Most businesses buy search and conversion separately. An SEO agency here, a CRO consultant there, and lately someone promising to get them mentioned by ChatGPT. Three budgets, three contracts, three sets of recommendations that rarely reference each other.
I have just scored 8,856 UK law firms on all three at once, and the data tells a story the specialists would rather you did not hear.
The three scores move together, and they move together tightly
Every firm in this sample carries three independent scores out of 100: how visible it is to AI search engines (GEO), how well it is built for conventional search (SEO), and how well the live page converts a visitor into an enquiry (CRO). Here is how those numbers relate to each other:
| Relationship | Correlation |
|---|---|
| SEO and GEO | 0.863 |
| GEO and CRO | 0.817 |
| SEO and CRO | 0.780 |
Those are high numbers. Give me a firm’s SEO score and I can tell you roughly where its AI search visibility sits without running a single audit.
Key Takeaways
- The three scores move together, and they move together tightly
- Almost nobody is good at exactly one thing
- Where the real weaknesses are
- The firms that get it right get it right everywhere
Split the sample into quartiles by SEO score and the pattern is impossible to miss:
| SEO quartile | Avg SEO | Avg GEO | Avg CRO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bottom 25% | 39.3 | 37.7 | 37.7 |
| Second | 53.4 | 50.1 | 52.3 |
| Third | 61.1 | 57.2 | 57.3 |
| Top 25% | 68.9 | 63.9 | 62.7 |
The firms at the bottom of one discipline are at the bottom of all of them. The firms at the top are at the top of all of them.
Almost nobody is good at exactly one thing
If these were genuinely separate disciplines, you would expect plenty of firms to have solved one and neglected the others. The data does not bear that out.
| Strong (60+) in… | Firms | Share |
|---|---|---|
| none of the three | 4,461 | 50.4% |
| exactly one | 1,381 | 15.6% |
| exactly two | 1,249 | 14.1% |
| all three | 1,765 | 19.9% |
Half the profession is weak everywhere. A fifth is strong everywhere. The middle — firms who genuinely specialised in one thing and let the rest slide — is the smallest group.
Of the 3,850 firms with a strong SEO score, only 172 are weak on AI visibility. That is 4.5%. The rest carried their SEO competence straight into AI search without doing anything specifically about AI.
Where the real weaknesses are
This is not an argument for ignoring SEO. Look instead at which discipline each firm is weakest in:
| Weakest discipline | Firms | Share |
|---|---|---|
| AI search visibility (GEO) | 3,803 | 42.9% |
| Conversion (CRO) | 3,701 | 41.8% |
| Conventional SEO | 1,352 | 15.3% |
SEO is the discipline firms have most under control, and that is no surprise. It has had 25 years of agencies, tooling and pressure selling. AI visibility and conversion are each roughly three times more likely to be a firm’s weakest point.
Correlations do not tell you that SEO causes the other two. They tell you that all three measure the same underlying property: whether a business is legible and persuasive. Most firms are treating the two newer measurements as optional.
The firms that get it right get it right everywhere
The best all-round performers in the sample carry all three scores into the high seventies:
| Firm | GEO | SEO | CRO |
|---|---|---|---|
| ayjsolicitors.com | 71 | 78 | 83 |
| connaughtlaw.com | 81 | 79 | 74 |
| cranbrooklegal.com | 79 | 76 | 79 |
| woodcocklaw.co.uk | 76 | 79 | 80 |
| kqsolicitors.com | 78 | 80 | 75 |
None of these are magic circle firms with seven figure marketing budgets. They are ordinary practices whose websites happen to be clearly structured, clearly written and clearly asking for the enquiry. That combination is what all three scores are picking up.
One important caveat
One engine produced all three scores, and some of the underlying signals feed more than one of them. A site that loads fast, uses clean headings and marks up its content properly will score better on all three, partly because those things are inputs to all three.
That still does not make the case for treating them separately. If the same handful of structural properties drive your search visibility, your AI visibility and your conversion rate, then buying them as three unrelated projects is an expensive way to build the same foundation three times.
Where to focus if you are choosing where to spend
The distribution above is the useful part. Half of firms are weak everywhere, which means the first meaningful gain is rarely a clever tactic in one discipline. It is the structural work that shows up in all three at once: clear headings, answerable content, working markup, a page that states plainly what you do and asks for the enquiry.
If you are already strong on SEO, your biggest gap is unlikely to be AI search. More often it is conversion, which is the discipline that gets measured least and costs the most in lost enquiries.
Method
8,856 UK law firms, each holding a GEO, SEO and CRO score above zero, drawn from the SearchScore benchmark of 9,487 firms published in One in ten UK law firms built a website AI cannot read. Firms missing any of the three scores are excluded, which is why the sample is smaller than the published edition. Where a firm has been audited more than once, only its most recent audit is used. Scores run 0 to 100 across 250+ signals. Correlations are Pearson. Figures accurate as at August 2026.
SEO, AI search and conversion are not three problems
