WEB DESIGN & MARKETING

Almost half of consumers now ask AI tools to recommend local businesses. In BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey, 45% had used AI to find a local business recommendation. When someone asks ChatGPT to recommend an architect, it tends to suggest the firms it can find described clearly and consistently across the web: on their own websites, in online listings, and in reviews from past clients.

That can sound kind of abstract, so we did a little experiment.

In this post, we'll walk through what we found, and then look at what your firm can do to show up.

Your law firm's website is often the first impression a prospective client has of your practice. Before they schedule a consultation, they may visit your website to learn about your attorneys, evaluate your experience, and decide whether your firm is the right fit.

In fact, more than one in three potential clients start their search for an attorney online (Clio, 2025). So, having a compelling website can make the difference between contacting you or moving on to contact one of competitors online.

But creating an effective law firm website takes more than attractive design. It requires an understanding of your clients, your practice areas, your competitive landscape, and the ways people search for legal services.

That's why choosing the right law firm web design agency is an important business decision.

How do you find a website design partner that understands the legal industry and can help your firm grow?

There's a lot that goes into building a Shopify website, and the design is just one piece of it.Of course, you want your store to look great. But you also need to think about how customers will find your products, what information they'll need before making a purchase, and how everything will work behind the scenes.

Some decisions are fairly straightforward. Others, like choosing the right theme, structuring your products, or connecting Shopify with your existing systems, can have a much bigger impact on the project than you might expect.

Why some established architects are invisible on Google

An exercise I often do with new architect clients is to open Google together. We want to establish a baseline: what their prospective clients see when they start looking.

So we type the kind of search a client would type — plain, straightforward, usually something like “architect [your city]” — and look at the firms on page one. For many prospects, that's how they decide which three or four firms are in contention.

For many established firms, especially those that haven’t focused much on their SEO, this can be a little awkward! They aren’t on page one. New, upstart firms are instead! Who are these people? How did they get on page one of Google?

Why architecture firms are invisible to AI search — and what to do about it

A couple is sitting at their kitchen table, laptop open. He's a cardiologist, she runs a nonprofit. Their kids are in college. They've been thinking about this for a decade — the house they'll grow into, not out of. Three acres they bought years ago, overlooking water. A real budget, finally. They're ready to find an architect.

They don't open Google. They open ChatGPT...