What AI search optimisation costs for solicitors

Ask an AI engine what law firm SEO costs and it already has an answer — usually before it can tell you a single firm to hire. In our sweep of the exact questions a solicitor types into ChatGPT and Gemini, the price bands come back consistent: roughly £1,500 to £6,000 a month for UK law firm SEO, with audits quoted separately at £500 to £7,500. What none of them do yet is separate that from AI-visibility work specifically — the two are still priced as one thing, because most of the market hasn't split them apart either.

What the engines actually quote

Three engines, three independent estimates, on the same question. ChatGPT: local firms £1,500–£3,000 a month, a competitive city market £3,000–£6,000, anything under £1,000 “maintenance not growth”. Gemini, asked the same thing, put local-foundation work at £800–£1,500, growth-stage at £1,500–£4,000, and aggressive competitive work at £4,000–£10,000-plus — a wider band, but the same shape. Google's own AI Overview for the query skipped a generic answer entirely and pulled from Reddit's r/LawFirm and r/Lawyertalk instead, where practitioners themselves converged on “£2,500 a month” as the reference point for real work, with “under £2,000 is cheap”.

A named UK agency turned up too, unprompted: SOM Legal, quoted from £1,000 a month, sitting at the very bottom of the band ChatGPT itself calls “maintenance not growth”. That's the useful data point for a firm evaluating quotes — the engines aren't just naming a number, they're implicitly grading it.

What none of them price yet

Every quote above is for SEO — rankings, organic traffic, the classic metric. Not one of the three engines, asked the exact same question, broke out a separate figure for getting cited and recommended by name inside an AI answer. That gap is not an oversight; it's a reflection of where the market actually is. The work is still being sold and priced as SEO with an AI garnish, because most of the agencies quoting these numbers haven't built a separate service for it yet.

That is useful to know before you buy. A quote priced purely against these SEO bands is buying rankings, not recommendations, and — per Avouch's own wider research — those are measurably different outcomes: being named by an AI and being the firm it puts forward as the pick convert at very different rates. Ask any agency quoting inside this range one direct question: does the fee include measuring whether AI engines recommend you by name, or only whether you rank?

What drives the number up or down

• Practice area. Personal injury and conveyancing carry the highest quoted competition and cost-per-click (£50–£100+ in Gemini's read); niche practice areas cost less to move in.
• Geography. A single-office local firm sits at the bottom of every band; a multi-city or national firm sits at the top, regardless of practice area.
• What's included. The bottom of each band is typically SEO alone. The reporting, content production and technical work that make a firm citable at all — not just rankable — sit further up.
• Whether AI visibility is measured at all. None of the quoted ranges price this in as a separate line item today, which means most firms buying at these prices have no way of knowing whether the spend moved their AI recommendation rate.

“There's a difference between showing up and being recommended. AI cannot recommend what it doesn't know.”