SAVI Report · UK Law Firms · 2026
When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI to recommend a solicitor, it reads websites and puts a few names forward. We checked 8,074 UK law firm websites to see how ready each one is to be picked. Exactly one clears the bar. Here is what the other 8,073 are missing.
The plumbing an AI needs to reach a firm is fine, and nearly every firm has it. Giving the AI clear, well-labelled information, who the solicitors are, what the practice areas are, what clients say, is the part that wins the recommendation, and almost no one does it. The door is open; the shelves are bare.
Every firm gets a score from 0 to 100 for how ready it is to be found and recommended by AI. To reach the top "AI-Ready" band you need 80, and one firm in the country gets there: Connaught Law, at 80.9.
More than a quarter of firms are Strong and half sit in the middle, while 1,757 firms, more than one in five, fall below 40 and are effectively invisible to AI. When someone asks an AI to recommend a solicitor, it names two or three, not ten. When nearly every firm looks the same, the few that stand out win far more than their share.
The score is built from eight areas. Firms score well on the plumbing an AI needs to reach them, the technical basics and the crawlers being let in, but fail on everything an AI needs to trust and cite them: structured data, brand authority and the evidence of expertise. The door is open; there is nothing labelled for a machine to lift and repeat.
We tagged the 62 large national and City firms in the cohort. They average 55.1, genuinely above the field's 50.6. Their budgets do buy a better site. But not one of the 62 is AI-Ready. The only firm over the line, Connaught Law, is a small independent.
The reason is the interesting part. The giants beat the field on everything money buys: technical quality (81.5 against 73.5), brand authority (56.6 against 37.6) and depth of content (79.1 against 63.1). Then the pattern stops. On structured data they score 31.3, against the field's 30.3, no better than anyone else. On AI citability they score 68.8, against the field's 72.1, slightly worse. They bought every signal a person notices and skipped the only one a machine needs.
Brand, size and budget do not buy AI visibility. The engines do not read a balance sheet, they read a website. A small firm that labels its work properly beats a national firm that does not.
On our measure, UK law firms sit mid-pack. They average about 51 for AI-search readiness, ahead of care homes (around 48), roughly level with veterinary practices, dentists and accountants (around 52) and behind aesthetic clinics (around 56). But law is the only sector with a firm over the AI-Ready line. The firms at the top are not doing anything exotic. They do a few specific, cheap things the rest have skipped.
Firms build technically reachable sites: on the technical basics they average 73.5 and on AI citability 72.1, and the crawlers are let in. But they give AI almost nothing to trust or lift: structured data averages 30.3 and brand authority 37.6, the two weakest areas. In a decision clients make on trust, that gap costs them the recommendation.
The firms near the top do four cheap things almost everyone else skips: they name their solicitors and their credentials in machine-readable form, mark the practice up as a LegalService or Organisation with its address and practice areas, publish the real questions clients ask as FAQ content, and show fees and regulatory information as structured data.
The highest-scoring firms in the country, all notified before publication, are Connaught Law (80.9, the only AI-Ready firm), Edmans & Co (79.7), Sutton Defence Lawyers (79.4), Bratby Law (79.1), MJP Conveyancing (78.9), Cranbrook Legal (78.9), Newgate Solicitors (78.8), Hodge Jones & Allen (78.5), KQ Solicitors (78.4) and Solidaire Solicitors (78.4). One clears the line and the other nine sit just under it, and the gap between them and the rest is a few labels, not the quality of the legal work.
The same thing keeps happening. Firms are reachable, the crawlers are let in, and the site works, then no one adds the small labels that let AI read and trust who the solicitors are, what the firm does and what clients say.
1,072 firms, one in eight, have a website built as a JavaScript app. They average 33.8 against 53.2 for everyone else, and just 4 of the 1,072 reach Strong, against 31 in every 100 of the rest. That is a firm 78 times less likely to be visible, decided not by marketing but by how the site was built. More than half of every effectively invisible firm in Britain, 905 of 1,757, is one of them. The legal work is the same; the machine simply never sees the page.
JSON-LD structured data is not one factor among many, it is close to a switch. 99.7% of Strong firms publish it. Just 1.3% of the weakest do. Of 8,074 firms, only 7 reach Strong without it. Firms that have it average 59.8; firms that do not average 39.7. The single snippet that tells an AI what your firm is, where it is and what it does is the line between being read and being skipped.
Structured data averages just 30.3 out of 100. Almost no firm publishes the machine-readable facts, the address, the practice areas, the fees, that an AI needs to lift and repeat.
Brand authority averages 37.6. Few firms show the credentials and trust signals an AI weighs before it will put a name forward.
Exactly one firm clears the AI-Ready mark: Connaught Law, at 80.9. It is the first business to do so in any SAVI edition we have published. The recipe is known, and almost no one follows it fully.
1,757 firms, more than one in five, score below 40, the point at which an AI can barely use the site at all. They may win in court; the machine cannot see them.
Choosing who to trust with a legal problem is won on trust and credentials: a named solicitor, regulatory standing, genuine reviews, real case experience. Yet brand authority averages just 37.6 and structured data 30.3 across the index, so the very things a client (and an AI) look for before enquiring are rarely labelled in a way AI can read. This is the open goal.
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How we did this. We checked each firm's live website the same way an AI reader would, looking at more than 250 things that affect whether AI can find, understand and recommend it, and turned that into a score out of 100. The benchmark covers 8,074 UK law firms identified from the SRA-regulated population via public listings, each audited in 2026 for AI-search (GEO) visibility. We name only the ten highest-scoring firms, all notified before publication; the rest stay anonymous.