BrandTerritory Research

Nine studies. The first measurement of how much injury demand is branded at all, the first market-by-market measurement of Spanish-language injury demand, the first measurement of America's legal vanity phone numbers, a census of 627 firm websites measured for AI answer engines, the ledger of which firms gained and lost branded search demand over the last nine months, what we found in a year of search data across 641 personal injury firms, ten years of seasonal data on when people go looking for a lawyer, the first market-by-market test of whether car crashes predict who searches for a lawyer, and an honest account of everything we got wrong measuring it.

Brand Penetration Rate: is brand-building in PI actually working?

Everyone measures who leads a market. Nobody measures whether anyone has built the brand reflex at all. Nationally 44.7% of injury search demand is branded — but it runs from 11.1% in Toledo to 69.0% in El Paso. Includes a direct test of the obvious objection: we ran discovery against the lowest markets to find the brands we were supposedly missing. It found 28 firms and none cleared the floor.

The Spanish-Language Brand Vacuum

Spanish-language injury search demand measured in 20 U.S. markets. The demand runs a clean gradient down the Texas border — Laredo 11.0% of measured demand, El Paso 9.7%, in exact geographic order. Spanish clicks price up to $1,466. And across a 659-firm index, Spanish branded demand is held almost entirely by two firms — in Los Angeles, one brand's name outdraws the entire Spanish generic category.

Do car crashes predict who searches for a lawyer?

Every fatal crash the government recorded in 2024, mapped by its coordinates to the media market it happened in and set against a year of injury search demand. Crashes explain two-thirds of lawyer search volume. The median market: ~688 searches per 1,000 crashes. The most search-saturated market — Buffalo, NY, the ancestral home of saturation PI advertising — runs 89x the least. New York places three of the top ten.

The Million-Dollar Digits: which vanity number owns America's memory

The first jointly-scaled head-to-head of legal repeater numbers. 222-2222 holds a third of national recall and is still being paid for every month. 444-4444 owns 63% of New York. And 888-8888 — once the most famous legal number in America — decayed to under a tenth of the pie after Cellino & Barnes dissolved. Recall is rented, not owned.

The Personal Injury AI-Readiness Study 2026

We measured all 627 personal injury firm websites in the index for the search engines that answer instead of rank. Not one earned an A. The average firm scores 89.8 on technical SEO and 57.1 on AI-readiness — a 32.7-point gap that holds on 620 of 627 firms. 98% make claims a machine can't verify. Full census, method, and every correction disclosed.

The biggest brand in personal injury is losing ground. Here is who is taking it.

Morgan & Morgan shed 1.36 points of national branded search share over nine months — more than any other firm we measure. TopDog Law gained 0.82, more than any other. The national number hides the strategy: Morgan is the biggest gainer in Orlando, Miami, Charlotte and Baltimore while losing ground in New York, Dallas, Philadelphia and St. Louis. City-by-city gainers and losers across the twenty largest measured markets.

One firm gets a third of the market. And almost never loses it.

In a typical market twelve firms compete for name searches. An even split would give each 8%. The leader gets 30.4%. In more than half of the markets we watched for a full year, the same firm was number one every single month. And two out of three firms have no measurable brand at all.

When people search for an injury lawyer

Ten years of Google data. February is the quietest month of the year — below average in 81% of the last ten years, the most consistent pattern in the dataset. Only July, August and September run above average. The full monthly calendar, and the honest size of the swing.

We were about to publish 853 “rising firm” claims. Only 72 held up.

Google rounds its search numbers off, and that rounding can look exactly like a firm on the rise. We checked our own index against that problem and deleted nine out of every ten arrows we were ready to show. Six problems we found, four of them ours, and what we changed.

Methodology and ownership disclosures: /methodology. Ownership shared with Mass Tort Ad Agency, which sells Meta advertising to law firms including brand advertising. Index results cannot be purchased.