Winner-take-most: how branded search demand concentrates in personal injury
Every month from July 2025 through June 2026. 641 personal injury firms. 60 markets where we track at least five of them. When we say share, we mean one thing: out of everyone who searched for a law firm by name in that market, how many typed yours. Before you quote a number from this page, read the audit — it explains what this data can and cannot tell you.
One firm gets a third of the market
A typical market has twelve firms competing. If people searched for them evenly, each would get about 8% of the name searches.
That is not what happens. The leading firm gets 34.9% — more than four times an even split.
Some markets are a real fight, with the leader on 12.6%. Others belong to one name: the highest we found was 75.1%. In 15 of the 60 markets the leader is above 40%. In seven of them, one firm gets more than half of everything searched.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Average leader share (60 markets) | 34.9% |
| Top three firms’ combined share of branded demand | 59.2% |
| Combined share of the bottom half of firms | 13.1% |
| Markets where the leader holds ≥ 40% | 15 of 60 |
| Markets where the leader holds ≥ 50% | 7 of 60 |
Branded personal injury search is not a long tail. Three names absorb six of every ten branded searches, and the entire bottom half of measured firms in a market — six firms, typically — divide 13% between them.
And they almost never lose it
We watched 118 markets for a full twelve months. In 62 of them — more than half — the same firm was number one every single month. Not once did anyone take the lead from them.
In 103 of those markets, only one or two firms ever held first place all year. Philadelphia is a good example: thirteen firms competing, and one of them sat at the top for eleven months out of twelve.
Whoever leads your market in January is probably still leading it in December. That cuts both ways. It is hard to take the lead. It is also hard to lose it once you have it.
Most firms have no brand at all
This is the part nobody puts in a pitch deck.
We track 856 firm-and-market combinations. In 564 of them — two out of every three — fewer than 150 people a month search for that firm by name. That is about five people a day. At that level we cannot tell a real change from Google rounding its numbers off.
Worse: 429 of the 641 firms we measure are below that line in every market they operate in. Not one city where their name gets searched enough to measure.
The honest way to say this is not “your brand is small.” It is that almost nobody is looking for you by name — while the firm across town collects a third of everyone who is looking.
When demand arrives: the seasonal calendar
We pulled ten years of Google search data (2016 to 2025) for five common phrases like “car accident lawyer,” then compared each month against its own year's average. Ten years means a slow month has to show up ten times before we believe it.
February is the quietest month of the year. It came in below average in 81% of the years we checked — the most consistent pattern in the whole dataset. Late summer is the busiest, with August and September running about 5% above average.
Two things this chart is not. It tracks people searching generic phrases, not people searching for firms by name — those are different behaviours. And it cannot tell you whether injury search is growing or shrinking over the years, because the math that reveals the month-to-month shape deliberately throws the year-to-year levels away. You get one or the other, not both.
| Month | Index (100 = year avg) | Keyword-years below avg |
|---|---|---|
| January | 93.6 | 62% |
| February | 87.7 | 81% |
| March | 96.7 | 64% |
| April | 90.3 | 60% |
| May | 91.5 | 66% |
| June | 97.1 | 66% |
| July | 101.4 | 40% |
| August | 105.5 | 36% |
| September | 104.3 | 34% |
| October | 99.1 | 55% |
| November | 96.0 | 57% |
| December | 99.5 | 51% |
What we are not telling you
We are not saying demand is going up or down. We have twelve months of data. With only one year, there is no way to tell a real trend apart from normal seasonal swings. Ask us again when we have two years.
We are not saying what built anyone's brand. We do not have anyone's advertising spend. So when a firm leads its market, we can show you that it leads — we cannot tell you whether TV, billboards, social, or thirty years of word of mouth put them there. Anyone claiming otherwise from this data is guessing.
We do not publish numbers finer than our tools can measure. Google reports search volume in rounded buckets, so we publish shares and rankings, never “this firm grew 12% last month.” Everything we got wrong on the way here is written up on its own page.
Source: BrandTerritory index panel, July 2025 – June 2026, brand-over-brand shares. Ownership shared with Mass Tort Ad Agency (which sells mass tort Meta advertising, not brand advertising); inclusion in the index can be purchased, results cannot. Methodology.