The degree to which a law firm appears in AI search engine answers when consumers ask for legal services.
AI visibility is a measurable property of a business or professional service: the degree to which AI search engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and adjacent retrieval-based generative systems — return the firm's name when consumers ask the engine for a service in the firm's category.
Operationally, AI visibility is scored by running a curated prompt set against each engine and recording whether the firm is named, in what position, and across how many engines. A four-engine, twelve-prompt audit produces a score on a 0–16 scale: zero means the firm does not appear in any engine for any prompt; sixteen means it appears in the top three of every engine for every prompt.
AI visibility replaces traditional search ranking as the most important upper-funnel marketing metric in the AI-mediated consumer journey. When a consumer asks an AI engine for "the best [profession] in [city]," the engine returns a short prose answer naming three to five firms. The consumer's shortlist is constructed by that answer. A firm not in the answer is not in the consideration set — regardless of how well it ranks in Google.
The correlation between Google SEO rank and AI visibility, across the dataset described in the methodology, is approximately 0.076 percent. Strong SEO performance does not transfer. Both metrics must be measured independently.
AI visibility is the output. The inputs are described in Answer Engine Optimization and decomposed into the five layers of the signal stack. The single most important individual input is citation density.
The free diagnostic at isyourfirmaiinvisible.com returns an AI visibility score for any law firm in about sixty seconds.