In September a personal injury lawyer asked r/LawFirm whether SEO is fake. We didn't try to settle that. What we did in October 2026 was look at what Google and ChatGPT put on the page for legal searches, since it turned out to depend on the kind of search.
Take hiring searches. "personal injury lawyer Houston" and "divorce lawyer Denver" both open with a map of three firms. Firm sites sit under it, along with directories like Justia and Super Lawyers. Neither search had an AI Overview.
Questions went the other way. We tried six, among them "how long does a divorce take in Colorado" and "can I get a DUI expunged". All six got an AI Overview, and between them the overviews named 18 sources. Eleven of those were law firm websites. Colorado courts, the Texas insurance department and the Florida revenue department were the three government sites. Reddit, a custody app and an ignition interlock company made up three more, and the last was the directory Super Lawyers.
The firm pages that got cited were ordinary. Each answered a single narrow question for a single state, near the top of the page. One Florida firm's explainer on how child support is calculated was cited right beside the state revenue department's page on the same topic.
ChatGPT did something else. We asked what a personal injury lawyer costs. It searched for typical contingency fees and for the bar association, then cited two American Bar Association pages. No law firm made it in.
The money numbers come from Google's own estimates. "personal injury lawyer near me" has about 301,000 US searches a month at about $163 a click, while "divorce lawyer near me" has 40,500 at about $25 a click. In the same thread, a commenter who markets personal injury firms put agency fees at $8k to $20k a month.
It was two hiring searches and six questions in one month, mostly in a few states, so this shows what Google did then and not a rate. If you run a firm, search your practice area with your city in it and see whether you get a map or an overview.
RankControl, an AI SEO and AEO platform, ran the check. RankControl's AI visibility tracker tracks citations across 7 AI engines, so you can see which of your pages get quoted. The full numbers are in the full write-up on Medium.