Can AI find your firm?

Only 3 of 105 scanned business sites (2.9%) opened with a passage an AI engine could lift as a quotable answer. The check evaluated whether the first substantial paragraph after the main heading is self-contained, specific, and attributable. For a law firm, this means a potential client asking AI for a local attorney recommendation almost never gets a firm-specific answer -- there is nothing specific to quote from the practice pages.

Of the 99 sites that failed, 84 placed their first concrete, citable fact three or more scrolls below the main heading. The first specific claim appeared after a hero line, a tagline, and a list of practice areas. For a law firm, the practice areas list that fills the top of most sites does not give AI a quotable answer -- it gives the engine a category label and nothing more.

12.7% of 102 scanned business sites returned HTTP 403 to an AI crawler while robots.txt explicitly allowed it. In every case the mismatch was invisible to the site owner -- a firewall setting, almost certainly a CDN default, that nobody had reviewed. A law firm in this situation is excluded from AI-sourced referrals even if the firm's staff believe the site is open and indexed.

7 of 60 scanned small business sites (12%) turned away a search-class AI crawler -- the kind that retrieves live pages to answer a user query and may link back to the source -- with no corresponding rule in robots.txt. A law firm that turns away AI search crawlers without a matching robots.txt rule is not making a decision -- it is inheriting a default it may never know about.

A study measuring what lifts pages into AI-generated answers found that adding attributed quotations produced approximately 41% position-adjusted visibility lift. The signals that worked were substance signals: statistics, quotations, and cited sources. For a law firm, pages that cite specific outcomes, case facts, or attributed statistics are more likely to appear in AI answers than pages that describe practice areas in general terms.