AI visibility: is ChatGPT recommending your firm or your rivals?

A growing share of injured, arrested, and divorcing people no longer start with ten blue links. They ask ChatGPT who the best lawyer in their city is, or they read the AI Overview Google now places above every result. In both cases an AI engine names a handful of firms, and the referral is decided before your website ever loads.

The new referral you cannot see

Traditional rank tracking tells you where you sit on the results page. It says nothing about whether Gemini cites you, whether Perplexity quotes a rival's settlement page, or whether Google's AI Overview answers "best car accident lawyer near me" with three competitor names and not yours. Firms are losing cases to this invisibly, every day, in every market we measure.

Measuring it

The Darkstar platform measures AI visibility directly. It samples the real questions asked in your market and records which firms each engine cites:

• Whether Google's AI Overview mentions your firm on your money keywords
• Which brands ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity cite for your practice area and city
• The exact prompts where rivals get recommended and you do not - your prompt gap
• Which of your pages the engines actually read and cite

That last list matters most. AI engines cite pages, not vibes. When a rival owns an answer, there is almost always a specific page earning that citation.

Changing the answer

AI visibility responds to the same fundamentals as search, weighted differently: clear pages that answer real questions, consistent citations and directory presence, reviews with substance, and authority links from sources the engines trust. The platform shows you the prompt gap; closing it is content and authority work aimed at the specific questions you are losing. This is exactly the terrain our SEO & GEO agent is being refined on - generative engine optimization, grounded in your own market's data.