Updated
UK law firms are going missing from AI search
The 30-second version
I checked the homepage of 73 UK law firm websites. Nearly a third were effectively invisible to AI search engines: 22% had no structured data at all, and only 1 in 4 used schema that tells an AI engine they are a law firm. Six firms loaded fine in a browser but blocked ChatGPT's crawler at the server, almost certainly without choosing to. Here is the full data, how I measured it, and how to check your own firm.
Why I ran this
Law firms have spent years getting their websites to rank in Google. That work is not wasted. But the way people find a solicitor is changing. They ask ChatGPT for the best employment lawyer in their city. They read Google's AI Overview instead of clicking a result. They let Perplexity shortlist three firms for them.
Those engines do not rank ten blue links. They read the web, decide which sources to trust, and name a few. If a firm's website is hard for them to read, it does not get named. I wanted to know how ready UK law firm websites actually are for that shift, so I measured it.
How the study was done
- Sample
- 73 UK law firm websites, taken from firms ranking on Google's first page for "solicitors" or "law firm" across 10 cities: London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Liverpool, Sheffield, Newcastle, Nottingham and Glasgow. These are SEO-active firms, not a random draw. If visible firms struggle, the long tail is worse.
- What I checked
- Each firm's homepage. I read its JSON-LD structured data and recorded the schema types. I requested the homepage as a normal browser, as ChatGPT's GPTBot and as PerplexityBot, and recorded what each got back.
- Date
- 22 May 2026.
- Limits
- This is a homepage-level snapshot, not a full-site crawl. 8 of the 73 sites returned a forbidden or authentication response to the crawler, usually aggressive bot protection, and were left out. All percentages below are from the 65 sites that served a readable homepage. The FAQ figure is homepage-specific.
Finding 1: a quarter of firms are unreadable by default
Structured data, or schema, is the machine-readable layer of a website. It is how a page states plainly what it is: this is a law firm, here is its name, here is where it is, here are its people. AI engines lean on it heavily, because it removes guesswork.
Of the 65 firm homepages I could read, 14 had no structured data at all. Not a single line. To an AI engine, those pages are a wall of text with no labels. One national firm with immigration and personal-injury practice areas had over 3,400 words on its homepage and zero schema. The words are there for a human. A machine has to infer everything.
The 25% figure is the one that should sting. Schema has a type built for exactly this: LegalService. Used well, alongside Organization, Person and a postal address, it hands an AI engine a clean set of connected facts. The firm, its solicitors, its location, all linked. Three quarters of the firms I checked did not use it. The best ones did, and it showed: their markup read like a tidy business card. The rest leave the engine to guess, and engines that guess tend to pick someone else.
Finding 2: almost nobody uses FAQ schema
AI engines pull answers. A question with a clear, self-contained answer is the easiest thing for them to lift and quote. FAQ schema marks those question-and-answer pairs up so an engine can extract them cleanly. It is one of the most reliable ways to get a page quoted in an AI answer.
Of 65 law firm homepages, exactly one carried FAQ schema. One. This is the clearest open goal in the whole study. Clients ask the same questions before they ever call: how much does a divorce cost, do I have a claim, what happens at a first meeting. A firm that answers those in plain language and marks them up properly is handing AI engines the exact format they want.
Finding 3: some firms block ChatGPT without knowing
This one surprised me. A firm can reasonably decide whether to let AI crawlers read its site. That is a real choice. What I found was firms not making the choice at all.
One firm used its robots.txt to formally tell AI crawlers to stay out. A clear, recorded decision.
Six firms loaded fine in a browser but their server or security layer dropped ChatGPT's crawler. Nothing in robots.txt said to. Almost certainly nobody chose this.
That second number is the quiet problem. These six firms have working, often well-built websites. A human visitor sees everything. But when ChatGPT's crawler comes to read the page, the hosting or security layer kills the connection. The firm is removed from a growing slice of AI answers, and there is no warning, no error in any dashboard, nothing. It is the kind of fault you only find by testing for it directly.
This is not rare or exotic. I found the same fault on my own site while preparing this study: the host's security layer was silently turning away GPTBot. robots.txt said one thing, the server did another. The only way to know is to test what the server actually does.
What this costs a law firm
None of this shows up in a normal SEO report. A firm can rank on page one of Google, have a tidy site, and still be missing from the answer ChatGPT gives when someone asks it to recommend a solicitor. The two are measured differently and they are drifting apart.
For a law firm the stakes are specific. Legal work is high-value and high-trust. A client choosing a solicitor for a £400,000 house purchase, a contested probate or an employment dispute is exactly the kind of person who now asks an AI engine to shortlist for them. If a firm is unreadable to that engine, it is not on the shortlist. A competitor with three lines of schema is.
The encouraging part: most of this is fixable, and quickly. Schema is a one-off technical job. A crawler block is a hosting setting. Neither needs a website rebuild. The firms that fix it now will be the ones AI engines name while the rest are still arguing about whether AI search matters.
How to check your own firm in 10 minutes
Check your structured data
Run your homepage and one practice-area page through a schema checker. Look for LegalService or Attorney, plus Organization and Person. If all you see is WebSite and WebPage, an AI engine cannot tell you are a law firm. Use the free AI schema validator.
Test what AI crawlers actually get
robots.txt is not enough. Test the live server response to GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. If your site loads for you but drops those crawlers, you are missing from AI answers without knowing. Use the AI bot robots.txt tester.
Ask the engines a client question
Open ChatGPT and Perplexity. Ask what a client would: "best employment solicitors in [your city]" or "recommend a conveyancing solicitor near [town]". See whether your firm is named, and which firms are. That is your real AI search ranking.
Score the page
Run a practice-area page through an AI visibility check to see how extractable it is: schema, answer structure, author signals, freshness. Use the free AI search visibility tool.
If those four checks come back clean, the firm is ahead of three quarters of the profession. If they do not, the fixes are smaller than they look. Schema and crawler access are the groundwork of generative engine optimisation, and they are where I would start on any GEO audit for a legal client.
Common questions
Is page-one Google ranking enough to show up in AI search?
Should a law firm block AI crawlers?
How much work is it to fix a firm's AI visibility?
LegalService, Organization and Person schema is a one-off technical task, not a rebuild. Fixing a crawler block is a hosting configuration change. FAQ content and schema take a little writing. None of it requires a new website. The slow part is usually finding out the problem exists.Will you check my firm's site?
Find out where your firm stands
I will run these checks on your firm's site, read how AI engines currently treat it, and send back a plain list of fixes in priority order. No retainer, no sales pitch.