SearchScore has benchmarked 9,487 UK law firms on whether AI search engines can find, understand and recommend them. Three are AI-ready. Three, in the whole country.
That works out to roughly one firm in 3,160. Accountancy and aesthetic clinics each managed one, from samples of 1,038 and 1,567. Law had six times the sample and barely did better.
But the number that actually stopped me is a different one.
One in ten firms built their website in a way that makes them invisible
964 UK law firms, about one in ten, have a website built as a JavaScript application. Those firms are 76 times less likely to be visible to AI.
| JavaScript-built (964 firms) | Everyone else (8,523) | |
|---|---|---|
| Average score | 33.6 | 53.4 |
| Reach Strong (60+) | 4 firms | 32 in every 100 |
Read the right-hand column again. Four firms out of 964 manage what a third of everyone else manages routinely. And 821 of the 1,768 firms that are effectively invisible to AI are JavaScript builds: almost half of the invisible population of an entire profession, created by a technical decision nobody framed as a marketing one.
Key Takeaways
- One in ten firms built their website in a way that makes them invisible
- The second finding is a different kind of problem
- What the benchmark actually found
- How the profession compares to others
Someone commissioned a website, an agency built it in a modern framework, it looked excellent in the browser, and it shipped. The content only exists after JavaScript executes, and a lot of what reads the web does not wait for that. The firm is not badly marketed. It is unreadable.
If your site was rebuilt in the last few years and looks slick, this is worth ten minutes of somebody’s time. Disable JavaScript and load your own homepage. Whatever is left is roughly what a machine gets.
The second finding is a different kind of problem
99.7% of Strong-scoring firms publish JSON-LD structured data. Just 1.3% of the weakest do. Across all 9,487 firms, not one reaches Strong without it.
Firms that publish it average 59.8. Firms that do not average 39.7. That is a twenty-point gap attached to a block of markup that takes an afternoon.
Correlation is doing some work here that causation might not fully own. Firms organised enough to add structured data are probably organised in other ways too. But “not one firm in 9,487 reaches Strong without it” is a hard line, and I cannot find a reading of that which makes the markup optional.
What the benchmark actually found
| Area | Average out of 100 |
|---|---|
| Structured data | 31.2 |
| Brand authority | 37.5 |
| AI platform readiness | 44.1 |
| Platform optimisation | 45.5 |
| E-E-A-T content | 46.8 |
| Topical authority | 64.5 |
| AI citability | 72.3 |
| Technical basics | 75.0 |
The crawlers get in and read the page perfectly well. Technical basics are 75.0 and AI citability is 72.3.
Structured data is 31.2 and brand authority is 37.5. Everything that tells a machine what it is looking at, and why it should believe it, is missing.
The report puts it well: the door is open and the shelves are bare.
How the profession compares to others
Law firms average about 51. That puts them ahead of care homes at around 48, roughly level with vets, dentists and accountants at around 52, and behind aesthetic clinics.
Five professions, wildly different in size, budget and sophistication, all clustered between 48 and 53. This is not an industry problem. It is what happens everywhere when nothing reports the loss.
I made the same point about 1,038 accountancy firms, where zero wrote answers in the format AI quotes from. Different profession, same shape.
Sixty firms are one push away
Three firms clear 80: Robertsons Legal at 82.6, Connaught Law at 80.9 and Saunders and Partners at 80.0. All were notified before publication.
More usefully, 60 firms sit between 75 and 79.9. That is sixty firms who have already done nearly all of the work and are one structural fix from being in the top band nationally. For most of them it will be the markup, or the JavaScript, or an author byline.
What I would do if I ran a law firm
- Load your homepage with JavaScript disabled. If the page is blank, nothing else on this list matters yet. This is the single highest-stakes check in the report.
- Publish JSON-LD. Organisation, and Article on anything you write. Not one firm in 9,487 reached Strong without it.
- Put named solicitors, with credentials, on the pages that matter. Brand authority at 37.5 is the gap between having expertise and being able to prove it to a machine.
- Answer the question first. One self-contained passage under each heading that still makes sense quoted on its own.
None of that is a redesign, and all of it is cheaper than the ranking work most firms are already buying.
Where these numbers come from
All figures are from the SearchScore SAVI benchmark, The AI Visibility Index: UK Law Firms 2026, covering 9,487 UK law firms identified from the SRA-regulated population via public listings, each checked across more than 250 signals. I have not recalculated anything. The report is the benchmark; this is my reading of it.
Disclosure: I built SearchScore, so weigh that accordingly. The checks behind it are things you can verify by hand on any law firm website in about ten minutes, and the JavaScript one takes about thirty seconds. If you want the reasoning behind the method rather than the numbers, start with my guide to generative engine optimisation.
One in ten UK law firms built a website AI cannot read
