Law firm visibility in AI search: a jurisdiction first audit checklist and reproducible citation test

For a law firm, visibility in AI search is decided first by the advertising rules of the jurisdiction you practise in, and only then by anything technical. So the honest count to lead with is the number of jurisdictions for which we have read the current primary regulator material, and that number is one: India. The instrument is the Advocates Act 1961 together with the Bar Council of India Rules on standards of professional conduct and etiquette, Chapter II of Part VI, whose Rule 36 restricts advertising and solicitation by an advocate and was amended to permit an advocate to furnish specified particulars on their own website subject to a declaration of accuracy. For every other jurisdiction this page names the regulator to read and states plainly that we have not read it. The citation test below is published in full and has not yet been run for any law firm.

The answer, first

Three statements, in the order they matter.

A small, accurately scoped review beats a large claim. One jurisdiction reviewed, named, with the instrument cited, is a fact. "Compliant in all jurisdictions" is a sentence nobody can check and every careful reader discounts.

Read the rule from the regulator, not from an article about the rule. Including this one. The Bar Council of India publishes its rules itself, state bar councils issue their own directions, and both change. Read the current text, write down the date you read it, and take the borderline questions to your own bar council or to counsel who handles professional conduct.

The pages that win in this category are usually not about your firm. We have this on record from our own work in the legal sector. On 17 September 2026, on questions about how to look a case up, official court portals took every position above any commercial product in Claude's answers, and it said plainly that no commercial product should rank above the official portal for a question about using that portal. A firm that explains a procedure and links the official portal is joining that answer. A firm that tries to outrank the portal is not.

How it was measured

Two separate methods, and they should never be mixed in one number.

Method one: the jurisdiction review, five steps per jurisdiction.

• Name the regulator with authority over advertising and solicitation by lawyers in that jurisdiction. Not the bar association, the regulator, because in several places they are different bodies.
• Get the primary instrument from the regulator's own site. The statute, the rules, the code of conduct, the current amendments. A summary is not the instrument.
• Record the citation to the rule level: the act, the chapter, the part, the rule number, and the amendment if any.
• Record the date you read it, per jurisdiction, and set a review date.
• Write down the open questions that the text does not settle, and route them to a person qualified in that jurisdiction rather than resolving them yourself.

The reportable number from this method is the count of jurisdictions completed through all five steps. Nothing else counts. A jurisdiction where somebody read a blog post is not a reviewed jurisdiction.

Method two: the citation test, for one jurisdiction at a time.

• The question set: 30 questions in five shapes, six of each. Practice area with a city, for example "commercial dispute lawyer in Pune". Procedure, for example "how do I check the status of my case". Cost, for example "what does a cheque bounce case cost". Need, for example "do I need a lawyer to reply to a legal notice". Document, for example "what should a rent agreement include".
• The blind rule. Your firm's name never appears in any prompt, wrapper or earlier turn. We hold the reading that shows why: on 27 July 2026 the same 78 questions were run twice in one day in the clawlaw.in programme, and the run whose wrapper named the brand had ChatGPT ranking it first on almost every question, while the blind run on the same day put it second by breadth and absent altogether from the questions it most wanted to win. The branded run was discarded.
• Three engines, three repetitions, fresh session each time, memory off, location recorded, no follow up before scoring. 30 questions times 3 engines times 3 runs is 270 observations per wave.
• Six things scored per observation. Whether any law firm is named at all. Whether your firm is named. Whether a URL on your own domain is cited. Whether your domain is the first source. Whether the answer instead directs the reader to an official source such as a court portal, a bar council or a legal services authority. And whether everything the answer says about your firm is correct.
• The fifth score is the one that matters most in this sector, because an answer that sends a person to the official portal is a correct answer, not a failure of your marketing. Counting it separately stops you optimising against a result you should not want to change.
• Record the search claim as a claim. Log the visible sources, then ask the assistant afterwards how many questions it searched for, and keep both records. In three separate batches of our September 2026 audit on our own domain, the assistant withdrew its own earlier statement, saying it could not honestly substantiate the claim that it had run a live search for each question.

What the numbers were

Jurisdictions reviewed against current primary regulator material: one.

• India. The Advocates Act 1961, and the Bar Council of India Rules on standards of professional conduct and etiquette, Chapter II of Part VI, Rule 36, which restricts advertising and solicitation by advocates, together with the amendment permitting an advocate to furnish specified particulars on their own website subject to a declaration of accuracy. State bar councils may also issue directions, and those are read per state. Read the current text at the Bar Council of India's own site and record your date.

Jurisdictions not reviewed, with the regulator you would have to read. We make no claim about any of these five and list them so the scope of this page is unambiguous.

• England and Wales: the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and for barristers the Bar Standards Board.
• New York: the New York Rules of Professional Conduct, where the advertising provisions sit in the rules beginning at 7.1, administered through the Appellate Division.
• Singapore: the Legal Profession (Professional Conduct) Rules under the Legal Profession Act, with the Law Society of Singapore's guidance.
• Australia: the Legal Profession Uniform Law and the legal services commissioner in the relevant state.
• United Arab Emirates: the Ministry of Justice and the applicable emirate level authority.

Law firm citation tests run: none, as of 29 September 2026. The 30 question set has not been run for any law firm, so this page carries no count of firms named, no count of own domain citations and no rate. It carries the protocol and this sentence instead.

What we do hold from the legal sector, and its limit. Our dated work in this sector is on clawlaw.in, which is legal technology rather than a law firm. It is the nearest real evidence we have and the difference matters, so it is stated every time.

• On 27 July 2026, asked 78 buyer questions with no brand named, ChatGPT confirmed it had run no live web search for any of them, so the whole reading described what the model remembered rather than what it could find.
• In that same reading the order by breadth was ProVakil on 28 questions, CLAW on 21 and Legistify on 18.
• On 18 August 2026, across eighteen blind commercial questions, ChatGPT made the company the top source on exactly one, and named its comparison page in the answer as still being the vendor's own editorial page.
• On 17 September 2026, across six questions, no third party review or directory source made it into any answer at all. One well known review site appeared in the raw results and was discarded, because the list it offered was of American products and so was not an answer to an India question.
• On 6 August 2026, fourteen days after publication, ChatGPT cited clawlaw.in/blog/how-to-check-a-companys-court-cases-in-india for a vendor due diligence question, in a zone where the same question set had named the company nowhere at baseline. That is a procedural explainer being cited, which is the shape this page recommends.

What this cannot tell you

• This is not legal advice and not a compliance opinion. It tells you which instrument to read and where. What it permits for your firm, in your state, for your practice, is a question for your bar council or for counsel.
• One jurisdiction is one jurisdiction. Nothing here applies to a firm practising anywhere other than India, beyond the instruction to read the named regulator.
• The rules change, and so do their interpretations. A dated review is a dated review. Set the recheck date when you write the date.
• The clawlaw.in evidence is legal technology, not a law firm. Buyers of software and clients looking for a lawyer ask different questions, and the assistants answer them from different sources.
• No position can be promised. We do not guarantee a place in any assistant's answer. Disclosure: we are the vendor of AI Knows Us, which sells this measurement.
• A compliant page can still be a bad page. Permission to publish is not the same as having something worth quoting.

Sources and change log

Sources. For the jurisdiction review: the Advocates Act 1961 and the Bar Council of India Rules as published by the Bar Council of India. Read them at the source and record your own date. For the dated results: the clawlaw.in programme of July to September 2026, recorded in Tier_1/GEO_BASELINE_RESULTS_2026-07-27.md, Tier_1/GEO_GAP_ANALYSIS_2026-08-18.md and Tier_1/claude_response_17_09_audit.md, and the aiknowsus.com audit of September 2026 captured to geo-audits/aiknowsus-com/. The 6 August 2026 citation can be checked from outside today.

Change log. 29 September 2026: first published. One jurisdiction reviewed, India, with the instrument cited. Five jurisdictions named as not reviewed. The 30 question citation test published and not yet run for any law firm. When a second jurisdiction is reviewed, the count in the first paragraph changes from one to two on the same day the instrument and date are added here.

Common questions

Can an Indian law firm publish content at all?

The rules distinguish between soliciting work and providing information, and they have been amended to permit specified particulars on a firm's own website subject to a declaration. That distinction is the whole question, and the safe practice is to read Rule 36 and the current amendment yourself, keep your pages informational rather than promotional, and put anything borderline to your bar council before publishing it rather than after.

Which pages are safest to publish first?

Procedural explanations of things people genuinely need to understand: how a notice period works, what documents a particular filing needs, how to check a case status on the official portal, what a stage of a proceeding involves. They are informational by nature, they are what people actually ask, and they are the shape we have watched get cited. On 6 August 2026 the page ChatGPT cited in our own programme was exactly that kind of page.

Should we try to rank above the court's own portal?

No, and you will not. On 17 September 2026 Claude put official court portals above every commercial product on the questions about using those portals, and said plainly that no commercial product should rank above the official portal for a question about using it. The winning move is to be the page that explains the portal and links it.

Do client reviews help, and are they allowed?

Treat this as a rules question before a marketing question, because soliciting testimonials is exactly the area the conduct rules address. Ask your bar council. Separately, note what our own data says about review sites in India: across six questions on 17 September 2026, no third party review or directory source reached any answer at all.

Can we publish our fees?

Ask your bar council, because fee publication sits close to the advertising rules and the answer is not the same everywhere. Where it is permitted, a fee stated with its scope and date is the single most quotable thing on a professional services site, which is why the question is worth asking properly rather than assuming the answer is no.

How often should the citation test be run?

Once a quarter per jurisdiction, with the same 30 questions and the same wording, and re-read the regulator material at the same time. Two dated readings six months apart are worth far more than one reading, because the interesting question is what changed.

What to do first

Do the five step jurisdiction review for your own jurisdiction this week and write the date on it, because everything else you publish depends on it. Then run the 30 question citation test blind on two assistants and count how often any firm is named at all. In most legal categories that first count is the surprise, and it decides whether your next page should be about your firm or about a procedure.