For firms in the Netherlands whose clients ask AI first
First find out where you are missing: on which client questions, and in which of the three AI answers. Then give the AI something to quote: a page on your site that answers that exact question, in your clients' language, and says who you help and where. Then ask the same questions again a few weeks later, because the answers also move on their own.
This page rests on my published measurements of firms in the Netherlands. Where a point is a correlation and not a proven cause, it says so.
Ask your clients' questions, not your own name. A client does not type your firm's name. They ask who can help with a refused permit, a dismissal, a mortgage on a temporary contract. A firm can come up on one such question and be absent from the next, so the useful result is a list of questions, not a yes or no.
Check all three answers. ChatGPT, Google's AI Overview and Google's AI Mode are different systems and they disagree. In my measurement of immigration lawyers on 27 September 2026, 4 of the 11 firms that Google's answers named on at least two of the eighteen buyer questions never came up in ChatGPT's answers to the same questions.
Expect Google to stay silent on some questions. Google does not show an AI Overview on every search. On 22 September 2026 Google showed no AI Overview on any of the five "who should I hire" questions about immigration lawyers, while AI Mode answered all five. Write that down as "no answer", not as "not named".
A link under the answer is not a mention. Google lists its sources under the answer. A firm whose page appears only there was used as a source; the answer did not name it to the reader. Count the two separately.
Ask again on another day. The list rewrites itself. Asked the same questions two days apart, with nothing changed, Google's AI Mode returned a different set of firms on 16 of the 18 buyer questions. One round describes a day, not your position.
The step-by-step version, with how to set up a browser profile that does not know you, is on How to check.
Across 110 firms where I could measure it, firms with three or more pages dedicated to a single client question are named more than five times as often as firms with none: 56% against 10%. That is a correlation, not a mechanism. Firms that write such pages tend to be more specialised in the first place. So treat a page as a reasonable bet that you can test, not as a guarantee.
Use the client's question as the heading. Answer it in the first two sentences. Then give the detail. Say plainly who you help, where, and in which language: "employment lawyer in Amsterdam for international employees" is something an answer can repeat; "full-service legal partner" is not.
Put your address, the names of the people who do the work, your registrations and, if you publish them, your fees on your own site in plain text. When an answer names a firm, it usually says what the firm does and for whom. Make sure your site contains that sentence about you.
Look at the sources listed under the answers to your clients' questions. If the same directory, guide or portal keeps coming up, being listed there correctly is part of the work. If the sources are your competitors' own pages, that tells you which questions they wrote for.
If your clients ask in English, the page has to exist in English. The same question asked in Dutch can name a different set of firms.
Check that your robots.txt does not block the crawlers that fetch pages for these answers, such as OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search and Googlebot for Google. ChatGPT search draws on outside search indexes, Bing among them, so it is worth checking that Bing has your pages too.
Write the questions down before you look at any answer. Take a measurement before you change anything. Change one thing. Ask the same questions about four weeks later, on more than one day, and compare against how much the list moves on its own. Without that comparison an improvement and a coincidence look exactly alike.
I do this for firms as a paid check, or I write the page and measure it. You can also do it yourself with a spreadsheet and two afternoons.
On 9 October 2026 I asked ChatGPT the thirteen questions a buyer of this service would ask, such as "Who audits AI visibility for law firms in the Netherlands?". My own business came up in none of the thirteen answers. It named other agencies and monitoring tools instead.
This page and the audit page are my change. I wrote down the threshold for success before publishing them, and I will publish the result here, whichever way it goes. I have no client result to show yet, so this is the first one.