I measured what UK legal searches actually return, who Google’s AI cites when it answers them, and which firms ChatGPT and Perplexity name when a member of the public asks for a solicitor. Three findings stand out. AI Overviews are far rarer on UK legal queries than the industry assumes. The directories that dominate ordinary search results are almost entirely absent from Google’s AI answers. And ChatGPT and Perplexity recommend substantially different firms for the same question.
Three separate measurements on 5 and 6 August 2026, each answering a different question, because AI visibility is not one thing.
One. Twenty-four consumer queries across eight practice areas, three per area, pulled from live UK Google results. For each I recorded whether an AI Overview appeared at all, and what else occupied the page.
Two. Google’s AI Overview citation corpus for the United Kingdom, queried across eight practice-area topics. This returns the domains Google’s AI answers actually cite, with a mention count for each. Every cited domain was then classified by hand as a law firm, a directory, a regulator, a publisher, a user-generated platform, or something else.
Three. Six live AI answers, asking ChatGPT and Perplexity the same three questions a member of the public would ask: a divorce solicitor in Leeds, conveyancing in Manchester, personal injury in Birmingham. Both models had web search enabled. Every firm named and every source cited was recorded.
Each finding names its sample size, because several of them rest on small ones.
Of 24 consumer legal queries, only 5 returned an AI Overview at all. A local pack appeared on 20 of the same 24, and a People Also Ask block on 22. Family law, wills and probate, personal injury, immigration and commercial property returned no AI Overview on any of their three queries. If your firm is being sold an AI-first strategy for consumer legal search, this is the number to ask about.
Across eight practice-area topics I collected the ten most-cited domains each, 80 slots in total. Not one was a legal directory or review site. No ReviewSolicitors, no Legal 500, no Chambers, no Yell. This is the opposite of ordinary search results, where a directory outranks every actual firm in every city I have measured.
In the six live answers, ReviewSolicitors was cited in four and Legal 500 in three. They divide cleanly by platform: ChatGPT cited Legal 500 in all three of its answers and never ReviewSolicitors as a source; Perplexity cited ReviewSolicitors in all three and never Legal 500. Directory influence is real, but it is platform-specific rather than universal.
Asked for conveyancing solicitors in Manchester, ChatGPT and Perplexity named 14 firms between them and agreed on only two. Across all six answers, 42 distinct firms were named and no firm appeared in more than three. Being visible in AI search is not one target. It is several, and they do not move together.
Conveyancing carries 12,846 citation mentions in the UK corpus. Will writing carries 97. Personal injury 6,251, employment 3,563, immigration 2,703, probate 2,152, divorce 1,042, commercial property 843. Any claim about how law firms perform in AI search is close to meaningless without naming the practice area.
54 distinct domains, 8,019 citation mentions, across eight practice-area topics.
The two most-cited domains across every practice area are YouTube (1,058 mentions) and gov.uk (1,052). Both appear in all eight topics. Citizens Advice, Reddit and the HomeOwners Alliance follow. The highest-placed law firm anywhere in the set is Slater and Gordon at 266 mentions, and the most widely spread are Irwin Mitchell and Osbornes Law, each appearing in three of the eight topics.
The remaining quarter goes to comparison sites, property portals, banks, insurers and charities. Which is worth sitting with: on the questions your future clients are asking, Google’s AI is citing MoneySuperMarket, Zoopla, Lloyds and Age UK more readily than it cites solicitors.
Do not buy an AI-only strategy for consumer work. On these queries the local pack showed up four times more often than an AI Overview. Google Business Profile, reviews and proximity still decide the most visible part of the page. AI visibility is additional work, not a replacement.
Your directory profiles matter, but not where you think. They earn you very little in Google’s AI answers and a great deal in ChatGPT and Perplexity. If you maintain one directory profile properly, know which assistant it is feeding: Legal 500 and Chambers reach ChatGPT, ReviewSolicitors reaches Perplexity.
Video and plain explanation are undervalued. YouTube is the single most-cited domain in the UK legal AI corpus. Almost no regional firm publishes there. That is an open position rather than a crowded one.
Check your practice area before believing any AI visibility claim, including mine. A conveyancing firm and a will-writing firm are operating in corpora that differ by a factor of over a hundred. Advice built on one does not transfer to the other.
No AI Overview citations were captured from live results. All five AI Overviews that appeared returned asynchronously, meaning the element was confirmed present but its text and sources were not delivered by the collection method. The usable sample for citation claims from that measurement is zero. Finding two rests on the separate citation corpus, not on those five.
The live answers are a single run each. Six answers, one sample per platform per question, with no repetition. AI answers vary between runs and these carry no measure of that variance. Treat findings three and four as well-evidenced observations, not as settled proportions.
The assistants were queried through their APIs, not their consumer apps, using ChatGPT gpt-5.5-2026-04-23 and Perplexity sonar-pro with web search enabled. The endpoint accepts no location setting, which is why Perplexity answered the Birmingham question with firms in both England and Alabama. What a member of the public sees in the app may differ.
Nothing the models said was fact-checked. Where an assistant claimed a Legal 500 tier or an accreditation, that claim is reported as made and was not verified against the source. One of them cited a commercial property ranking as evidence for residential conveyancing, and said so itself.
I would rather publish five findings with their sample sizes attached than a larger number without them.
Data collected 5 and 6 August 2026 through the DataForSEO API. Search results and citation data: United Kingdom location, English language, desktop, platform Google. Live AI answers: ChatGPT gpt-5.5-2026-04-23 and Perplexity sonar-pro, web search enabled, temperature and sampling left at defaults, so exact reproduction is not guaranteed. Mention counts are the per-domain ranked figures from the citation corpus; the same responses carry a second, dataset-wide set of figures that is larger, and mixing the two would produce different percentages. Domain classification was done by hand and is auditable: barristers’ chambers were counted as legal practices, and a will-writing service that could not be confirmed as regulated was not counted as a firm. Where a field was not returned by the source, it was recorded as missing rather than as zero. The report will be re-run and published as a 2027 edition.
This report is free to cite by press, academics, AI assistants, consultancies and firms themselves. Attribution required: “UK Law Firm AI Visibility Report 2026, Gregg King” with a link to this page. Direct quotation of findings is welcome with attribution, and I would ask that the sample size attached to each finding travels with it. Press enquiries via the contact page.
This report describes the field. The SRA-Compliant AI Visibility Audit runs the same measures against your firm specifically, free, turned around in 72 hours, with no obligation to engage me afterwards.
