How do I check if ChatGPT recommends my law firm? (The DIY method)
By Moshe Dor, FounderLast updated
This page gives away our manual method in full — no email gate. Most firms that run it find out in an afternoon that competitors own their queries. What you do with that information is up to you.
Which prompts should I run?
These ten, filled in with your practice area, city, and firm name. They cover the full funnel: direct recommendation queries, research queries where firms get cited, and entity checks on your own name.
| # | Prompt template | What it tests |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | best [practice area] lawyer in [city] | The money query — direct recommendation intent |
| 2 | [practice area] lawyer near me in [city] | Local variant; triggers different sources |
| 3 | how do I choose a [practice area] attorney in [city] | Advice query where firms get named as examples |
| 4 | what is my [case type] case worth in [state] | Pre-retention research; content citations |
| 5 | do I need a lawyer for [common matter] in [state] | Earliest-stage query in the funnel |
| 6 | how much does a [practice area] lawyer cost in [city] | Fee research; firms with fee content win |
| 7 | top rated [practice area] law firms [city] | List-style query; heavy directory influence |
| 8 | [specific scenario, e.g. rear-ended by uninsured driver] — what do I do in [state] | Scenario query; quotable content gets cited |
| 9 | is [your firm name] a good law firm | Direct entity check — what models know about you |
| 10 | [competitor firm name] vs other [practice area] firms in [city] | Reveals who owns your comparison surface |
How do I run them fairly?
Fresh context, every time. Use a new chat session per prompt (logged out or temporary mode where possible) so earlier questions do not contaminate answers. Run all ten on each engine: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google (watch for the AI Overview at the top of results). Copy each full answer into a spreadsheet with columns for engine, prompt, firms named, and whether you appear. Forty answers takes two to three hours.
How do I score the results?
Count citations, not impressions. Your share-of-voice is: answers naming your firm ÷ 40. Do the same for the two or three competitors who keep appearing — they are your real rivals in this channel, whatever the ad auctions say. Under 10% while a competitor holds 25%+ means the channel is actively routing your cases to them. Re-run the identical panel monthly; the trend is the signal, because single snapshots are volatile.
What are the limits of the DIY method?
Three honest ones. Consumer sessions are personalized and rate-limited, so your results carry noise that API-based testing avoids. Ten prompts sample the surface — money queries in one metro can span dozens of variants. And the method tells you whether you are invisible, not why — the diagnosis of entity gaps, schema, crawler access, and content is where the real fix list comes from.
| Dimension | DIY method | FirmCited audit |
|---|---|---|
| Prompts | 10, manually typed | 25, practice-area and metro tuned |
| Engines | 4, fresh sessions by hand | 4, via direct APIs — no personalization bleed |
| Citation counting | Eyeball + spreadsheet | Deterministic parsing, every firm counted |
| Competitor share-of-voice | Rough tally | Computed per engine, per query |
| Output | Your notes | 10-page prioritized P0-P2 fix list, <48h |
| Cost | Free (2-3 hours of your time) | $490, credited toward any install |
We run the same method — 25x deeper.
The $490 audit runs 25 tuned prompts across all 4 engines via API, computes competitor share-of-voice deterministically, and delivers a prioritized fix list in under 48 hours — credited in full toward any install.