The shift
Discovery is moving off the blue links.
Twenty years ago an injured client typed your practice area and a city into Google and got ten blue links. Today the answer often arrives composed, above the links, before a single click. The numbers below are measured, not predicted.
That last number cuts both ways: a firm ranking #1 on Google can be invisible in ChatGPT, and a firm that never cracked page one can dominate the AI answer if its setup is right. Citation sets are also volatile: studies find 40 to 60 percent of cited sources change month to month (Search Engine Land), so visibility is a program you run, not a box you check.
Where it hurts
PI economics punish every leak twice.
Legal keywords carry the highest average cost per click of any industry at $9.87, and competitive PI terms routinely run $50 to $200+ per click (Custom Legal CPC benchmarks; Web Tonic). Yet the average firm signs just 8 to 15% of its inbound leads, while top performers sign 18 to 28%, by fixing intake rather than buying more volume (HQ Intake). And 67% of legal leads call outside business hours, when most front desks are dark (PILMMA). Ads keep getting more expensive, AI is deciding who gets seen, and the calls marketing already paid for go to voicemail. Both leaks come out of the same fee revenue.
A note on those last three numbers, because this page holds itself to it: the click prices are published benchmarks, but the signing rates and the after-hours share come from intake practitioners who report them without a stated methodology. We are quoting them accurately and labeling them honestly, so treat them as directional, not as measurements. The only numbers we will stand behind for your firm are the ones we measure at your firm, which is what the audit does.
The stack
Two doors, one number: cost per signed case.
Get named, then answer. Janua Labs installs a measurable acquisition system, not a content package. Every capability below is labeled honestly: live means working software you can try right now, human-led means our team does the work personally, reviews every result, and shows you the raw output, in development means it does not exist yet and we will not pretend otherwise.
Janua AI Front Desk
An AI receptionist that never improvises
Answers your website visitors around the clock, says only what an attorney approved, refuses case-value and legal-advice questions, hands off the moment it is unsure, and captures a structured case file with everything needed to open a matter.
- Live24/7 web chat intake with attorney-approved answers
- LiveVoice demo you can hear: the same engine answering out loud
- LiveStructured case file emailed to your team on completion
- LiveOwner dashboard with full record of who approved what
- In developmentReal phone lines with the same guardrails — today's voice demo answers in a browser, not on a phone line
See the live demo: ask it what your case is worth and watch it refuse →
Janua AI Visibility
Get named where injured clients actually ask
One program in three rungs: an audit that shows where you stand, the fix that repairs what it finds, and the ongoing work that raises your citation share month over month. AI engines retrieve from the open web, so classic SEO is the raw material this program is built on. That is why it lives here instead of being sold as a separate package.
- LiveThe audit: free Foundation Check with every check shown, pass or fail on the requirements
- Human-ledThe fix: LegalService and Attorney schema, llms.txt, identity and directory consistency, Google Business Profile and review-health discipline
- Human-ledThe program: citation runs across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity with raw logs, location and case-type pages mapped to real intake questions, organic cost per signed case reported monthly
- Human-ledMonthly monitoring: one citation run a month compared against the last, with a variation band so an ordinary swing is never reported to you as progress
Why label it? Because most legal marketing sells a black box. If we cannot show you where a number came from, we do not put it in the report, and if a tactic is unproven we say so. That is the whole difference.
No mystique
How the AI actually decides who to name.
There is no secret GEO score. Answer engines do four understandable things, and each one is something a firm can be good or bad at.
01Background search
When someone asks an AI who to call, it quietly searches the web, ranks candidate pages, and reads the top few. If your pages are thin, blocked to AI crawlers, or missing from that background search, you are never read, so you are never named.
02Identity clarity
AI looks for one consistent story. If your firm name, phone, address, attorneys, or hours differ between your site, Google Business Profile, Avvo, and Justia, the engine reads that as noise and moves on to a firm it can pin down.
03Evidence density
Engines pull specific facts: case types, results with amounts and dates, review counts, credentials, jurisdictions. The original GEO research showed pages with real numbers and quotes get cited far more than pages full of adjectives (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024).
04Outside consensus
AI trusts what other sources say about you: reviews, directories, news mentions, bar association listings. A firm with 400 reviews and third-party coverage beats a firm with 40 reviews and a bigger ad budget, because consensus is what engines can verify.
Common questions
Asked by managing partners, answered plainly.
Is GEO just SEO with a new name?
No. SEO optimizes ranked links and the local map pack. GEO works on whether AI engines cite or recommend your firm when they compose an answer. The foundations overlap, but the success metric is citation share inside answers, not rank.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will name our firm?
No, and be wary of anyone who guarantees it. Engines are probabilistic and 40 to 60 percent of cited sources change every month. We raise the probability with identity work, evidence, and consensus, then measure continuously and show you the raw logs, so you know when you are in and when you drop out.
Does the intake assistant give legal advice?
No. It answers only from information your attorneys reviewed and approved. Case value, strategy, and anything outside the approved set get a handoff to a person, not a guess. Every answer traces to who approved it, in a record your bar association could read.
Will AI intake replace our staff?
It extends them. Nights, weekends, and overflow are where inquiries leak. The assistant screens the matter, captures what is needed to open a file, and escalates anything urgent, so your people spend their time on signed matters.
Do we still need Google Ads and LSAs?
Usually yes, while organic and AI presence ramp. The point of the stack is to make the spend you already have convert better and cost less per signed case, then reduce your dependence on rising click prices over time.
What about bar advertising rules?
Everything public follows your jurisdiction's ethics rules. We decline tactics that do not.
Related reading: How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT · Why your business isn't showing up in AI search · What the fix includes
Start with the audit. It is free, and it is yours whether you hire us or not.
The visibility audit runs live checks against your firm's site right now. If you want the full picture, ask for a firm audit: prompt-level AI visibility against your top competitors, entity and technical gaps, and an intake leak estimate in dollars. If we do not find leaks worth more than the cost of fixing them, we will tell you.
hello@janualabs.com