5 AI Search KPIs Every Legal Marketer Should Track: Key Insights from Our Webinar

​Not long ago, Keith Edwards, President and Chief Business Development Officer here at Good2bSocial, received an inquiry from a major US company interested in working with our agency. Ten minutes into the meeting, he asked the question he always asks: how did you find us?

The answer wasn't a Google search. It wasn't a referral. It was Claude AI.

"I share that not to brag," Keith told attendees during our recent webinar, AI Visibility Decoded: Tracking and Optimizing for Success," but because it confirms that the strategies we've been building at Good2bSocial are already effective for us."

This story gets at something every legal marketer must reckon with: your potential clients are using AI to find and vet legal services. You need to ask yourself: Does your firm show up? If it does, are AI your mentions even accurate?

The Rules Have Changed. Have Your Metrics?

For well over a decade, law firm marketing meant chasing page-one rankings. Track your impressions, watch your click-through rates, repeat. Traditional SEO isn't dead, but in a world where prospects increasingly rely on platforms like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity to connect with legal services, it’s not enough.

We’re experiencing what Director of SEO and AIO, Zach Laroche, called "the great decoupling." For years, impressions and clicks moved together; more eyeballs meant more traffic. That relationship has broken apart. AI-generated answers are driving enormous impression volume, but your prospects increasingly get answers without ever clicking a blue link to your site.

"Your first impression is no longer your home page or your traditional search listing," said Emily Andreas, Good2bsocial’s Assistant Director of SEO and AIO. "It's really whatever shows up inside of an AI-generated answer: the summarized response a user sees before they even click through, if they ever even do."

This raises a question your current analytics dashboard probably can't answer: what does AI actually say about your firm?

AI Gets Things Wrong. A Lot.

Before we get into the metrics, here's something that should make you uncomfortable: AI answers aren’t always accurate. In fact, these platforms get it wrong more than you might think. Take, for example, the partner who emailed Zach, concerned that attorneys who had left the practice were still being mentioned in connection with a matter the firm had successfully handled.

“She also wanted to know whether it would make sense to publish content on the firm's own site to create a source of truth,” Zach recalled. “My answer was yes.”

This isn't a fluke. According to Search Engine Land, one recent analysis found that Google's AI Overviews answered correctly just 85% of the time when running on Gemini 2, and 91% on Gemini 3. At five trillion searches a year, that 9% error rate translates to tens of millions of wrong answers every hour.

Bottom line? Firms that actively optimize for LLMs can shape their AI mentions. Those that don’t are leaving it to chance.

The 5 AI Search KPIs Your Firm Should Be Tracking

To optimize for AI, you need to track the right metrics. But according to an informal poll host and CEO Belinda DiGiambattista ran at the start of our webinar, many firms aren't tracking any AI metrics at all.

So what should you pay attention to?

1. AI Mentions

By tracking mentions, you can answer the most fundamental question: Do the LLMs even know your firm exists? Anytime a platform includes your firm's name in response to a relevant prompt, you've earned an AI mention.

What drives AI mentions?. It's not just your website, it's your entire digital footprint. Schema markup, meta titles, meta descriptions, your presence on social platforms like LinkedIn, and third-party references across the web all provide signals to the LLMs. AI models aren't just evaluating what your firm says about itself; they're reading what everyone else says about it as well.

One telling observation from Emily and Zach's testing: firms with clear, consistent brand names in their title tags and meta descriptions showed up more prominently in AI responses. Firms without them blended into the background. Even in the age of AI, the basics of SEO still drive real results.

2. Citations

You’ve earned a citation when an AI model doesn’t just name your firm, but links its domain as a source.

"A mention alone shows visibility," Emily noted. "But a cited mention shows validation. It suggests that the AI has identified authoritative content that reinforces why that firm belongs in the answer."

What will get your domain cited by the LLMs? Based on what we're seeing across our clients, the models tend to favor thought leadership and insights, time-sensitive content, attorney bios, and practice area pages. Pay attention to what's getting cited, and you'll start to understand what AI considers credible from your site.

Another pattern we’ve noted: Firms that publish their awards and rankings on their own sites — rather than relying solely on directories like Chambers or Best Lawyers — send a powerful credibility signal to the LLMs. When an AI model sees consistent information on both the third-party directory and your own site, it’s far more likely to cite the firm’s domain directly.

What’s the takeaway? If you want to improve your firm’s citation metrics, don’t rely solely on third-party directories and rankings to establish your authority with the LLMs. Publish it on your firm’s site, with a link back to the directory listing. That kind of triangulation of information across multiple sources is exactly what gives AI the confidence to cite your firm directly.

3. Cited Pages

While citations tell you how often your firm’s domain is referenced, this KPI tells you how many distinct URLs the LLMs are pulling in from your site. Think of cited pages as a measure of breadth; how widely AI draws from your content, not just how frequently.

Knowing your cited pages metric is particularly useful for spotting internal linking opportunities. If your insights pages consistently appear as cited pages, use them. By linking those pages to relevant practice area pages and attorney bios, you give the AI models a clearer path through your site.

4. AI Audience

AI audience measures the total pool of users exposed to prompts that trigger mentions of your firm. It's a broad number that fluctuates with algorithm updates, so think of it as a general indicator of reach rather than an exact measurement.

The AI audience is a great metric for determining where opportunities lie. A prompt like "energy law firms for litigation" attracts a very different audience than "top employment defense law firms." When you understand that difference, you can focus your efforts on the keywords and phrases that will deliver the most impact.

5. AI Visibility Score

This is your aggregate score (out of 100) measuring how consistently your firm appears in AI-generated responses across relevant topics, compared to similar brands. You can look at your score holistically or break it down by LLM (ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, and others), by topic, or by specific prompt.

It’s not unusual for a firm to score high for one LLM, but significantly worse with another. That's not a problem; it's information. If your form is thriving on one platform, look at what it's citing, and use that insight to inform your visibility strategy for the AI models where you're underperforming.

How Good2bSocial Tracks and Benchmarks AI Visibility

Now that you know which AI visibility KPIs to track, how do you actually go about tracking them? While tools are available, none were built specifically for a law firm's unique needs. Their shortcomings in that regard are what led Good2bSocial to develop its own AI reporting framework that brings all five metrics into a single view.

"We can not only track performance," said Zach, "but work with our clients to identify gaps and uncover opportunities to guide strategy going forward and improve AI visibility."

Good2bSocial's AI reporting framework also improves on one key area where we’ve found many off-the-shelf tools truly lacking: benchmarks.

"Their benchmarks did not always make sense," said Zach. "There were many times that smaller firms would be looked at as direct competitors to a site like Chambers or Best Lawyers, who obviously have really broad coverage, a lot of traffic, and it's just not apples to apples."

When those comparisons get baked into your visibility score, the numbers look better than they are, and you lose the ability to see where you actually stand.

"We've actually created our own benchmarks for legal looking at firm size," said Zach, "and that has proven to be a lot more accurate in terms of when we're looking at individual firms."

In segmenting for everything from AmLaw 100 firms down to boutiques with under 10 attorneys, our framework has revealed one thing worth noting: smaller practices tend to score closer to midsize firms than you'd expect, a signal that content quality and strategy matter more than firm size.

Your AI Visibility Strategy Starts Here

In an era of AI-driven search, tracking the right metrics is key to maintaining and enhancing your firm's online visibility. By focusing on the five KPIs discussed in our webinar, your firm will be better positioned to attract the attention of the LLMs and pull ahead of its competitors/

If you'd like to view the full webinar, the recording is available here.

Need more guidance? Schedule a free consultation to learn how our SEO/AIO team can help. Contact Good2bSocial today.