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1. "Who should I hire?" is now a question for AI
2. The questions to track
3. What the engines say about you, and whose pages they cite
4. Places to be mentioned
5. Reading the change week to week

Clients used to ask a colleague or a search engine which firm to call. Now they can also ask an AI assistant.

"Who should I hire?" is now a question for AI

A founder who needs an employment lawyer, or a family business looking for a new accountant, can put the question to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews or Google AI Mode. It names a few firms in order, often with a line on what each is known for, and many engines link to the pages they leaned on.

For a professional services firm, that answer can do the work of a referral. Your marketing team should know which firms come back for your work, where you do it, and whether yours is among them.

The questions to track

We sort client questions into three kinds.

Service plus place

The client wants someone nearby, or someone who knows the local rules.

• "Which law firms in [your city] handle commercial lease disputes?"
• "Recommend an accounting firm in [your region] for a small manufacturing business."

These come closest to a referral, so a firm that wins its work locally should give them the largest share.

Service plus specialism

The client wants the firm that knows a particular need well.

• "Find an accountant who specialises in cross-border tax for remote employees."
• "Which consultancies help mid-sized retailers with supply chain planning?"

If you are named here, the engines have linked your firm to that specialism.

How do I choose?

The client does not yet know what to look for.

• "How do I choose a lawyer for a contested will?"
• "When is it worth hiring a consultant for an operations review?"

The engines answer with advice and often name firms along the way. An article of yours that answers the question well gives them a page to draw on.

Write them the way a client would, with their situation, size and place. Give every practice area you want to win at least ten questions. Our guide How many questions do you need to track AI visibility? shows how the number you track sets how precise your rates are. Add your questions one by one, or accept the ones BotSay recommends from your website address, and edit them as you go.

What the engines say about you, and whose pages they cite

Five measures describe where you stand: Mention rate, Share of voice, Average rank, Your pages cited and Sentiment. For a firm, start with the last two.

Sentiment is how favourably an engine describes you, scored from 0 to 100. Clients read the sentence about a firm as closely as the name, and "known for its work with family businesses" does more for you than a bare mention. The sentences behind the score also show where an engine still names a practice you closed or a partner who has left, often traceable to a page or listing you can update.

Your pages cited is the share of the answers' links that point at your own sites. When it cites your practice pages, profiles or articles, it is working from your words. When it works from someone else's page, a directory entry or an old press piece may be setting the terms.

The list of cited pages shows where the engines use a rival's page in place of yours, and which outside sites they trust for your field. BotSay counts every source for you: which pages the engines cited and how often. Once you confirm which sites are yours and your rivals', it sorts each as yours, a rival's, or somewhere you could be.

Places to be mentioned

For a firm, the outside sites the engines lean on tend to fall into three groups:

• Directories and rankings for your profession, and the member listings of professional bodies.
• Publications your clients read: trade press, business pages, industry journals.
• Review and listing sites, including local business listings.

Start with the sites the engines already cite. Make sure your firm is listed there, completely and currently, with the services and places you want to be known for. Then find publications that quote a rival and not you, and offer your people as sources. Run listings and pitches past whoever signs off your firm's marketing.

Your own site counts too. Give the engines a page for each service in each place you work, partner profiles that describe their work, and articles that take on the "how do I choose" questions.

Reading the change week to week

Ask your questions the same way every week, and note how many answers your Mention rate rests on. A rate from a handful of answers can swing on a single reply; one from a few hundred holds steadier.

The count lets you work out a likely range for your Mention rate. As a quick check, when this week's range sits clear of last week's, the change is real. BotSay shows Mention rate with its likely range and the number of answers behind it, and shows a change in Mention rate as real only once it clears both weeks' uncertainty. Its exact test also finds real changes whose ranges overlap a little. The other four measures show the figure and how far it moved. Our guide Is my AI visibility score real? shows how to check any number, whoever produced it.

Three practice areas of ten questions on six engines is 180 answers to read, count and score every week. We built BotSay to carry that part. It asks your questions on all six engines every week, through each provider's official developer access or a licensed search-data provider, and works out the five measures for you. For every answer, it shows the searches the engine ran to write it, with every page the answer linked to. Your reading arrives in the weekly email.

Then pick the practice area where rivals are named and you are not. Fix the listing, publish the page or pitch the article, note the day it goes live, and compare the weeks after with the weeks before. When the work lands, you see it in the answers that name you.

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