Your clients are asking AI which law firm to hire. That’s not a hypothetical anymore — it’s happening across every major platform, in every market, every day. And most firms have no real idea what those platforms are saying about them.

I decided to see if I could find out.

So: I ran more than 120 queries across Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google AI Overviews in late March 2026. Nine markets. Six practice areas. Three platforms. I captured which firms appeared, which sources each platform cited, and how those patterns varied by market size and practice area. The full research report lives here. What follows is what I think every law firm marketing decision-maker needs to understand before spending another dollar on AI visibility.

To set some context, here’s the summary of the queries I ran, the markets I tested, and the platforms I used.

My fundamental query was “What is the best [practice area] law firm in [city]?”

I tested these queries on Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google AI Overviews — the AI-augmented search results that often appear at the top of organic search results before a user clicks a single link.

The practice areas I tested were:

• Personal injury
• Family law
• Criminal defense
• Bankruptcy
• Estate planning
• Corporate law

And finally, I broke my searches up by market size, which I defined as large, mid, and small. The cities I ran queries in were:

• Large markets: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles
• Mid markets: Philadelphia, Atlanta, Denver
• Small markets: Boise, Providence, Tucson

The core finding: AI didn’t create a new hierarchy. It inherited the old one.

Start here, because everything else flows from it.

The firms that appear most consistently in AI search results are not the firms that cracked some new optimization code. They’re the firms that spent years — in some cases decades — building authority within the credentialing systems the legal industry already trusts. Chambers Band 1. Best Law Firms Tier 1. Super Lawyers. Best Lawyers. Legal 500.

These directories didn’t become relevant because of AI. What AI platforms have done is inherit their authority. When Perplexity retrieves pages to answer “what is the best corporate law firm in Philadelphia,” it isn’t making an independent judgment about legal quality. It’s retrieving the pages that rank highest in its index — and those pages are dominated by the same credentialing content that has defined legal market authority for decades. ChatGPT draws on its training data, which encodes the same sources. Google AI Overviews synthesizes what Google’s algorithm surfaces — which, for institutionally complex practice areas, is again the same material.

The platforms are different. The underlying authority structure they reflect is largely the same.

The question isn’t “how do I rank in AI?” It’s “how do I build the kind of authority that AI platforms recognize?” That question has the same answer it’s always had.

Finding 2: Where you practice matters more than how you market

The single most useful predictor of what drives AI visibility for your firm isn’t the practice area or the platform. It’s the size of the market you’re in — and the three tiers I identified behave very differently.

In large markets — New York, Chicago, Los Angeles — AI results are dominated by national credentialing systems. Firm websites are essentially invisible as direct citation sources, regardless of how well-optimized they are. The directory bar is high and the path to clearing it is long. Content investments and schema markup won’t move the needle here.

Mid markets — Philadelphia, Atlanta, Denver — show a more accessible ecosystem. National directories still matter, but they’re joined by local editorial sources that don’t appear in large market results at all: city magazines, regional legal publications, local Super Lawyers features. These aren’t vanity placements. They’re functioning trust signals, and they’re genuinely achievable for firms that haven’t yet built national directory standing. For mid-market firms, local editorial presence is the highest-leverage gap to close.

Small markets — Boise, Providence, Tucson — are where things get really interesting. National directory coverage is thin, and in its place, firm websites appear as primary citation sources in a way that simply doesn’t happen in larger markets.

In New York, a great website is table stakes. In Boise, it may be your most powerful AI visibility asset.

Finding 3: Estate planning is the clearest pattern in the data

I wasn’t prepared for how consistent this finding would be. Across eight of nine markets tested on Perplexity, the firm ranked first for estate planning was either Band 1 in the Chambers High Net Worth Guide for Private Wealth Law or directly associated with a Band 1 firm. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Denver, Boise, Providence: all three market tiers, same result. Where Chambers publishes a private wealth ranking, it dominates. Not usually. Not mostly. Every time.

The one exception is Tucson, where Chambers doesn’t publish private wealth rankings. The exception proves the rule.

Finding 4: Small market websites function as direct trust signals

When AI retrieval systems can’t find authoritative directory content — which happens routinely in thin-coverage markets — they reach for whatever substantive, well-indexed content is available. In small markets, that’s often the firm’s own website. I saw firm websites appearing as the specific sources driving firm recommendations across multiple practice areas in Boise, Providence, and Tucson. This doesn’t happen in Philadelphia or Chicago.

The websites that appeared aren’t sophisticated content marketing operations. They are firms with clear practice area pages, attorney biographies that establish credentials, and enough geographic specificity that AI systems could confidently associate them with the relevant market. The bar isn’t particularly high. But it must be cleared — firms with thin, generic websites didn’t appear in our results regardless of their actual quality or reputation.

Finding 5: Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google AI Overviews are measuring different things

Run the same query on all three platforms and you will not always get the same answer. This matters for strategy.

Perplexity is retrieval-first — it measures what’s indexed and retrievable today. ChatGPT is training-data-first — it measures historical depth in authoritative publications like Chambers, Vault, Lawdragon, and the American Lawyer. Google AI Overviews sits on top of Google’s search infrastructure and inherits its ranking signals entirely, which means it favors SEO-optimized content and review volume over peer-reviewed authority.

The practical consequence showed up clearly in our data. In Boise estate planning queries, Holland & Hart — Chambers Band 1 — appeared at #1 on both Perplexity and ChatGPT. On Google AI Overviews, it didn’t appear at all. Consumer-facing boutiques with strong local SEO filled the results entirely. The firm with the strongest peer-reviewed credentials in the market was invisible on the platform most people encounter first.

A firm optimizing for one platform isn’t necessarily optimizing for the others. The most defensible strategy addresses both: sustained directory and peer-recognition investment for Perplexity and ChatGPT visibility, combined with traditional local SEO fundamentals for Google AI Overviews.

Finding 6: Google AI Overviews is the most SEO-susceptible platform — which makes it the most accessible

Google AI Overviews is the AI platform most of your prospective clients will encounter, because it requires no deliberate choice to use it. It appears automatically at the top of Google Search results before anyone clicks a link.

For consumer-facing practice areas, its results often look more like a Yelp search than a Chambers ranking. Cordell & Cordell — a national franchise firm focused on men’s divorce cases with heavy SEO investment — appeared at #1 for Philadelphia family law on Google AI Overviews. It didn’t appear on Perplexity or ChatGPT for the same query. In our New York and Philadelphia bankruptcy queries, no BigLaw restructuring firms appeared at all — not because Google misunderstood the query, but because those firms don’t invest in the consumer SEO that drives Google’s rankings. Kirkland & Ellis doesn’t have a Yelp page.

This cuts in both directions. Firms with strong peer-reviewed credentials but non-existent SEO will find Google AI Overviews underrepresenting them. Firms without established directory presence will find it the most accessible platform to influence — solid local SEO, review management, and a well-structured website are all substantially more achievable in the short term than multi-year directory building.

Corporate law is the exception: Chambers and Vault have strong Google SEO for corporate law content, so results on Google AI Overviews converge with the other platforms for that practice area. For everything else, traditional SEO fundamentals drive the show.

What to do with this

The investments that drive AI visibility aren’t AI-specific investments. Directory submissions, peer recognition, local editorial presence, website content, and review management are all things firms should be doing regardless of AI. What AI has done is make the consequences of neglecting those investments more visible — and more immediate — than they’ve ever been.

Where to start depends on where you practice. Large market firms: audit your directory standing and prioritize submissions for the practice areas where gaps exist. Mid-market firms: identify the local editorial outlets that appeared in our results for your markets and develop a plan to earn recognition in them. Small market firms: your most actionable opportunity is a website that actually does its job — and that’s a project measured in weeks, not years.

Do you have a knowledge gap about search, AI, or digital marketing you need filled? Feel free to call me at 646-522-2774 or david@splatworld.tvdrop me a line here. It’s always free to chat and, of course, should you have the need for an agency, we can talk about that, too.