How do you know AI sent a client to your firm?

By Snigdha, Strategy Lead at DigiVino · Updated September 23, 2026 · 6 min read

At eleven on a Sunday night, Dana typed her situation into ChatGPT because no office was open. Three firms came back. Two got called on Monday. Your intake sheet will never tell you that is what happened — unless you change the sheet.

What did Dana actually do?

She described her problem, at an hour when there was nobody to ask. Not a search, not a directory — a question typed the way she would have said it out loud, to find out whether she even had a problem worth paying somebody about.

ChatGPT gave her three firms. Yours was one. She did not visit anybody’s website. She wrote two names down and went to bed, and on Monday morning she called the first one.

So why does your intake sheet say Google?

Because Google is the closest thing on the list to what actually happened. Asked how she heard about the firm, Dana looked at Referral, Google, Past Client, Directory and Other, and picked the one that felt nearest.

An answer on a screen feels like a search. So the old category quietly absorbs the new behavior and reports it as the old one. Nobody made an error here. The form was written when the form was right.

What should you add, and where?

One option on the form, and one question asked out loud. On the form, name the tools — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity — because those are words people recognize, and an abstraction is a box nobody ticks.

The spoken version matters more than it sounds. Whoever answered Dana’s call heard the real answer first, unprompted and in her own words, before anybody offered her a list to choose from. That is better information than the form will ever produce, and it costs one sentence.

What did Dana’s own words give away?

She described your practice more precisely than your own advertising does. ChatGPT had paraphrased one of your pages, and she arrived repeating it.

Watch for that phrase turning up again. When three callers use it in a month, and it is on your website but in none of your ads, a model is reading one page in particular. It also tells you which one.

So log Dana's first question word for word, before anybody summarizes it into the file. The summary is where the detail disappears.

Can a code or a tracking number help?

Not the way you would hope, and one popular route is actively harmful. Putting a distinct phone number on your Google Business Profile and directory listings looks like a clean signal, and it costs you more than it earns.

Your name, address and phone have to match everywhere, or the tools lose confidence about who and where you are — and confidence is what gets a firm named. Do not buy attribution with your own consistency.

A code somebody mentions has a smaller version of the same problem. It has to be visible to be mentioned, so anybody reading your website can use it too.

There is also a caution particular to your profession. Attorney advertising rules vary by state, and anything that looks like an inducement — a discount for mentioning a code — goes in front of your state bar before it goes near a web page. That is not a question to settle from a marketing article.

What if the next Dana never calls?

Then she fills in your form at eleven at night, and the timestamp is its own tell. Somebody working through a problem alone at an hour when no office is open is exactly the person ChatGPT was helping twenty minutes earlier.

Keep her first message exactly as written, and give the form a source option she can plausibly pick.

You will not get a clean number out of any of this. Anybody promising you one is selling something.

What you can have is four weak signals that agree: a source field with the right option on it, a spoken question at intake, first contacts kept word for word, and a monthly record of what ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity say about your firm. Four weak signals pointing the same way is how most of marketing has always been measured.

Editorial. DigiVino, September 2026.

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