The SRA already requires your firm to publish its prices, what those prices include, who does the work, what they are qualified to do, and how long each stage takes. That is the most structured and most factual content on most law firm websites, and it is close to an ideal source for an AI assistant answering “what does conveyancing cost in Leeds”. Most firms bury it in a PDF, hide it behind a JavaScript accordion, or replace the figures with “contact us for a quote”. All three satisfy the regulator and lose the citation.
Compliance and AI visibility are usually treated as separate jobs with separate budgets. On transparency pages they are the same job, and the work has already been paid for once.
What the rules actually require
The SRA Transparency Rules, in the version in force since 11 April 2025, run to four rules. Rule 1 covers costs, Rule 2 complaints, Rule 3 publication where a firm has no website, and Rule 4 regulatory information.
Rule 1 applies to a defined list of services. For individuals: residential conveyancing, uncontested probate on UK assets, immigration applications other than asylum, First-tier Tribunal immigration appeals, summary motoring offences in the magistrates’ court, and employment tribunal claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal. For businesses: defending employment tribunal dismissal claims, debt recovery up to £100,000, and licensing applications for business premises.
For each of those, Rule 1.5 requires the total cost, or an average or range where a total is not practicable, plus the basis of your charges, the qualifications and experience of whoever does the work and whoever supervises it, a description of likely disbursements with estimates, whether VAT applies, and the key stages with likely timescales. Rule 1.6 requires all of it in a prominent place on the website. The SRA’s guidance, updated on 30 September 2024, adds that it must be accessible, clearly signposted, easy to find, and written in plain language rather than legal jargon.
Read that as a content brief rather than a compliance one. Specific prices. Named qualifications. Defined stages. Stated timescales. An itemised list of what is and is not included. It is a better-specified page than almost anything a marketing team writes voluntarily.
Why AI assistants want exactly this
Answer engines are not looking for persuasive copy. They are looking for a source they can quote without being wrong.
Three things make a page quotable: it answers the question directly rather than circling it, it carries specific checkable facts rather than adjectives, and it belongs to an organisation the model can verify. Transparency pages hit all three when they are built properly.
“Our fixed fee for a freehold purchase up to £500,000 is £1,450 plus VAT, with disbursements of approximately £310, typically completing in eight to twelve weeks” is the kind of sentence an assistant will lift whole. “Our fees are competitive and depend on the complexity of your matter” is not, and no amount of technical SEO will change that.
Four ways firms satisfy the regulator and lose the citation
None of these breaches anything. All of them cost you the answer.
- The PDF. A price list published as a download technically appears on the website. Assistants generally will not open it, and the figures are invisible to anything reading the page text. If your fees live only in a PDF, they do not exist for AI search.
- The accordion that loads on click. Pricing inside a JavaScript accordion or tab may not be present in the page’s initial HTML. Test it in ten seconds: view source and search for one of your own fee figures. If it is not there, neither crawlers nor assistants can see it.
- Contact us for a quote. The most expensive of the four. Where a total is not practicable the rule expects a range, so a range is always available to you. Publishing nothing removes your firm from every price-related answer in your practice area, and price is where a large share of consumer legal search sits.
- Figures that have quietly gone stale. An undated page carrying last year’s fees is worse than an honest range. Assistants weight recency, and a firm publishing an out-of-date fee will eventually be quoted incorrectly by one.
The register check nobody optimises for
Rule 4 is the one firms treat as a footer obligation. It requires your SRA number and the SRA’s digital badge displayed prominently, and the authorised-and-regulated wording on your letterhead and emails.
It matters more than that suggests. Before naming a firm, assistants tend to confirm the firm exists and is what it claims to be, and the SRA register is the authoritative source for that in England and Wales. Where your firm name, trading name, address or SRA number differs between your website and the register, the mismatch reads as a reason for caution rather than a small admin discrepancy. Reconciling those fields is the cheapest trust signal available to a law firm, and it is the section of my audit that turns up the most fixable problems.
What to do about it
Start with what you already have, because you are legally obliged to have it.
- Read your transparency pages as a stranger would. If the price is not visible as text within a few seconds, that is the first fix.
- Move every figure out of PDFs and into page text. Keep the PDF if you like it, but the figures have to exist as readable HTML.
- Check your own fee appears in view-source. If it does not, the accordion is hiding it from machines as well as from you.
- Give a range wherever a fixed figure is not practicable. Silence is a choice, and it is the wrong one.
- Write key stages and timescales as a list rather than a paragraph. Stages and timings are the second most-asked thing after price.
- Name the people. Rule 1.5 already requires qualifications and experience, and named fee earners with verifiable credentials are the difference between a page about a service and a page about a firm.
- Reconcile every field against your SRA register entry.
- Date the page and diarise a review.
Structured data helps the same content travel further, which is covered in schema markup for law firms, and the entity work behind the register check is in entity SEO for law firms.
What this does and does not prove
The rules are on the record, and so is the SRA’s stated preference for plain language. It is also verifiable that assistants prefer sources answering directly with specific, attributable facts. What follows from that is a reasonable inference rather than a measured result: a firm publishing clear, current, machine-readable fee information is more likely to be cited in a price or process answer than a firm publishing a PDF.
Anyone quoting you a percentage uplift from a transparency rewrite is guessing. AI answers vary between runs, so a single result moving is sampling noise rather than progress.
What I will say plainly is that this is unusually low-risk work. The pages have to exist anyway. Making them clearer serves the client reading them, matches what the regulator asked for, and happens to produce the format answer engines prefer. The compliance case and the visibility case point the same way, which is rare enough to be worth acting on.
Where this sits with Rule 8.8
Publishing mandated factual information is not publicity, so the constraints on what a firm may claim about itself do not bite here. There is no claim to substantiate, only a fact to state clearly. That makes transparency pages the least contentious place to start, and your COLP has rather less to sign off than on almost any other visibility work.
I am not a solicitor and none of this is legal advice. What I do is make the pages you are already required to publish work as hard as they should. If you want to see how yours currently read to an assistant, that is sections four and eight of the free SRA-compliant AI visibility audit, which cross-references every field on your register entry against your website and the main directories, and tests how your firm is described across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews.
