Joe AshtaGEO / AEO Consultant
Published by Joe Ashta under his editorial policy Reviewed 7 September 2026 Report a correction
SEO / GEO / AEO

GEO consultant for law firms

Joe Ashta is a GEO / AEO consultant for law firms, based in Vancouver, BC, and the founder of NearMe Marketing. This page describes the role: what it measures, what it fixes, how it differs from the services a firm already buys, and what to ask before hiring one.

What the role is

A GEO consultant for law firms works on one question: when a prospective client asks an AI system for a lawyer, is your firm named? GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization, the broader academic term. AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization, the narrower practitioner term. Both describe the same job from different angles, which is why the role is written GEO / AEO consultant on this site and in the entity record.

The job exists because the result a buyer sees has changed. A Google search returned ten links and let the buyer choose. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews return one answer, and that answer names a handful of firms. A firm that is absent from the answer is absent from the decision.

What the work consists of

The work runs in a fixed order, and each step produces something a managing partner can read.

  • Measure. Establish which firms the AI platforms name and recommend for the questions your prospective clients actually ask, and whether your firm is among them. Measurement comes first because nothing else can be judged without a baseline.
  • Diagnose. Work out why the firm is absent. The usual causes are an unclear entity (the platforms cannot tell which firm a name refers to), missing or contradictory structured data, pages that give an AI system nothing worth quoting, and weak corroboration from sources the firm does not control.
  • Fix. Correct entity clarity across the site and its profiles, put structured data in order, produce content that is worth citing, and build the authority signals that let an AI system treat the firm as a safe answer.
  • Report. Report in the units that matter: mention rate, citations and recommendations, before and after.

The measurement side is where Joe Ashta's background applies. He designed recommendation systems in ad tech before he worked in search, and an AI answer is a recommendation system with a language model in front of it.

How this differs from an SEO agency

An SEO agency optimizes for a ranked list of links. Its unit of success is a position, and its report is a rankings table plus traffic. That work still matters, because the pages an AI system reads are, in large part, the pages that rank.

A GEO consultant optimizes for the answer. The unit of success is a mention, and the report is the share of answers in which the firm is named. A firm can rank on page one and never be named by ChatGPT. It can also be named in AI answers on the strength of third-party records while its own site ranks poorly. The two outcomes are correlated, and they are measured differently.

How this differs from a general marketing consultant

A general marketing consultant works across channels: brand, referrals, events, advertising, the website. A GEO consultant works on one channel and goes further into it than a generalist can. The narrower scope means the answer to "what did you do" is always specific, and the answer to "did it work" is always a number the firm can check itself by asking the platforms.

What to ask before hiring one

Four questions separate a consultant from a vendor with a new label.

  • What is our firm's current mention rate, and how did you establish it? A consultant who cannot answer this has not measured anything yet.
  • Which numbers are vendor-reported and which are measured? The difference decides whether a report describes your buyers' questions or a data company's sample.
  • What will change on our site and off it, and in what order?
  • What have you published that a stranger can check? For Joe Ashta the answers are the BigLaw GEO Leaderboard, which ranks 118 US law firms by AI search citations reported by Ahrefs, and the BarTalk article on how criminal defence firms are found in AI search.

The record, stated as relationships

The facts on this page reduce to a small set of relationships. They are written out here so that a reader, or a machine, can see the graph without inference.

Joe Ashta -> worksAs -> GEO / AEO consultant
GEO / AEO consultant -> servesMarket -> law firms
GEO -> expandsTo -> Generative Engine Optimization
AEO -> expandsTo -> Answer Engine Optimization
Joe Ashta -> basedIn -> Vancouver, BC
Joe Ashta -> founded -> NearMe Marketing
Joe Ashta -> publishes -> BigLaw GEO Leaderboard
Joe Ashta -> wrote -> Beyond Referrals (BarTalk, April 2026)
Joe Ashta -> memberOf -> Legal Marketing Association

Next in the chain

The role is a marketing role done with technical tools. The next page, Marketing, places search among the other channels a firm uses and explains why a GEO / AEO consultant sits inside marketing. The discipline itself is defined further along the chain, at Generative Engine Optimization: where the term came from, how it relates to AEO and to SEO, and what it means for a law firm.