42 personal injury law firms, and not one scored above 53/100 on AI visibility

Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "who's the best personal injury lawyer in Houston?" (or Atlanta, or Las Vegas, or Tampa) and you get a confident, named shortlist. A growing share of injured people asking exactly that question now act on the AI answer instead of scrolling ten blue links or a map pack. So we audited 42 real personal injury firms, in 20 different metros, on both engines in our free check, to see how the typical firm actually shows up. What we found is a category with no floor problem and no ceiling: almost everyone sits near the bottom, and the best firm we measured still only got halfway up.

Finding 1: The average score is 26/100 — and the ceiling is 53

Across the 42 firms, the average AI-visibility score was 25.9 out of 100 and the median was 21. Half the firms — 21 of 42 (50%) — scored under 20. That much looks like our other local-business benchmarks. What doesn't: not one firm scored above 53. In our med-spa benchmark, 9% of businesses cleared 60; here it's zero. The distribution simply has no top band. There is no marquee, obviously-dominant PI firm that AI reliably names the way one exists for many keywords in organic search.

Finding 2: The typical firm is left off the shortlist more often than it's named

A firm was named in an average of just 46% of the AI answers about its own city and category. More often than not, the engine produces a shortlist of "best personal injury attorneys near me" and the firm isn't on it. And when a rival is named, it's frequently named more prominently — in 18 of the 42 audits (43%), a single competitor was mentioned more times than the audited firm itself. Nearly half of these firms are being out-recommended in the answers their own prospective clients are reading, in a practice area where a single case can be worth six figures.

Finding 3: Nobody owns this category either — the most-named firm holds 1.9%

The low ceiling and the fragmentation are two sides of the same coin. Across the 42 audits the engines named 159 distinct firms as recommendations, spread over 418 mentions. The two most-recommended firms in the entire dataset — Perdue & Kidd and Zehl & Associates, tied on 8 mentions each — hold just 1.9% of those mentions apiece. The next few cluster near 1.7% and fall away from there. No firm has "won" AI recommendations for personal injury the way a business can own the #1 organic result for a keyword. The leader's lead is 1.9%.

Personal injury is one of the most competitive, most expensive markets in all of local marketing — the keywords cost hundreds of dollars a click. Yet in AI recommendations, the most-named firm holds 1.9% and the best score is 53. That gap between how ferociously firms fight for Google and how empty the AI answer still is may be the single most actionable fact in this report: the ground everyone will eventually fight over is, right now, almost entirely unclaimed.

Finding 4: It's a national pattern, not a few weak metros

The low scores aren't concentrated in one city. Every metro with a meaningful sample sits well below the halfway mark:

Houston — one of the most saturated PI-advertising markets in the country, and one of our largest samples (four firms) — averages 18. In Las Vegas all four firms we audited scored 17. Even Fort Worth, the strongest metro in the set, averages 42, still short of the halfway mark. Metro cells of two to five firms are directional, not definitive, and we say so; but the direction is the same everywhere: personal-injury firms are broadly invisible to AI, in every city we looked at.

What this means if you run — or market — a personal injury firm

For a firm owner: your score is probably nearer 17 than 25, you're likely being left off the shortlist more than half the time, and a competitor you may not even track is being named ahead of you. That's the bad news. The good news is that no rival has a real lead — a 1.9% "leader" and a ceiling of 53 mean the gap between you and the front is small and closeable, in a channel where your competitors have almost certainly not yet done the work.

For an agency or GEO consultant: this is the retainer argument, sharpened by a practice area with a huge marketing budget already in motion. AI visibility for personal injury isn't a saturated market you're fighting into on a client's behalf — it's an unclaimed one, and it's built off-site (on the review platforms, directories and "best-of" roundups the engines actually read — see where AI looks before it recommends a local business), which is ongoing work, which is exactly what a retainer is for. Walking into a PI pitch with "here's your AI score, here's the firm being named instead of you, and here's why nobody has won this yet" is a far stronger open than another round of Google Ads.

Either way, the first step is measuring where the firm stands and who's being named instead — per engine, per question — which is what an AskedAbout audit reports.

Methodology

42 completed AskedAbout free AI-visibility checks of real personal injury law firms across 20 US metros (Houston, Atlanta, Las Vegas, San Antonio, Fort Worth, Tampa, San Diego, Phoenix, Austin, Orlando, Charlotte, Denver, Nashville, Dallas, Fort Lauderdale, Garden City and others), run July 2026. Each check submits buyer-intent, city-and-category questions ("best personal injury lawyer in [city]", "top injury attorneys near me") to the two engines in the free check — OpenAI's ChatGPT search model and Perplexity — and parses the responses for whether the firm is named, how prominently, and which competitors are named instead. The score (0–100) combines how often the firm is named and how it ranks against rivals across engines. "Most-recommended" shares are computed over 418 total rival mentions. Corrected 2026-07-21: an earlier version of this page counted an engineering QA row ("QA Concurrency Check," a fake Houston firm) as one of the firms; `audit_cut` now excludes it by exact name, moving n from 43 to 42 and the leader's share from 2.6% to 1.9%. Metro cells are as small as two firms and are stated as directional. Synthetic smoke-test rows are excluded by business name via our canonical `audit_cut` script — never by test flags, which our own prospect audits also carry. n is stated so you can weight the figures; we re-publish as the corpus grows.

More from the same corpus: the full AI-visibility benchmark across 152 local businesses, the med-spa benchmark, where AI looks before it recommends a local business, and — written for owners — why AI doesn't recommend your law firm. Reselling this to law-firm clients? The white-label Agency 5-pack puts five of these audits under your logo for $249.