AI Search & Professional Services Firms

How Professional Services Firms can secure mentions in AI Assistants and AI Search summaries

A Client’s AI-Driven Search

Picture a prospective client: they need a trusted advisor — perhaps a tax specialist or a probate solicitor. Instead of clicking through a list of websites, they type the query straight into ChatGPT. Or they open Google and are instantly presented with an AI-generated summary. In that moment, visibility is no longer about ranking. It’s about being mentioned.

The Changing Landscape of Visibility

Traditional SEO remains important, but the way people find professional services firms is changing fast. According to a July report by search tool specialist Semrush, Google’s AI Overviews, for example, now appear in more than 13% of desktop searches, up from just 6.5% at the start of the year. By early 2025, according to Google, these summaries were reaching an estimated 1.5 billion users every month — roughly one in four internet users worldwide.

This is no longer an experiment on the margins. AI-generated answers are shaping how clients discover and assess firms in legal, financial and other professional services.

Search AI: Optimising Your Own House

AI summaries in Google and Bing still depend on the familiar signals of search. They favour firms whose websites are technically sound, clearly structured, and authoritative.

That means using structured data such as Schema.org markup to make your services machine-readable. It means enabling rich snippets that highlight reviews, office locations or FAQs. And it means maintaining content that demonstrates clear expertise and authority. In short: the better organised and more transparent your digital presence, the more likely it is to be pulled into an AI-generated summary.

AI Assistants: Winning Through Trust

ChatGPT and other assistants work differently. They don’t crawl your site in real time. Instead, they lean on independent sources of credibility.

For law firms, that might be directories such as Chambers & Partners or Legal 500. For financial services, it could be FT Adviser rankings or industry awards. For both, it includes review platforms such as Trustpilot or Google Reviews.

These external references act as proof points. When an assistant is asked who to recommend, it is far more likely that they will draw on these compiled, third-party sources than on what you say about yourself.

Two Fronts, One Strategy

For professional services firms, the implication is clear. To feature in search AI, focus on the clarity and authority of your own digital footprint. To feature in AI assistants, make sure your firm is visible in the independent lists, rankings and reviews that large language models use as their evidence base.

Make Your Firm Visible

Some may see AI as a threat to website traffic. In reality, it’s an opportunity to expand visibility. The firms that succeed will be those that combine authority they control — their website, their structured data, their published expertise — with authority conferred by others through rankings, reviews and recognition.

Those are the firms that will not just be found, but also named — in search results (our SEO Strategy Services), in AI summaries (Our AI SEO Services), and in the conversations where new client relationships increasingly begin.