Answered on camera by Dan Milikow, CEO of iShoot.direct · 1:03 · transcript and sources below
The most common obstacle to citations is related to structure. It's easier for the bots to crawl pages that are properly structured for AI — a question and an answer, a named attorney as author, links to authorities, and corroboration from other sources. AI bots sometimes struggle to pick apart the podcasts, webinars, and long reports firms traditionally have leaned on to show their expertise.
Firms get cited because their content is structured for citation — not because they're better lawyers[1].
Somewhere, at this very moment, an AI is answering a question that belongs to your firm. Whether it's estate, employment, personal injury — whatever you're best at — it's citing someone else. Not because they're more talented. It's because their content is better structured to be cited[1].
Because podcasts, webinars, and long reports are dense, linear formats that bots struggle to pull answers out of.
The dense, linear storytelling assets that you've traditionally leaned on to show expertise — the podcasts, the webinars, the three-page reports — they're just harder for the bots to pick apart.
Structure it as a question and an answer with proper HTML markup, a named attorney as author, links to authorities, and corroboration from other sources[2].
So what does structured for citation actually mean? Well, first of all, it's a question and an answer. It's also proper HTML markup. It's a real person as an author, not the firm. There's links back to authoritative sources. There's tables and comparisons where appropriate. And the content is corroborated by other sources. That's what trust looks like to an AI bot[2].
Go watch it happen. Ask AI a question your best client would ask and see who gets cited in the answer. Then look at the page and see if you can reverse engineer why they showed up instead of you.