Apr
28
2026
Your potential clients are asking AI who to call. Are you the answer?
I had an interesting conversation with a Partner at a Professional Services firm recently. He was telling me about all the work they’d done on their website over the past couple of years — the investment, the content, the SEO. He was really proud of it, but the results they were getting weren’t as good as they had hoped…
So, here’s the thing: When did you last Google something yourself rather than just asking ChatGPT?
Can you actually remember, or do you jump straight to a AI app?
The way your potential clients find professional services firms is changing, and its changing fast. Not in that vague, “digital transformation” way that people talk about at conferences but changing in a very specific, very practical way that directly affects whether you get the call or not.
And very few firms have caught up yet.
So, what’s actually happening?
For years, the game was SEO — Search Engine Optimisation. You optimised your website so that when someone typed “employment solicitor Manchester” or “corporate tax adviser London” into Google, you showed up near the top. Ideally, you got a click, then a website visit, and then a genuine enquiry.
SEO still matters, but it’s no longer the whole story.
Because more and more, your potential clients aren’t typing things into Google at all. They’re asking ChatGPT. They’re asking Gemini. They’re asking Copilot. And more and more they’re asking Claude.
And those tools don’t give them a list of websites to click through. They give them an answer. A recommendation. A name.
And if that name isn’t yours, you’ve not even in the running — before anyone picked up a phone, before anyone visited your website, before you even knew they were looking.
This is what the marketing world is calling AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation — and GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation. Don’t worry too much about the terminology. The point is simple: the question isn’t just “does my website rank well?” anymore. The question is “when someone asks an AI who to call, do I come up?”
Why this matters more for Professional Services businesses than for most
Think about how your clients actually make decisions. They don’t buy professional services the way they buy a book on Amazon. There’s no add-to-basket moment. There’s research, there’s conversation, there’s trust-building — and increasingly, there’s a stage that happens before any of that, where someone asks an AI to help them understand their options:
“Who are the best M&A advisors for a mid-market deal?”
“What should I look for in a recruitment firm specialising in financial services?”
“Which accountancy firms are strongest on international tax?”
Or something more complex and more specific.
These questions are being asked right now. Every day. By people who could be your clients. And the AI is giving them answers — names, firms, descriptions of what makes each one credible.
If you’re not showing up in those answers, you’re not on the shortlist. It’s as simple as that.
What’s more, with traditional SEO, a prospective client would land on your website and you’d still have a chance to impress them. With AI, the impression is already formed before they get to you. The AI has already described you — or it hasn’t. That’s a very different kind of invisibility.
So what actually makes AI recommend you?
This is where it gets interesting — and where I think there’s genuinely good news for firms that are serious about their expertise.
AI doesn’t recommend you because you’ve spent the most on your website. It recommends you because it understands you, trusts you, and has seen consistent evidence that you know your stuff.
That means a few things important things in practice.
It means writing content that actually answers questions — clearly, specifically, and in plain English. Not vague thought leadership that says a lot without really saying anything. Proper, useful answers to the questions your clients are genuinely asking. If someone asks an AI “what should I consider when restructuring my partnership?” and your firm has written something genuinely helpful about exactly that, you’re in the running.
It means being consistently visible in the places that build credibility — industry publications, professional directories, rankings, awards, even your individual partners’ LinkedIn profiles and published articles. AI pulls from all of these. Your Chambers ranking isn’t just a badge for your website. It’s an authority signal that AI systems pay attention to.
And it means making sure that what you say about yourself is clear, structured and consistent. AI gets confused by firms that describe their services differently in different places. It favours the firms that make it easy to understand exactly who they are, what they do, and who they do it for.
What can you do?
Open ChatGPT, or Copilot, or Gemini, or whichever you use. And type in the kind of question your ideal client would ask when they’re starting to look for a business like yours.
See what comes back.
Do you appear? How are you described? Are your competitors there instead?
That search — that simple, two-minute exercise — will tell you more about where you stand than most marketing audits I’ve seen.
If you’re not showing up, or if you’re being described in a way that doesn’t reflect what makes you genuinely good, that’s the gap you need to close. And the way to close it is the same way you’ve always built your reputation — by demonstrating real expertise, consistently, over time — just done in a way that AI can find, understand, and trust.
The firms that will win new clients in the next five years are the ones that show up in the answer, not just in the search results.
