AI visibility tracker for law firms: how we set it up
How we set up an AI visibility tracker for law firms: local prompts by practice area, citation sources, directory profiles and the platform we use.
Law firms were among the first clients to tell us their enquiries had changed. Prospects were arriving having already asked an assistant for a shortlist. Some firms were on it, some were not, and none of them knew why. A tracker answers the first part. The second part is a piece of work, and this is how we do it.
This is practitioner advice on measurement, not legal or compliance advice. Attorney advertising rules vary, and every page a firm publishes should go through the firm's own review.
Build prompts the way clients phrase them
A legal prospect does not type a keyword. They ask a question, usually with a place and a situation in it. We organize prompts by practice area and by intent.
- Discovery: "best employment lawyer in [city]", "who handles wills and probate near [town]".
- Situation: "I was dismissed without notice, what are my options and who can help".
- Comparison: "[firm] vs [firm]".
- Reputation: "is [firm] any good", "[firm] reviews".
Tag each by practice area, so you can see that the firm is strong in family law and invisible in employment. A single blended score would hide that.
Location is half the job
Nearly every legal query is local. For single-office firms, country-level tracking with the city in the prompt is often enough to start. For multi-office firms, we want the monitor to ask from the place. In Promptwatch, state and city tracking begins on the Business plan and is included on every agency plan. Local GEO/SEO targeting pins a monitor to exact coordinates, with a radius from 20 m to 5 km, for ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, and falls back to country, state or city for other models.
Sources decide who gets named
For law firms the cited sources are rarely the firm's own website. We usually see:
- Legal directories and review platforms.
- Bar association or professional body pages.
- Local news and community pages.
- Reddit threads and forum answers on legal situations.
We use citation analytics to see which of these appear for each practice area and city. Offsite mention tracking shows pages that name the firm without linking. The work that follows is often unglamorous: complete the directory profile, fix inconsistent firm names and addresses, and ask satisfied clients for reviews on the platforms engines actually cite. Review requests have to follow the firm's professional conduct rules.
The platform we run it on
We run client programs on Promptwatch. For law firms, we use topics and tags for practice areas, personas for client types, and the Brand Book to define what counts as a mention, including variants of a firm's name with partner names. Citation analytics gives page-level and domain-level views. Agent Analytics provides IP-verified AI crawler logs from the Professional plan, which helps when a firm's site sits on a legal marketing platform with rules we cannot see. Visitor analytics reports AI-referred sessions and conversions, so we can link visibility to enquiries if the site tracks them.
Plan notes: Explore is free (10 prompts, ChatGPT only). Essential is $95 a month, Professional $245, Business $579. Agency plans start at $199 a month.
Content, with a lawyer in the loop
Gap analysis shows which questions the firm's site does not answer. For law firms, we draft plain-language pages on common situations, and a qualified person reviews each before publication. The Content Agent, available on Business and Enterprise, can plan and draft on a schedule, and we run it with a review inbox so nothing publishes unreviewed. Agency plans do not include the Content Agent.
Mistakes we see
- Tracking only the firm name. Prospects rarely know it yet.
- One prompt panel for every practice area. Competitors differ by area.
- Ignoring directories. They are often the cited source.
- Publishing generic advice pages. They add nothing an engine cannot find elsewhere. Specifics about local process and the firm's approach do better.
- Promising rankings. Nobody can.
What a tracker cannot do
It cannot guarantee that an assistant names your firm. It cannot give legal advice, and it does not check your content against advertising rules. It shows how often you appear, who appears instead and where the engine finds its information. Answers vary by run, so we report trends over weeks.
Where to start
Choose one practice area and one city. Write twenty prompts, including a few reputation prompts, and read every answer. Check the sources. If the firm is missing from a directory that an engine cites, that is your first task.