Your Agency Says 'AI-Powered SEO'. Here Is What to Ask

Every law firm SEO proposal now says AI somewhere. It can mean the agency writes your pages with a model and publishes them unread, or that it measures whether AI engines cite you, or nothing at all. Seven questions that separate the three, what a good answer to each sounds like, and the two answers that should end the meeting.

Short answer: "AI-powered" in a proposal describes one of three things: the agency uses a model to produce content faster (which can be fine or can be a liability, depending on who reads it before it goes live); the agency optimizes and measures for AI answer engines (which is real work with a method behind it); or the agency has added the phrase to the same package it sold in 2022. Seven questions tell them apart. The two answers that end the meeting: "we publish AI-written content without attorney review" and "our AI visibility score is proprietary".

The seven questions

1. "Show me a page you produced for a law firm client, and tell me who wrote it and who reviewed it."

A good answer names a writer, a reviewing attorney at the client firm, and a process. A model may have drafted; a person with legal knowledge edited; the client's lawyer approved. A bad answer is a page that was generated and published. Under California Rules of Professional Conduct 5.3 and 7.1, the firm is responsible for the content; a page nobody at the firm read is a page the firm has vouched for without knowing what it says.

2. "Which AI engines do you measure, with what query list, how many runs, how often?"

A good answer is specific: five surfaces, forty to sixty questions fixed for the year, three runs, monthly, logged, with the misses recorded. See the method. A bad answer is a score with no list. A worse answer is "our tool handles that".

3. "What is the citation rate for a comparable firm you work with, and what was it when you started?"

Not a guarantee; a track record with a method behind it. Low single digits at the start and a real number now, described by engine and question type, is a credible answer. "Most of our clients are in the top three on ChatGPT" is not a thing anyone can show.

4. "What would you change on my site in the first ninety days, specifically?"

Named pages, named fixes. The courthouse pages the firm is missing, the schema errors, the review pace, the directory mismatches, the widget that fails Core Web Vitals. If the answer is a phase diagram, ask again.

5. "How is the AI work different from the SEO work, line by line?"

The honest answer is that most of it is the same: specific pages, entity consistency, reviews, technical health, with a measurement added. An agency charging a separate "GEO" line should be able to say what is in it that is not in the SEO line. Usually it is the measurement and the earned-mention work. If it cannot, the line is a margin.

6. "What will you not do?"

A good agency will say: no incentivized reviews, no outcome claims, no "best lawyer" pages, no content the attorney has not approved, no blocking of AI crawlers to "protect content", no llms.txt sold as a ranking factor. An agency with no list has not thought about the bar rules.

7. "If I leave in month four, what do I have?"

Every page, every account, every credential, the query list and the citation log. The contract terms piece covers the rest.

What good answers sound like, together

An agency that answers well describes a process a partner could audit: people writing and reviewing, a fixed measurement, named deliverables, and a list of things it refuses to do. It uses the model as a tool and says so. It reports calls and citations, not sessions and scores.

The two answers that end the meeting

"We generate and publish; it's faster." The firm is publishing legal information it has not read. Beyond the bar exposure, the pages will be generic, undated, and unciteable, because the model was not at the courthouse.

"Our AI visibility score is proprietary." A number that cannot be reproduced from a query list is a number that cannot go down. The agency report piece explains what to look for instead.

Does Isonn use AI?

Yes, as a drafting and research tool, with every page written to a brief, edited by a person, checked against the current law and the courthouse, and approved by the client's attorney before publication. The measurement is the method we publish. The refusals are in the pricing page terms. Ask us the seven questions; the answers are on the site.

Where to start?

Before any proposal, run the free visibility check. It gives the firm a citation baseline and a page audit that any agency's ninety-day plan can be held against. The comparison of the main Los Angeles agencies, on these criteria, is in the best law firm SEO agencies page.