SRA rules and AI-generated content: what a law firm can and can't publish

The rules don't change because AI wrote the sentence. That's the whole answer, and the interesting part is that the engines already know it: asked plain marketing questions — “SEO for solicitors”, “law firm SEO agency” — ChatGPT cited SRA rules unprompted in three separate answers in our own sweep, without ever being asked about compliance directly. If an AI engine already treats SRA conduct as part of the answer to “how do I market my firm”, a firm that ignores it while using AI to draft that marketing is working against the grain of the exact system it's trying to be recommended by.

The three rules the engines already reach for

Read closely, our sweep's SRA citations cluster around three specific, checkable things — not vague “be careful”, but rules with a name.

• No exaggerated claims. Engines specifically flag phrasing like “best solicitor in London” as a compliance risk, not just a marketing cliché — the SRA's own guidance treats unsubstantiated superlatives as misleading, and the Advertising Standards Authority's CAP Code applies to legal advertising the same as any other sector.
• Price and service transparency. The SRA's Transparency Rules (2018) require firms to publish clear pricing and service information for specified work types — conveyancing, probate, immigration, employment tribunal claims, debt recovery and others. An AI-drafted page for one of those services that omits pricing isn't just thin content, it's a compliance gap.
• No unsolicited approaches. The SRA issued a 2024 warning notice specifically addressing unsolicited direct approaches to potential clients, particularly around claims. Content and outreach generated at AI speed and volume makes it easier to drift into exactly this — the fix is a human sign-off step, not slower AI.

One more, sector-specific to personal injury and worth stating plainly given how much of our own sweep sits in that market: the ban on referral fees in personal injury claims under the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (sections 56–60) is a statutory rule, not an SRA guidance note — it doesn't bend for AI-generated content any more than the others do.

The mistake our own sweep caught

Asked specifically about local SEO for lawyers, one engine named “fake office locations” as a common law firm SEO mistake — firms listing addresses they don't genuinely operate from, to game local search results. It's an old SEO trick that predates AI entirely, but AI-assisted content production makes it faster to do at scale, and faster to get caught doing: an engine that already flags the pattern to a buyer researching agencies is exactly the kind of engine that will flag it about your own firm too.

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

What to actually do about it

• Treat AI-drafted marketing copy exactly like paralegal-drafted copy: useful first draft, a named solicitor's sign-off before it publishes, full stop.
• Put your SRA number, PII position and complaints route in plain, crawlable text — not a PDF, not an image — so an engine can cite it directly rather than guessing.
• If you offer any of the SRA's specified services (conveyancing, probate, immigration, employment tribunal, debt recovery, licensing), publish a price. The Transparency Rules already require it, and our own research says engines reach for exactly this kind of specific, checkable figure when deciding who to recommend.
• Never let an AI tool auto-publish location or office pages without a human check. It's the single most-flagged local-SEO mistake in the data, and it's also the easiest one for an engine — or a client — to catch.