ChatGPT Search Just Launched. What It Means for Law Firm Websites

Short answer: As of October 31, 2024, ChatGPT can search the web and cite the pages it used. For a law firm that means a second place, next to Google, where a prospective client can be told which firms to consider. It is early and the volume is small. But two things are already clear from testing legal queries: the answers pull from pages that state facts plainly, and they credit sources by name. Make sure the crawler is allowed, make sure the firm's pages answer questions directly, and do not pay anyone who claims to know the ranking factors yet.

What actually launched?

OpenAI added a search mode to ChatGPT for paid users on October 31, with a wider rollout promised. When the model decides a question needs current information, it runs a web search, reads the results, writes an answer, and shows the sources as links. The prototype, announced as SearchGPT in July, ran on a crawler OpenAI calls OAI-SearchBot, which is separate from GPTBot, the crawler used for training data.

That separation matters. A firm can block training and still allow search. Many sites blocked GPTBot in 2023 and 2024; that block does not, by itself, block OAI-SearchBot.

What do the answers look like for legal questions?

We ran the obvious queries this month: "divorce lawyer in Pasadena", "what happens at a DUI arraignment in Los Angeles", "how much does a living trust cost in California". Three patterns, with the caveat that this is two weeks of observation and not a study:

• Directories and publishers first. Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Nolo and local news appear in the source lists far more often than individual firm sites.
• Firm sites appear when they answer a specific question. A firm page that explains the arraignment process at a named courthouse was cited; the same firm's "Criminal Defense" overview was not.
• The quoted passage is short. One to three sentences, lifted from near the top of a section, usually the sentence that states a fact.

The answers also vary run to run. The same question asked twice produced different firm names in about half our tests. Anyone selling "guaranteed ChatGPT placement" this month is selling something that does not exist.

Should a firm allow OAI-SearchBot?

Yes, unless the firm has a specific reason to keep its public pages out of an index. The robots.txt entry is:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

Check the current file first. Some site builders and security plugins shipped blanket blocks of anything with "GPT" or "OpenAI" in the name during 2023, and those rules sometimes match the search crawler by prefix. If the firm wants to block training while allowing search, block GPTBot and allow OAI-SearchBot as two separate entries.

What should change on the site?

The same things that were already good practice for Google, now with a clearer reason:

1. Answer the question in the first paragraph. A section headed "How much does a living trust cost in Los Angeles?" should begin with the range and what changes it, not with three sentences about how every family is different.
2. One page per question. The cited pages in our tests were specific. See the practice-area page structure we published last month.
3. Name the firm, the city and the attorney on the page. The answer needs a name to credit. A page that says "our office" and "the attorney" gives it nothing to cite.
4. Keep the directory profiles accurate. Since the directories are what the answers lean on, a wrong phone number on Avvo now shows up in a new place.

What should a firm not do yet?

• Do not restructure the site around ChatGPT. Google still sends nearly all the traffic. Do the four items above because they help both.
• Do not add hidden text, AI-specific pages or "prompt" content. There is no evidence any of it does anything, and hidden text has been a Google penalty for twenty years.
• Do not sign a contract with "AI SEO" in the title. Nobody has enough data to price it honestly. We include the four items above in ordinary law firm SEO work because they are ordinary SEO work.

What will we watch?

Which sources the answers cite for Los Angeles legal queries, month over month; whether firm sites gain share from directories; and whether the run-to-run variance settles. We will publish what we find when there is enough of it to mean something. In the meantime the free visibility check includes the ChatGPT queries for a firm's practice and city, so a firm can see whether it is being named at all. The background on how AI answers choose sources is in the AI search visibility guide.