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 9,487 UK law firm websites to see how ready each one is to be picked. Just three clear the bar. Here is what the other 9,484 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 three firms in the country get there: Robertsons Legal (82.6), Connaught Law (80.9) and Saunders & Partners (80.0).
More than a quarter of firms are Strong and half sit in the middle, while 1,768 firms, nearly 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.
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 now has three firms over the AI-Ready line, more than any edition we have published. 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 75.0 and on AI citability 72.3, and the crawlers are let in. But they give AI almost nothing to trust or lift: structured data averages 31.2 and brand authority 37.5, 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 Robertsons Legal (82.6), Connaught Law (80.9), Saunders & Partners (80.0), Edmans Legal (79.7), Newgate Solicitors (79.6), Moeen & Co (79.2), MJP Conveyancing (78.9), The Cranbrook Group (78.9), Bratby Law (78.8) and Stuart Sutton Defence Lawyers (78.7). Three clear the AI-Ready line and the rest sit just under it, and the gap between them and the field 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.
964 firms, one in ten, have a website built as a JavaScript app. They average 33.6 against 53.4 for everyone else, and just 4 of the 964 reach Strong, against 32 in every 100 of the rest. That is a firm 76 times less likely to be visible, decided not by marketing but by how the site was built. Almost half of every effectively invisible firm in Britain, 821 of 1,768, 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. Across 9,487 firms, not one reaches 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 31.2 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 37.5. Few firms show the credentials and trust signals an AI weighs before it will put a name forward.
Three firms clear the AI-Ready mark: Robertsons Legal (82.6), Connaught Law (80.9) and Saunders & Partners (80.0). At one firm in roughly 3,160 it is the thinnest rate in any edition we have published: accountancy and aesthetic clinics each found one, from 1,038 and 1,567 businesses. The recipe is known, and almost no one follows it fully.
1,768 firms, nearly 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 37.5 and structured data 31.2 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 9,487 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.