Before You Build an "AI Strategy," Find Out Where Your Firm Actually Stands

Step 3: Run the questions and record what you find

Start with the obvious places your prospective clients may be looking: ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.

If you want a broader sample, add Perplexity or Claude.

Then ask the same ten questions on each platform.

Don't over-engineer your testing environment, but make it reasonably clean:

• Use incognito or private browsing

• Log out of AI tools that already know who you are

• If practical, use a VPN set to your audience's location

• Don't mention your firm, your name or anything else that gives away who's asking

You're trying to approximate what a prospective client with no existing connection to your firm might see. It won't be laboratory-perfect. It doesn't need to be.

For each question and platform, log one of these outcomes in your tracker:

Absent: Your firm and website don't appear.

Mentioned: Your firm is named, but your website isn't linked as a source.

Linked: Your website appears as a clickable citation or source.

No AI answer: Just in case Google doesn't show an AI Overview.

That's it.

You do not need to create an “AI Authority Score,” assign every response a number from 1–100, or build a dashboard that requires its own instruction manual. And you also don’t need to pay someone to do it.

You're looking for basic patterns.

Melody Bartholomew is the founder Right Note Strategy, a content and messaging consultancy focusing on immigration lawyers and other businesses serving expats. She's spent more than a decade in marketing for small businesses, and she gets genuinely excited about using strategy, tactics, and customer psychology to find and execute high-impact marketing solutions for busy small business owners. She's also an immigrant herself, which is part of why she's drawn to this space: choosing an immigration pathway, and deciding whether to trust a lawyer with it, is rarely a quick decision, and the marketing has to hold up across that entire journey.

Your future clients aren't just Googling immigration questions anymore.

They're asking ChatGPT whether they can retire in Costa Rica. They're walking Gemini through their income and family situation. They're asking which residency pathway fits, what documents they'll need, how long the process takes, and eventually, whether they need an immigration professional to help.

You've heard some version of this already.

You've probably also heard that you now need to worry about GEO, AEO, AI visibility, LLM optimization, and whatever hot acronym the experts come up with next.

In plain terms, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) just means structuring your content so AI tools can actually find it, understand it, and cite it. That's really all it is.

Before you add another thing to your marketing to-do list, find out whether you actually have a problem.

You don't need another dashboard to do that.

There are free AI-visibility tools that will do a version of this for you, but most test generic keywords, not the specific client journey we're about to build in Step 2, so you lose the control that makes this exercise useful in the first place. They also tend to run on a free trial that covers your first month, and it feels great, right up until it's time to pay to keep the data flowing. If you don't, you're back to figuring this out manually anyway, except now you've also lost the consistent, month-over-month data you'd already started building.

Doing it manually from day one, on your own terms, skips that cliff entirely. You need about 45 minutes.

By the end of this exercise, you'll have a useful baseline for three things:

• Where your firm appears

• Where it disappears

• What might actually be worth fixing

That's it. You're running an immigration firm, not an AI-search laboratory.

What you need

• About 45 minutes

• One priority immigration service/pathway

• One clearly defined audience segment

Don't try to audit your entire firm at once. We're looking for a useful signal, not a perfect measurement of the internet.

Step 1: Choose one service and one audience

If you handle twenty immigration pathways for six different types of clients, testing everything at once will give you mixed, and therefore unhelpful, results.

Pick one service you care about and the audience most likely to buy it.

For example:

Priority service: Costa Rica Pensionado Residency

Priority audience: American retirees aged 60+, receive regular pension or Social Security income, and are considering moving to Costa Rica long term.

That specificity matters.

An AI system may use completely different sources for someone asking:

“What are the best countries for Americans to retire to?”

versus:

“Can an American retiree with $1,500 in monthly Social Security income qualify for Costa Rica's Pensionado residency?”

The second question tells you much more about whether you're visible to the person you actually want to reach.

Step 2: Test the client journey, not random prompts

This part is important.

Don't make a list of ten random immigration keywords and start plugging them into ChatGPT.

Your prospective clients don't experience immigration as a keyword list. They move through a long decision process.

They start by wondering what's possible.

Then they compare options, investigating eligibility, requirements, cost and timing.

All the while they’re subconsciously deciding who they can trust, and eventually some will start looking for professional help.

So your test questions should follow roughly the same journey:

Possibility → Options → Eligibility → Process → Trust → Hiring

Copy this prompt and enter your priority service, priority audience, and their most commonly asked questions to generate ten realistic questions across that journey:

Use the notes column sparingly. Record something only when it's genuinely useful. For example:

• The same competitor keeps appearing

• Government sources dominate a topic

• An answer is dangerously outdated

• One of your pages appears for a topic you didn't expect

Once you've run all the questions, stop looking at individual results and look at the bigger picture.

What do your results actually mean?

This isn't a report card on whether your marketing is “good” or “bad.”

It's a starting point.

Here are a few patterns worth paying attention to.

You're absent almost everywhere

First, look at the basics.

Do you actually publish useful, substantial content on your own website?

Not just LinkedIn or Instagram posts. Not a handful of service pages saying essentially the same things as every other immigration firm.

Content that answers the specific questions prospective clients ask while they're figuring out what to do.

If that content barely exists, you may not have an AI problem.

You may have a content problem.

And if you've only recently started publishing, give it time. Search and AI visibility typically take 3 to 6 months to show measurable results, and the good news is that this is the perfect time to start tracking those efforts!

You're mentioned, but rarely linked

This is interesting.

The platforms appear to know your firm exists, but they're not regularly using your website as a source.

Look at the sites they are citing.

What are those pages doing that yours aren't?

Don't immediately conclude that you need “more GEO.”

You may discover something much more ordinary: competitors have clearer explanations, answer more specific questions, cite stronger sources, or simply have useful content covering topics you don't.

You appear for some questions but disappear elsewhere

This is one of the most useful outcomes.

Look at where in the client journey you disappear.

Maybe your firm appears once someone already knows the exact visa or residency pathway they want, but you're nowhere to be found when they're still comparing their options.

Or maybe your informational content appears regularly, but your firm disappears when the questions shift toward trust and hiring a lawyer.

That's not merely an AI visibility problem.

It's a clue about a gap in your marketing.

You're linked consistently

Great.

Now don't ruin your afternoon looking for something else to panic about.

Instead, look at which pages and questions are earning that visibility.

Those patterns can tell you what AI systems already seem to find useful about your site, and where it may make sense to build from what's working rather than starting another enormous marketing initiative from scratch.

The point isn't to become a GEO expert

AI is changing how people find information. That's real.

But that doesn't mean every immigration firm owner now needs to become an expert in another branch of digital marketing.

I've worked in marketing for more than a decade, and I recently completed an updated training in SEO and GEO because I wanted to understand what this shift actually changes.

I'm also an immigrant myself.

One reason I'm particularly interested in this space is that choosing an immigration pathway, and deciding whether to trust a lawyer with it, isn't a quick purchasing decision.

People research. They worry about jobs and finances and healthcare. They compare. They let their aunt talk them out of it for three months, but then they come back. They ask increasingly specific questions as a vague idea turns into a serious plan.

That's why your visibility needs to be considered across that entire journey. That’s strategy.

But you don't need to measure everything.

You just need enough information to answer:

Where are we now?

Where are the obvious gaps?

What deserves our attention next?

If this 45-minute exercise gives you those answers, it has done its job.

One run tells you where you stand today. Repeating it monthly is what tells you whether you're actually moving, which questions are shifting from Absent to Mentioned, and whether the content you just published is starting to earn its keep.

Or skip the 45 minutes

Everything above will give you a useful baseline, and you can absolutely do it yourself.

But maybe you've read this far and thought:

I would rather have someone just look at our marketing and tell me what matters.

Fair enough.

Spend about 30 seconds filling out my form and share a few links to your website and content.

I'll record a personalized video reviewing your messaging, content and overall online presence. I'll show you where you're building trust, where prospective clients may be dropping off, and the biggest opportunities I see to improve your marketing.

No generic checklist.

No “here are 87 things to add to your to-do list.”

No automatic recommendation that you simply need more content (even though, of course you do—sorry!).

Just practical, tailored feedback on the few things I'd pay attention to first.

Read the questions before you use them. They should sound like questions your actual clients ask. Delete or edit anything that's off-topic or sounds like a robot. You’ll know.

The goal isn't to give your AI visibility a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. It's to find out where in the client's decision process your firm becomes visible (and where it disappears).

Once you've got your ten questions, grab this tracker and drop them in, one per row. You'll fill in the rest as you test.

Connect

Complimentary. Personalized video review.

Email: melody@rightnotestrategy.com

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