Co-Founder of SEO and AI law firm marketing company, Custom Legal Marketing, focusing on strategies for highly competitive practice areas.
While many SEO companies are still finding their footing in the new AI-driven world or even trying to hold on to the tired old concepts that have been staples of the industry, my team and I are actually feeling pretty excited about the decentralization of search. For many years, we’ve been focused on Google’s next move, Google’s algorithm updates, its search engine results pages and so on.
Don’t get me wrong, the challenges of search marketing and the ever-changing nature of it are part of the excitement. But now that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and other chatbots are becoming part of the world’s daily content consumption and research practices, you can’t just focus on Google. You have to convince ChatGPT that you’re the best law firm to recommend to a ChatGPT user.
ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, doesn’t have a support system for content creators or anything like Google’s SEO Starter Guide. Instead, law firm marketing agencies like mine have had to experiment, make discoveries and build processes on top of our own theories to build out our answer engine optimization (AEO) departments.
Like Google, ChatGPT uses many data points when making decisions, so there is no single thing you can do to make it recommend your firm. But what we’ve discovered is that promoting your case wins carries a lot of influence.
Press Releases Are Only The Beginning
Obviously, press release distribution companies have jumped on these discoveries to try to sell their packages. And based on our data, yes, promoting case wins and legal victories through press releases has (along with other AEO practices) improved the number of clicks and leads coming into our law firms from ChatGPT.
But it’s not actually that simple. Periodically sending a press release about a good case settlement or verdict is nice, and there are certainly no downsides to pushing positive press about your firm. But it’s not directly what moves the needle in ChatGPT. It is the ecosystem around those press releases that leaves a durable public footprint, which trains the AI models.
During a drill-down session with ChatGPT, I was able to extract some clarification on this matter. According to ChatGPT: “ChatGPT doesn’t read press releases and say ‘this firm wins a lot, recommend them.’ But press releases that turn into independent, repeated, third-party coverage can shape the public record I was trained on.”
Upon further drilling, ChatGPT explained: “When a firm issues press releases about case wins and settlements, those announcements are often picked up by regional news outlets, syndicated across legal news sites, and referenced or summarized by third-party publications. Over time, this results in the firm being frequently mentioned in articles, consistently associated with successful outcomes in similar case types, and appearing in legal directories, rankings, or professional commentary. As those repeated, third-party mentions accumulate across the public web and legal media ecosystem, they form a recognizable pattern of visibility and expertise that is more likely to be reflected in training data and, in turn, surface in AI-generated responses.”
Promote Your Wins
Now that ChatGPT has confirmed that promoting your verifiable case wins can lead to firms surfacing in AI-generated responses, what is the best practice?
First, every trial verdict should be promoted on your website, social media and the press. These are verifiable, public record cases, and by publicly promoting them, you’re feeding LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT with training data that shows your firm winning. If you don’t send out a national press release, then submit your case wins to local publications or legal news outlets. And at the very least, post your verdicts and settlements on your website and social media.
Beyond verdicts and settlements, firms should focus on creating a consistent, third-party-validated public footprint. That means being quoted in reputable news stories, publishing clear explanatory content that answers common client questions and maintaining accurate, detailed profiles across trusted legal directories. ChatGPT tends to mirror signals that appear repeatedly and independently across the web. When your firm is consistently associated with a specific practice area, jurisdiction and type of outcome—through media mentions, educational articles and authoritative listings—it reinforces trust in the same way it does for human decision-makers.
As chatbots are consuming training data, you want your firm’s durable public footprint to point to case wins. Promote your wins so you can win at answer engine optimization!
Source: Law Firms: Winning ChatGPT Leads Is Easier When You Share Case Wins
