Precedia is now working with several law firms on their answer engine visibility - and in active negotiation with others. This is what the first wave of audits is showing.
Most firms are invisible to the engines their clients now use
Across every audit we have run so far, the pattern is consistent: when a prospective client asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity for a lawyer in a given practice area and city, the firm we are auditing is not named. A competitor is. Sometimes two or three competitors are. The firm being audited does not appear at all.
This is not a question of firm quality or reputation. Several of the firms we are working with are well-established, with strong Google rankings and active referral networks. The issue is that answer engines are a different surface entirely. You can rank number one on Google and still be absent from the AI answer - because the engines synthesize from entity signals and citations, not from ranked links.
The gap between engines is larger than most firms expect
One of the clearest findings so far: a firm's visibility is not uniform across engines. A firm can be named by Perplexity and completely absent from ChatGPT for the same query. It can appear in Google AI Overviews for one practice area and not another. Copilot and Gemini often return different firms entirely for the same question.
This matters because clients are not using one engine. A prospective client might ask ChatGPT for a referral in the morning and check Perplexity in the afternoon. If a firm appears in one and not the other, it is invisible to half the query surface. Tracking nine engines is not an academic exercise - it is the actual map of where clients are looking.
You can rank number one on Google and still be absent from the AI answer - because the engines synthesize from entity signals and citations, not from ranked links.
Entity consistency is the most common gap
The structural issue we see most often is entity inconsistency. The firm's website describes it one way. Its LinkedIn page says something slightly different. Its directory profiles use different practice area language. Review sites describe it in terms the firm would not recognize.
When an engine tries to reason about a firm it has seen described four different ways across four sources, it hedges - or defaults to a competitor whose description is cleaner and more consistent. Entity consistency is not a technical detail. It is the first thing we address in every engagement, and it is usually where the fastest early wins come from.
Where Precedia is going
We are building toward becoming the leading AEO platform for law firms. The early engagements are validating the core bet: law firms need a dedicated service that understands practice areas, partner-level entities, and how clients actually search for counsel - not a generic AEO agency that treats legal as one vertical among many.
The live AEO ledger - citations and share of answer tracked across nine engines, refreshed continuously - is what differentiates the work. A managing partner should be able to open a dashboard and see, in one number, how often their firm is named when clients ask for a lawyer in their practice areas. We are building that. The early results are what we expected, and the direction is clear.
If your firm is curious about where it stands today, the free audit is the place to start. It runs the queries your clients are actually asking and shows exactly where you are named, where you are not, and which rival firm the engine names instead.
Run a free audit
See how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity describe your firm today - before any engagement.