I'm a partner at Jalal Law, a Saudi law firm advising companies on commercial disputes, corporate structuring, labor matters and regulatory compliance, with clients across Riyadh, Jeddah and the Eastern Province.
General counsels and founders in the Kingdom had started researching counsel through AI assistants before ever calling anyone. When we tested it ourselves, ChatGPT and Perplexity recommended the same handful of international firms and never mentioned us, in Arabic or in English. We hired VOCTOS for generative and answer engine optimization so our firm would be cited when someone asks an AI assistant for a commercial litigation or corporate law firm in Saudi Arabia.
What set them apart was that they understood legal marketing here is regulated. Every deliverable was written to stay inside the Saudi Bar Association's professional conduct rules, with no outcome guarantees or comparative claims, and they ran the content past our compliance partner before publishing.
The scope included a bilingual prompt set of roughly 100 buyer questions in Arabic and English, baseline visibility measurement across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Copilot, entity consolidation so the firm resolves as one clear entity in both languages, structured data for the firm and each lawyer's credentials, an llms.txt implementation, rewriting practice-area pages into extractable question-and-answer format, plain-language explainers on Saudi commercial and labor procedure, and citation building on the third-party sources these models actually rely on. We received a monthly dashboard showing citation share per platform, split by Arabic and English prompts.
Over eight months our mention rate on the core prompt set rose from 3% to 48% in ChatGPT and from 6% to 67% in Perplexity, with Arabic prompts improving faster than English. We now surface in Google AI Overviews for 54 queries where we had no presence, and AI referral traffic reached roughly 950 sessions a month from a near-zero base, producing 63 consultation requests and 15 retained corporate matters traced directly to an AI recommendation.
On project management, the audit was delivered in ten days and monthly deliverables always arrived on schedule. They worked around our partners' court calendars, kept a shared channel for quick approvals, and never published anything without our sign-off.
The one area for improvement: early reports were too granular for our partners to digest. A one-page executive summary would have helped sooner, which they added once we asked.
