Employment Defense
From invisible to the cited answer on Texas non-competes
Firm profile: Employment Defense · Market: Austin, TX · Service: Complete AEO · Timeframe: ~90 days
answer engines now citing the firm
answer-first pages published
to the first verified citation
The challenge
Ranked on Google, absent from the answer.
The firm had spent years and real money on SEO and held page-one rankings for terms like ‘Austin non-compete lawyer.’ But their clients, HR directors and business owners, had quietly changed how they searched. They were asking ChatGPT and Perplexity questions like ‘can I enforce a non-compete in Texas in 2026?’ and getting answers that named HR-software blogs and a competitor two suburbs over. The firm was not losing the ranking. It was losing the shortlist before the click ever happened.
The approach
Every lever, run as one program.
We opened with an AI Visibility Audit across all five engines, then executed the Complete AEO program against the questions that drive employer-defense matters:
Answer-first content: 31 one-question pages on FMLA terminations, non-compete enforceability, and handbook compliance, each with the answer up top and the jurisdiction and year named.
Attorney authority: every page bylined to a named partner with bar credentials and Attorney schema.
Off-page work: digital PR placing partner commentary in HR and legal press, optimized directory profiles, editorial backlinks, and a compliant review push.
Freshness cycle: answers updated the week Texas employment rules changed, capturing citations while the topic was still open.
The result
The firm became the answer.
Within roughly seventy days the first verified citations appeared. By ninety, all four tested engines named the firm for at least one priority non-compete question, and the partner could confirm it by asking ChatGPT herself. The freshness cycle now defends those positions each time the law moves.
“We were number one on Google and still felt invisible. Now when a client tells me ChatGPT mentioned us, I finally understand what we were missing.”
Managing Partner, employer-defense boutique · illustrative
Services used
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This case study is an illustrative representative scenario, not an actual client engagement, shown to demonstrate our approach.