Methodology

How the Personal Injury Brand Demand Index is measured, and the rules that keep it honest.

The premise: every search is a vote

BrandTerritory's tagline is "Every search is a vote. We count them." When an injured person types a law firm's name into Google, they express a preference that no directory listing, award badge, or advertisement can manufacture: they already know who they want. Branded search is revealed preference — demand-side evidence of which firms people actually choose. It is the opposite of supply-side data (directory profiles, self-reported case results, awards), which describes what firms say about themselves. Directories tell you which firms exist in a market; this index measures which firms people ask for by name, and in what proportion. That is the question this dataset answers, and the sense in which every figure published here is a vote count.

What we measure

Brand demand share is the number of branded searches a firm's name attracts each month — the exact name, common misspellings, principal attorneys, and nicknames — as a share of all injury-related search demand in the same metro market. Branded demand is the demand that cannot be manufactured by bidding or ranking; it belongs to whoever built the brand. It can, however, be intercepted at the moment of search — a rival can buy a firm’s name as a keyword and sit above the result the searcher came for. Owning the demand and receiving the click are different things; this index measures the first and monitors the second. Who is bidding on whose name →

Geographic unit: city and state

Volumes are measured at Google Ads metro scope — city-level geo targets like "Phoenix, Arizona" — because that is the geography search-volume data actually lives in and the unit a firm can act on. Results are displayed on Nielsen DMA outlines because DMAs are the stable, non-overlapping, mutually familiar map legal marketers already speak; the tile is the outline, not the measuring stick. Where Nielsen combines metros into one DMA (Mobile–Pensacola, for example), we measure each metro separately. State pages roll measured metros up to the unit where bar licensure, statutes of limitation, damage rules, and statewide-saturation brands actually operate — a firm's legal market is its state; its brand market is its metro; the DMA is how the map is drawn.

How it is measured

Search volumes come from Google Ads search volume data, scoped to each market. Google groups close spelling variants and reports them at identical volume and CPC; we collapse those groups so no name is counted twice, and apply the same deduplication to the generic demand basket. Volumes arrive as Keyword Planner buckets, so every figure is a band, not a decimal — disagreements inside roughly 15% are tool noise, and we say so.

Territory status

A market is a fortress when its leader holds 40% or more of all demand; contested when two or more measured firms hold meaningful share; led when one firm leads below the fortress line; and partial coverage when no measured firm holds at least 10% of demand and 200 branded searches per month. Partial coverage is a statement about our enumeration of that market, not a finding that the market has no brand leader.

Share percentages are unaffected by enumeration gaps: the denominator is total injury-related search demand in the market, not the sum of measured firms, so a missing firm never inflates another firm's share.

The measurability floor

The measurability floor scales with the market: it is 1% of that market's total injury search demand, never below 20 branded searches per month and never above 100. A firm below its market's floor is measured but not ranked — below that line we cannot distinguish a brand from noise, and displaying a number inside its own error bars would be false precision. A flat national floor would have been wrong in both directions: it would erase strong local brands in small markets, where 70 searches a month can be a quarter of everything typed, while ranking statistical noise in the largest ones. "We couldn't measure you yet" is a possible outcome of any scan — that is precisely what makes every published number worth something.

Inclusion and integrity

Inclusion can be purchased; results cannot. A firm may pay to be measured — that is an audit fee, and the measurement says what the data says. Market leaders in every measured market are indexed editorially, free, whether or not they are ever customers: a ledger missing the giants would be false, and a false ledger is worth nothing to anyone, including the firms on it.

Ownership disclosure

BrandTerritory shares ownership with Mass Tort Ad Agency, AdaptLegal, and PlatinumProfile.ai. PlatinumProfile clients receive index inclusion as a paid component of their plans. Measurement methodology is identical for all firms; no commercial relationship affects any score.

Use of rankings by law firms

BrandTerritory publishes comparative market data. Firms who republish their position in their own advertising are responsible for compliance with their state bar's rules on comparative claims; we recommend citing the index by name, with date, and linking the market page.

Known limits

Metro-level search volume from any third-party tool is modeled, not measured. Multi-state advertisers pick up brand search that market-scoped tools may attribute to local strength. Markets flagged thin coverage track fewer than three firms and will understate competition until the local field is added. And share of search is one surface of coverage — the winner of a market is ultimately decided by cost per signed case, not by any single share number.