Your firm can rank on Google. ChatGPT can still recommend another firm.
Search now runs through several systems, from Google to ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, and each one decides independently who it recommends. Making sure your firm’s name comes up in all of them is a specific, ongoing job.
GEO · AEO · South East Queensland
Your SEO work already tells Google what your firm does.
AI systems ask the same question too, and each one checks a different set of information before it answers.
Ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity for a family lawyer in Brisbane, a conveyancer on the Sunshine Coast, or a criminal defence barrister on the Gold Coast. Each platform names a firm using its own sources and its own rules, so they don’t always agree with each other. When a firm gets named this way, it’s called a citation, and it works differently from a Google ranking: there’s no list to compare, just one name handed to the client directly.
Search used to hand back a list and let the client do the comparing. Now, a growing share of that comparison happens inside the AI system itself, before the client ever sees a website.
A firm can rank well on Google and still lose the citation to a competitor on a different platform. Same query. Same day. The firm that gets named still gets the call, and the one that doesn’t never knows what it missed.
68%
of Google searches now end without a click to any website — up from 60% in 2024, the fastest two-year jump SparkToro has recorded. United States data; no equivalent Australian figure has been published.
This is the exact gap
Felicity Jane Digital works in.
AI SEO, Generative Engine Optimisation, is the work that gets your firm’s content checked and cited by Google’s AI features.
Answer Engine Optimisation does the same job for platforms that skip the results page entirely: ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Whatever the system decides to say is the only thing a prospective client sees.
how they differ
The major platforms work differently.
Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude each read different sources and weigh different signals when deciding who to cite. A firm well placed on one isn’t automatically well placed on another. See the data on AI citation overlap →
Google (AI Overviews and AI Mode)
Both run on the same AI technology, so you’d expect them to show the same results. They don’t: tracking through 2026 found they often cite different pages for the same search. Ranking well on Google still helps you get cited here, and that effect has been getting weaker over time.
ChatGPT
Retrieves from Microsoft’s Bing index. That distinction matters more than it sounds — a page can rank prominently on Google and still need separate indexing on Bing before ChatGPT ever sees it.
Perplexity
Reddit is the single largest source of its citations, ahead of every other domain by a wide margin. Perplexity behaves like a live summary of public conversation happening across the web.
Claude
Favours long-form, credentialed writing, and weights forum content lowest of the major platforms. It draws on Brave’s search index for anything live, plus whatever it already learned during training.
What the work covers.
In practice, the work breaks down into a handful of things.
Entity and schema markup
Code added behind the scenes that tells any system reading the page exactly what your firm does, and where. What the evidence actually shows about whether schema markup moves AI citation rates is covered in does schema markup help a page get cited by AI.
Content built to be quoted
Written so that when a system pulls together an answer, there's a clear, complete sentence it can use. The retrieval mechanism behind this — how a system breaks one question into many and selects passages from across the results — is explained in what query fan-out means for a law firm's content structure.
Facts with dates and sources
A platform can check a claim like "our audit found X in March 2026." It can't check something like "we deliver results."
Earned mentions
Being named in publications and directories a platform already trusts — research consistently finds this matters more than other websites simply linking to yours.
Platform monitoring
Tracking where your firm actually gets cited, reported the same way rankings are.
This list will change as the platforms themselves change. What's here reflects where the evidence stands now, not a fixed formula.
What this work does
and doesn't claim.
No one checks an AI-generated recommendation for accuracy or fairness before a client sees it. This work changes how easily a system can find and verify what’s true about your firm. It doesn’t change what a system says about any other firm, and it doesn’t guarantee your firm gets picked. Everything Felicity Jane Digital builds stays inside the advertising rules your practice already works under, on every platform your clients might use to find you.
frequently asked
Questions Queensland law firms ask about GEO and AEO.
Does my firm still benefit if a potential client sees an AI system name us, but never visits our website?
Yes, usually. Most people who see an AI system name a firm never click through to that firm’s website at all; they read the answer and stop there. That doesn’t mean nothing happened. Being named still shapes which firm a client contacts first, the same way a strong Google Business Profile influences a decision before anyone visits the website.
Does traditional SEO still matter, or does this replace it?
It still matters, and nothing here replaces it. A substantial share of what gets cited in Google’s AI features still comes from pages that already rank well organically. Organic SEO and AI citation share some signals and diverge on others, which is exactly why they’re scoped inside the same engagement.
Can you guarantee my firm gets cited by an AI platform?
No one can. These platforms don’t publish their selection criteria, and results shift over time. The work is making what’s verifiably true about your firm easy for a system to find and cite.
If clicks aren't the main measure, how do you know this work is having an effect?
By tracking two things: whether your firm is actually named when a prospective client asks, and whether that leads to contact, meaning a call, a form, or a consult booked. Clicks miss most of what’s happening, so they aren’t how this work gets judged. It’s reported plainly, the same way your rankings and enquiry numbers are reported for the rest of the engagement.
Is this sold separately, or does it come as a part of Legal SEO?
GEO and AEO work is scoped as part of a Legal SEO engagement, not sold as a separate product. It starts from the same diagnostic assessment as that engagement: Google, AI platforms, and local search reviewed together, not as three separate audits. If your SEO foundation is already solid, ask whether a narrower scope makes sense for your firm. If it isn’t, that’s usually the starting point regardless.
Does this work differently for a small or single-practitioner firm compared to a larger one?
Not in any way that disadvantages you. These platforms weigh documented, verifiable expertise, not firm size or headcount. A sole practitioner with a clear, well-sourced track record can be cited ahead of a larger firm with a thinner web presence.