A researcher at an AI SEO agency recently published something that should catch every law firm marketing director’s attention: he told Google’s Gemini he was the world’s best AI SEO expert — on his own website — and Gemini believed him.
That’s not a bug. It’s a structural flaw in how AI search systems work. And it has direct implications for how your law firm competes in 2026.
AI Systems Trust What They Read — And That’s a Problem
When Gemini, ChatGPT, or Perplexity generate an answer, they pull from web content retrieved through search. The model reads source pages, extracts relevant information, and synthesizes an answer. This is supposed to make AI more accurate.
But here’s what these systems don’t do: they don’t verify whether the source is honest.
A company can publish a page titled “Best Personal Injury Law Firms in Los Angeles 2026,” rank itself at the top, get that page to rank organically — and AI systems will absorb and repeat those claims as if they came from an independent editorial source. The user asking for the “best PI lawyer in LA” never sees the source. They just see the AI’s confident recommendation.
This is called GEO spam — content engineered specifically to manipulate AI-generated answers. It works right now. And it’s creating a mess across every industry, including legal.
The Four Tactics Behind GEO Spam
Researchers studying AI grounding systems have identified four primary manipulation patterns showing up in the wild:
1. Self-referential listicles. A firm publishes “Best [Practice Area] Attorneys in [City]” and places itself first. The page ranks. The AI retrieves it. The AI recommends the firm. Users trust the AI. The firm “wins” — not on merit, but on game-playing.
2. Manufactured endorsements. Pages that use phrases like “industry experts agree” or “leading legal professionals recommend” when the only expert quoted is the firm itself. AI systems interpret this language as third-party validation and treat it accordingly.
3. Prompt-aware content. The most sophisticated variant: content written specifically to match the phrasing patterns used in AI queries. If Perplexity tends to surface answers in response to “who handles wrongful death cases in Phoenix,” this content is engineered to mirror that exact query structure.
4. Pay-to-play AI citations. An emerging commercial layer — services that promise AI visibility by placing brands into content designed to be retrieved by AI grounding systems. These services exist. They’re being sold to law firms right now.
Why This Matters More Than Traditional SEO Spam
With traditional search, a spammy result is one of ten links on a page. Users exercise judgment. They click, realize the page is junk, and move on.
AI search doesn’t work that way.
There’s no list of ten options. There’s one synthesized answer, delivered by a platform — Google, OpenAI, Microsoft — that carries enormous trust with users. When Gemini says “X is the best PI firm in Los Angeles,” users don’t evaluate the underlying source. They receive it as a conclusion reached through intelligent analysis.
The credibility of the AI platform gets silently transferred to whatever content that system pulled from. A self-promotional listicle the user would immediately dismiss if they saw it gets the full weight of Google’s brand reputation behind it.
For law firms trying to build genuine authority, this is frustrating. For law firms considering gaming the system — read on.
The Crackdown Is Coming
Researchers studying Gemini’s grounding system analyzed over 7,000 queries and 880,000 individual text snippets to understand how AI systems allocate attention across web content. Their conclusion: organic ranking still functions as the primary gate for AI visibility, but the content that passes through that gate is currently absorbed uncritically.
Google has decades of experience building webspam detection systems. Those systems weren’t designed with AI grounding in mind. The gap is closing.
Independent AI labs are already building GEO spam classifiers — tools trained to recognize self-referential claims, manufactured endorsements, and prompt-engineered content. Google’s internal teams are doing the same. The prediction from researchers: a test-ready classifier within six months, production within a year.
What appears to be a working shortcut today will become a liability when that classifier ships. Firms that built AI visibility on manipulative content will see it collapse. Firms that built it on genuine authority will see it compound.
What Legitimate AI Visibility Looks Like for Law Firms
This is where Intercore’s approach becomes the only durable strategy.
AI systems — even flawed ones — consistently surface content that demonstrates specific characteristics:
Structured authority. Content that answers discrete legal questions clearly, completely, and in a format AI systems can extract and cite. Not keyword-stuffed landing pages. Not generic “about us” copy. Specific, accurate, useful answers to the questions your prospective clients are actually asking.
Schema markup. Properly implemented schema tells AI systems exactly who you are, what practice areas you cover, where you operate, and what your credentials are. It’s the difference between an AI guessing at your identity and an AI knowing it with certainty.
Citation signals. When reputable third-party sources — bar associations, legal directories, local publications, civic organizations — reference your firm, AI systems treat that as validation. This can’t be faked with a listicle. It has to be earned.
Content architecture. A hub-and-spoke content system where your site clearly establishes expertise in your practice areas and geography. AI systems model topical authority. Firms with deep, coherent content architectures get cited more consistently than firms with thin, scattered pages.
These aren’t workarounds. They’re the foundation of what AI systems are trying to surface — when they work correctly. Intercore builds this foundation for law firms.
The Question for Your Firm
GEO spam creates a short-term visibility advantage for firms willing to play the game. Intercore isn’t in that business.
The reason is simple: legal clients make high-stakes decisions. A firm that gets recommended by AI because it gamed a listicle isn’t a firm that earned its position — and that gap tends to show up in client experience, reviews, and long-term retention. Beyond that, the platforms cracking down on this will not be gentle. Algorithmic penalties in AI systems don’t come with warnings.
The firms that will own AI search in 2026 and beyond are the ones building genuine authority now — before the classifier ships, before the crackdown, before competitors realize the window is closing.
If you want to know where your firm stands in AI search today — and what it would take to build a durable position — Intercore offers a free AI visibility audit at intercore.net/free-ai-visibility-audit.
The crackdown is coming. The question is whether you’re building something that survives it.
Sources: DEJAN Marketing, “AI Search Has a Spam Problem” (2026)