If you don't have an SSL certificate on your website, that is a major like don't trust me signal. That's going to hurt with getting you listed on chat and also in the search engines, right? So you want to have an SSL certificate on your website. Most websites today do so. You know. You type in HTTPS colon, backslash, right, and you can check and make sure that you have that on your website. But an SSL certificate is really important. It's important that the data on your website is structured in a way that ChatGPT can understand. I'm not a super tech wizard, but you want to have your data scheduled, structured correctly. You want to have there's a. There's a. We use a plugin that basically does a schema markup, which is sort of some behind the scenes code information. That just makes it easier for ChatGPT, as well as the search engines, to understand what they're looking at. If you're missing these components, your content is not as likely to be trusted by chat GPT.
Speaker 3:Yeah, also go ahead. I know there's a phrase that a lot of people aren't familiar with. It sounds a lot more technical than it is on the surface. We don't want to stop people from being creative. We don't want people to think that they have to do what everyone else is doing, kind of thing. That's certainly not what I'm saying.
Speaker 3:But say you're a divorce attorney and you're like well, everyone calls themselves a divorce attorney. I want to be a relationship transition specialist or I'm going to get really weird with it. If you're going to do that, your schema in the back end needs to tell these engines what is this page. So if my practice area is, you know, relationship transition instead of divorce, which I know is not a real thing, I'm just making it up for the example. In the back end of your website there should be something that says this is a page about divorce, you know in this region, kind of thing, rather than what you've decided to call it. I would recommend, just on the surface, still calling it. You know what it actually is. Regardless. Chatgpt needs, excuse me, chatgpt needs to be able to look at your website, scroll your website and see what it actually is looking at.
Speaker 3:So if you get a little bit too quirky or a little bit out of the box, it can impact this negatively. So there's other areas that obviously we can still be creative as well.
Speaker 1:Yep, awesome. Okay, give me a one if you're still with me, if this is making sense, if this is helpful for you guys. We're now going to hop into really the money question. Right, which is all right. Awesome if ChatGPT is citing your blog entries to answer questions. But how does ChatGPT decide which law firms to recommend? Okay, here's what we are learning. Okay, here's what chat GPT is looking for and, by the way, gemini and Grok and perplexity all similar, right, and after this, you're going to get an action plan.
Speaker 1:This is the stuff that really matters the most. One you need to have accurate and consistent contact information across your business listing. So this is going to include, like your Google my Business profile, if you have a, you know, if you're listed on legal directories. It includes your social media sites you want to have. You want to make sure your name is listed.
Speaker 1:The same right, and a lot of law firms over the years change their names slightly. It's got to be consistent. It needs to be consistent on your Facebook page, on your Google my Business. It's got to be consistent. It needs to be consistent on your Facebook page, on your Google my Business If you have an X account, if you have a LinkedIn account. All of your public profiles you need to use the same name, and we call it NAP Name, address, phone number Use the same name, address and phone number everywhere. This is super easy to do, obviously, but if you have inconsistencies, chat GPT is going to be confused. It's probably not going to cite your business. If it does, it might use an old address or an old phone number or an old name. So it's super important All your profiles are accurately and consistently updated.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we've done some troubleshooting with clients on this very issue, because we've, more than ever in our history, we've had clients that are like I'm getting calls about practice areas that I don't do anymore, like I used to do real estate, but I don't do that anymore and I'm still getting calls about it, why? And I'm like, well, we built you a website from scratch and we don't mention real estate anywhere on this website. We built it from scratch and you weren't doing that. So we're like, why is this happening? That's when we learned about this. You know, we can Google it. You look at the State Bar website. You look at, you know Justia Fine Law, any of those sources, no-transcript that tells them, hey, this person does real estate law in this region. Um, so definitely be on top of this and kind of look and we can also help with that miranda?
Speaker 1:um, it's a great question about masking numbers. You know different like CallRail functions differently than some others, right? Most masking tracking numbers should not impact this. Now, you would not want to use a masking or like a CallRail number and list that as your primary phone number on Google, my Business or Facebook or anything like that. But as long as it's, as long as what's happening is like a dynamic replacement on your website, this shouldn't affect you. But it is very important that your actual profiles all have the same phone number.
Speaker 1:Okay, high quality original content on your website is important and we talked about you know, I talked earlier about why it's really important that you are speaking to your ideal clients and that you are including the types of information that may be relevant to them when they're deciding to hire a lawyer.
Speaker 1:For example, if you want to work with high net worth divorce clients, talk about high net worth divorce and make sure you use that language a lot and you create resources and you gear your site towards those clients. Another example you know if, say, you're a criminal defense attorney white collar, you know criminal defense and maybe you're your former prosecutor, right, if that is a piece of information, the fact that you're a former prosecutor. If that's a piece of information that might be relevant to your ideal clients, make sure you call that out in your website content. Really, really important Again, third-party links, whether those are social media links, whether those are directories, whether those are articles, whether you're interviewed in a newspaper. All of this is a credibility signal for ChatGPT, and so you want to get links from social platforms, links from media websites, if possible. Press releases are a good way to do this.
Speaker 3:In your own we talked about this a little bit yesterday like your own linking can help. So, like when you publish content on your website, you shouldn't just kind of sit back and be like all right, let's let ChatGPT work. Go on social media, share that blog, share that, you know. Website link whatever it may be. Get members of your firm if they're able to and they're willing to post about it on LinkedIn or other places. Your own linking can kind of be a little bit of a cheat code for this as well.
Speaker 1:Love it. Positive reviews are important. Reviews have always been important. They're even more important now because ChatGPT is absolutely looking for both a good volume of reviews and also positive reviews. If you've got 1.8 stars on Google, that is going to ding you in ChatGPT's eyes, okay.
Speaker 1:This next one is going to be a little controversial. Pricing information is important. You want to have some level of pricing information available on your website because one of the questions that is constantly being asked of chat GPT is how much is this going to cost? Now, I know it's not as simple as just putting a dollar figure out there. I know there are many variables that affect pricing for law firms. You should have a page on your website where you're speaking to pricing. You can give a range. You can say you know, on the low end, in North Carolina, you know it may cost you $3,000 in legal fees to get a divorce and on the high end it might be $25,000. And here are a few of the factors that impact where you're going to end up.
Speaker 1:Having some conversation around pricing on your website is important. It will give you an advantage and again, you don't have to be uber specific. You know you don't have to quote a flat rate. Just have a discussion on your website about pricing. How much is this going to cost? This is something that, if you have this information, it's going to be very helpful for chat, gpt, jamil. Contingency fees for personal, personal for PI firms yeah, explain how it works. You know, maybe is there a range of your contingency fees. Just listen, just answer the question. When somebody asks how much does it cost to work with you, answer the question If the answer is hey, there's contingency fees and they range from 30% to 42%, and here's why it could be 30% and here's why it would be 42%. Break that down.
Speaker 3:And to answer both Nina and Deanna's questions, I would say both. I would recommend a pricing page, a static pricing page that you're updating. But you can do blogs and we've had clients that have asked about it where we're explaining contingency fees. With what Jamil asked about, we can explain what that is to people. I know some laws, like some states have laws that give you a range for that. They'd say, hey, if you're doing this type, then the contingency fee is this percentage sort of thing. You can explain that. And yes, paul, if it's expensive, um, that's definitely still something that you want to talk about and at the end of the day, these people are going to find out eventually what your fees are if they get that far down kind of your client funnel. So you still want to be transparent about it, but you can also say why it is or what it is that you guys do that makes what you do expensive.
Speaker 1:Bingo. Explain the value Like if it to Dylan's point, like you're not going to be able to hide it forever. And if the fact that you are more on the expensive side, you know, turns off some potential clients, well, honestly, let's let them find that out up front so they don't, you know, take, you know, you know gum up your sales machine and only to eventually not be able to pay for it. Include a range, include a range Winning you constantly changers, that's fine. Include some level of information about how you know what it's going to cost and if that means again a range, totally fine. But I'm telling you, this is what people are asking for and ChatGPT is going to like it and like you more if you give them some answer to that question. Another piece of this is you want to have an about page and you want to do this on your website. I mentioned this earlier. You really want to be sure you're highlighting your key selling point. So if you're a former prosecutor, if you have 20 years of experience and you think your clients care about that, right, what I would do is literally sit down and bullet point out all of the reasons why a client your ideal clients may choose to work with you and you want to make sure that that information is on your website prominently. Okay, because, again, you, you don't know exactly how chat GPT is going to choose to answer the question and it may answer it differently If it knows. I'm looking for, for you know, white level service, right, like you know, white glove level service. Then, you know, make sure your content makes it clear that that's what your law firm prefers or provides, right, and if you are low cost, efficient, talk about that. Ok, I'm going to keep moving here.
Speaker 1:Fresh content is really important on your website. This is where, like, regular blogging is really important. If you have won awards whether that's super lawyers, whether that is an Inc 5000 award, right, whatever you can do to showcase your credibility is valuable. Chatgpt pays attention to it. Include it on your website. Like I talked about a minute ago, you need to have an SSL certificate on your website. That's important. It's pretty easy to do. You need to have your data structured properly on your website. Okay, dylan talked a little bit about that, not going to get into the tech side of it now, but you want to have a schema markup. You want to have your data structured properly and it is important that you have a site load time aim for under two seconds per page. All of this is going to increase your chances of being the firm or among the firms that chat GPT recommends.
Speaker 1:Give me a one If you guys are with me. If this is still making sense, I am going to give you an action plan. Okay, what I suggest is screenshot this when we get to the end. I'm going to attempt to kind of take the information that we just talked about and give it to you in a format that you can get to work with right away. So if you've got questions, as we're going here, this is a great time to ask. One is make sure your social profiles, including Google, my Business, have consistent, accurate contact information. Two is use your social media channels actively. Okay, you should be posting regularly and you should be including links back to your website. Right, this is a way to increase the amount of links you have pointing to your website. Three, you should be regularly I would love for you to do this once a week, once a month, kind of at minimum publish blogs that are answering the top questions that your PNCs are asking.
Speaker 1:We created a resource we did this for. I want to say five or so practice areas, mike, if you can drop these links in the chat. These are the top questions that consumers are asking. Chat GPT around business law, I think we have family law, I believe we have immigration. So, listen, you can do this research on your own if you want to, but we're also right now dropping a link. This is not something you have to pay for or sign up for or anything. There's just a PDF you can download that's going to give you some ideas of prompts that you can use to create blog content. Right, because, again, you want to be answering the questions that your best prospects are asking. If we didn't include your practice area and you want us to, you can shoot us an email. It's solutions at spotlightbrandingcom and, if we get enough requests, pi is a great one. If we get enough requests, we'll put a few more of these together. I think criminal defense is on there, paula and Joel. Family law is definitely on there.
Speaker 1:So you should be publishing blogs that are answering the questions that your PNCs are asking. And remember what Dylan said about formatting Put the question in the headline, give a little executive summary, then write the blog. Okay, you should be creating FAQ style video content and social media content. Take the same list of questions right. Download the PDF that Mike just shared. Take that same list of questions, write a blog entry. Then create a social media post. Then pull out your phone and create a 30-second video answering the question. Okay, this is how you get your content out there indexed on ChatGPT. Grok, gemini, this is how you do it. You create the content.
Speaker 1:You got to ask clients for reviews. I know a lot of you have been doing this. It's always been important. If anything, it's even more important. Ask your clients for reviews. Create webpage content that speaks to your ideal clients. We talked about this. This is really important. Your homepage, your about page. You should make it very clear who the best clients are that you want to attract to your law firm. You should create resources for them. You should speak to them. Then ChatGPT is going to know what types of people should be recommended your way, who are going to be good clients for your firm. Include pricing information on your website. We may have to do a whole webinar about this, because there are a lot of good questions, but you need to include pricing information on your website.
Speaker 1:Karen, it's important to respond to a review One, it just shows it sends the signal that you're paying attention, you're engaged to review one. It just shows it sends the signal that you're paying attention, you're engaged. If they are negative reviews, there are multiple reasons why it's valuable to respond. It gives you the chance to sort of correct the record in a graceful way. At the end of the day, many smart people have concluded that ChatGPT wants to see responses to reviews, and so that's kind of why it's on the list. Again, if you've won a super lawyers award, if you've been featured in the Inc 5000, that stuff should be on your website. Take 10 minutes, look back at the awards you've won over your career. Make sure they're on your website. Okay, quick and easy to do.
Speaker 1:Really important the technical checklist. I've gone over this a couple times. You need to have an SSL certificate on your website. If you're not sure that you have an SSL certificate on your website, just shoot us an email. We'll check this for you. Solutions at spotlightbrandingcom. Jana or Eddie, would you mind just dropping in the chat the email address that folks can use if they want us to check this for them? Again, it's solutions at spotlightbrandingcom. You need to have a schema markup. That's something that is relatively easy to do and your site speed really matters. Okay, this is the action plan. You want to have a privacy policy as well. Forgot that Boring piece of information on the bottom of your website. Nobody ever reads it, but chat GPT wants to make sure that it's there, so screenshot this Again. This stuff changes every day. This is evolving fast, but if you are consistently doing what I've got on this screen, you are going to be well ahead of the curve.