Answer Engine Optimization for Lawyers

Answer Engine Popularity

As answer engines grow in popularity, the stakes for winning the game of user eyeballs grows in tandem. Higher stakes means more opportunity, which can only mean more competition. The winners of today aren’t necessarily the winners of tomorrow, but here is how market share shakes out as of June 2025:

With ChatGPT making up the lions share of referral traffic in 2025, it is vital your website is optimized for the signals that ChatGPT rewards, including:

• An emphasis on structured data. Schema.org, FAQ, and HTML tags make your content easy to parse and understand for LLM crawlers.
• Content that is written in a conversational style and easily understood.
• Listings in cited sources. Run a simple query through ChatGPT like “recommendations for a personal injury lawyer in new york” and you’re bound to get results like this:
  
  At the bottom of these results, you’ll see the option to see what sources were cited to generate these results.
  
  Click that button, you want to chase placement everywhere listed in those results. ChatGPT is showing you the roadmap, don’t ignore it.

Differences Between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Both SEO and AEO share a common primary objective: To provide users with content that fulfills their search intent. That means building authoritative, trustworthy, conversational content and presenting it in a format easily digestible to the end user. However, there are a set of key differences between the goals, mechanisms, and result tracking between optimization for search and optimization for answer engines like ChatGPT.

Goals of SEO vs. AEO

While AEO and SEO have a shared objective, the user experience (and goals of optimization, by extension) are wildly different. While the real money in SEO is driving transactional and commercial intent to convert on your website, AI optimization tends to target visitors higher in the funnel and provide an educational touchpoint in the users journey to eventually choose your law firm. The table below goes into more detail on the differences in how we think about goal setting for search engines vs. answer engines:

Tracking Results of SEO vs. AEO

The biggest difference in tracking SEO vs. AEO effectiveness really boils down to the maturity of the ecosystem. SEO has been around for 20+ years and the tools, methodologies, and frameworks are well understood and adopted. AEO is nascent. Tracking and auditing tools pop up daily, but there is no “source of truth” as it were.

Content Development and Optimization

Optimizing content for AI platform visibility means ensuring it’s appropriately annotated, marked up with schema descriptors, and is concise and human-readable. These legacy SEO plugins and SAAS have bolted on new functionality for AEO that gets you most of the way there:

• Yoast – WordPress plugin that makes writing optimized content simpler.
• Surfer SEO – content analyzer and assistant to build content that satisfies searcher intent and is appropriately focused on the right keywords
• AlsoAsked – visualize the “people also asked” tree from Google

Visibility Tracking

Brand visibility and sentiment monitoring, citation tracking, and visibility scoring are some of the key bits of functionality provided by tools like:

• Profound – having just raised a $20m Series A, expect more cutting-edge developments from this AI visibility tracking and optimization platform.
• Higoodie – still in beta with no open signup, claims to have a number of killer features including an AI content assistant, attribution hub, and search trend explorer.
• AI Visibility – a narrower platform then the other 2, but with a narrower price tag to match. As the name suggests, focused primarily on visibility monitoring with strategic optimization ideas.

As a cutting-edge AI optimization agency, MeanPug is also pioneering AEO visibility and optimization software under the banner of the soon to be released pugnacious.ai. More on this to come!

Auditing

At the end of the day, ChatGPT and other answer engines rely on content just like traditional search engines. So, it’s unsurprising that there’s meaningful crossover between AEO and SEO tools when it comes to auditing and monitoring your site for issues and opportunities. Some of our favorites for this include:

• ScreamingFrog – an oldy but a goodie. Screaming frog has been around since keyword stuffing was considered best practice, but if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. There’s still no quicker way to crawl a site and run complex analysis on both substance and structure. While other tools might have a cleaner UX, ScreamingFrog is still a pro’s best friend.
• ContentKing – a great balance of simple to use when you want it to be, and highly customizable when you need it to be. We love ContentKing as a sanity check to passively monitor your sitemap for regressions and new issues.
• SEMRush – Yeah yeah, I know we called it a legacy tool, but it still offers a comprehensive suite of functionality for monitoring your site and auditing for common issues applicable to answer engine optimization as much as search engine.