Are Your Law Firm Practice Group Pages AI-Friendly?
Just as the rise of generative AI tools has given new relevance to awards and rankings, there’s another facet of legal communications drawing attention from the LLMs: practice group pages.
The conventional wisdom (and Google Analytics) said that firms should focus on attorney biographies and “Contact Us” pages, as they were the sections that drove the most traffic from a traditional human audience. It wasn’t uncommon to see just 4 to 5 percent of website visits going to practice pages.
However, our new robot overlords consume law firm websites differently, and it’s evident that LLMs are trained to scout practice pages early and often.
Consider these outputs from a recent AI visibility analysis for a boutique litigation firm. Using software that rotates IP addresses and generates thousands of queries, we asked different AI platforms about the firm’s practice areas (“Who are the best lawyers for XYZ litigation?”) and tracked the sources.
- On ChatGPT, law firm practice pages were 13 of the top 25 most-cited URLs. As a category, law firm practice pages surpassed all other source types; Wikipedia pages were second, with four in the top 25.
- On Perplexity, law firm practice pages were 14 of the top 25 most-cited URLs. The next-highest-performing category, awards and rankings, had four.
- In Google AI Overviews, law firm practice pages comprised 15 of the top 25 most-cited URLs. The category in second place, awards and rankings, had three.
While every firm’s context is different – and LLM parameters are changing every day – law firms that want to be visible in AI queries must ensure their practice pages are positioned to deliver the information LLMs want in the format they want it in.
The Anatomy of an “AI Friendly” Practice Page
The team at MantyWeb thoroughly researched the factors driving performance in AI visibility. Many will feel familiar to law firms that actively engage in SEO; they span site setup, content presentation and key content ingredients.
Key factors include:
Site Setup
- AI Bot Access: This is a straightforward issue, but an imperative one. Does your site allow AI bots to crawl it? If you have restricted their access, you will not be visible in any AI answers.
- Schema Markup: Have you added code to the back end of your website to help robots understand the context of your page?
Content Style
- Readability: Is the page easy to scan? Take cues from presenting to humans here; break up long sentences, avoid jargon, use subheads as visual cues and break up long lists with bullet points.
- Length: Does your page have sufficient substance? AI bots want to see 300 or more words.
- Active Voice: Is most of your prose in active voice?
Content Ingredients
- Statistics: Does your page show authority through data? Does your practice page provide quantitative evidence (number of litigators, number of verdicts, number of states covered)? Do you provide external data about the market (e.g. XYZ litigation claims are up 25 percent)?
- Citations: Do you link to reliable external sources? (Recall that LLMs love legal awards and rankings; your Chambers, Best Lawyers, Best Law Firms and Super Lawyers pages could be excellent contenders.) Aim for three.
- Content Age: LLMs want to see that your information is current. Is there a clear sign of the content age, such as “Updated January 2026”?
- Definitions: Do you provide definitions of key terms? Try to include two.
- FAQs: Do you provide an on-page Q&A section that can help LLMs answer user queries?
(MantyWeb provides a free scanner you can use on your site’s content as well as a paid tool that tracks which pages LLMs are visiting.)
Where to Go From Here
Does this mean that you should rewrite all of your practice pages to adhere to AI’s preferences?
Time for the classic legal answer: It depends.
Take into account your brand and your clientele. For a consumer-facing family law firm, definitions and Q&A are value-adds for the human visitors as well as the robots. But if your firm serves a sophisticated audience, tread carefully; the general counsel of a publicly traded company may be put off thinking you need to define “securities” for them or seeing very rudimentary FAQs.
Despite the neverending AI buzz, you are still in a people business, and your website must not alienate, confuse or turn off your human visitors in an attempt to court the robot variety.
Consider how important AI visibility – and AI leads – are to your overall business development strategy, and act accordingly. If nothing else, checking that your site is available to AI bots and that your schema markup is complete and relevant can boost your visibility without changing any client-facing material.
Finally, remember that optimized practice pages are a key part of LLM output, but they are not the only part. AI tools also consult attorney awards and rankings, trade media, Wikipedia and even Reddit. As this nascent field evolves, the best defense and offense remains a well-rounded communications strategy that keeps your law firm visible across channels.
