The AEO Schema Stack for Law and Tax Firms
The AEO schema stack is a layered set of JSON-LD types — Organization, LegalService or AccountingService, Attorney, FAQPage, and Review — that make a professional firm machine-readable and citeable by every major AI answer engine.
Answer
The AEO schema stack for law and tax firms is a layered set of JSON-LD types — Organization at the root, LegalService or AccountingService for practice, Attorney or Person for practitioners, FAQPage for question-led pages, and Review for social proof — each emitted on the pages it describes. Together they turn a firm's website into an unambiguous, machine-readable entity graph that AI engines can cite without inference.
Why schema decides who gets cited
Every AI answer engine has to answer the same question before it names your firm: do I know, with high confidence, what this website is describing? Without schema, the engine parses prose and guesses. Guesses fail closed — the engine hedges or picks a competitor with cleaner signals. Schema replaces guessing with declaration. @type: "LegalService" isn't marketing copy. It's a machine-readable fact the engine trusts because it's spec-compliant.
The five layers of the stack
Layer 01 — Root entity
Organization
Emitted sitewide (typically at the root). Establishes the firm as a single entity with name, URL, logo, contact points, and same-as references to bar associations, directories, and social profiles the engine already trusts.
Layer 02 — Practice
LegalService / AccountingService
Per-service pages. Declares what the firm does — practice areas, jurisdictions served, service outputs — so the engine can match prospect questions to the right service without inference.
Layer 03 — People
Attorney / Person
Per-attorney or per-enrolled-agent pages. Credentials, bar admissions, education, alumni relationships — every fact the engine can cite when asked "who handles X at this firm."
Layer 04 — Questions
FAQPage
The highest-leverage schema for AEO. Every prospect question you answer, marked up as Question + Answer pairs, becomes a direct extraction target for AI engines building their response.
Layer 05 — Proof
Review / AggregateRating
Verified reviews wired into schema. Turns social proof from prose into a machine-verifiable trust signal the engine can cite alongside your firm's name.
Layer 06 — Cross-links
BreadcrumbList & sameAs
Anchors every page in the firm's site hierarchy and links external identities (bar directories, LinkedIn, verified profiles) back to a single entity so the engine never fragments your firm into duplicates.
What a compliant Organization block looks like
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LegalService",
"name": "Example Law Firm",
"url": "https://examplelawfirm.com",
"areaServed": [
{ "@type": "State", "name": "Texas" },
{ "@type": "State", "name": "Oklahoma" }
],
"serviceType": ["Estate Planning", "Probate", "Business Formation"],
"aggregateRating": {
"@type": "AggregateRating",
"ratingValue": "4.9",
"reviewCount": "127"
}
}
Every field is a fact the engine can cite. Fields you don't emit are facts the engine has to guess — and guesses lose to competitors with cleaner schema.
The implementation checklist
- Emit Organization sitewide in the root layout, once. Duplicates confuse the engine.
- Emit LegalService or AccountingService on every service page, scoped to that service.
- Emit Attorney or Person on every practitioner page — credentials fully qualified.
- Emit FAQPage on every question-led page and every service page with a Q&A block.
- Emit Review only for verified reviews. Fabricated reviews are detected and penalize the entity.
- Test with a JSON-LD validator before deploy. Broken schema is worse than no schema — the engine drops your entity entirely.
The Rival Practice default
Every Rival Practice site emits the full stack automatically. Your team writes the answer; the platform emits the schema. The result: your firm is machine-readable from the first day, and the AI-Visibility Sweep can measure your Share-of-Voice from day one.