We asked five AI engines to recommend the best personal injury lawyers in Denver, 1,420 times, across all 30 firms on the first page of Google. Then we measured what actually separates the firms AI names from the firms it ignores. Most of what the marketing industry sells did not move the needle. One thing did.
This is a full-population census, not a sample or a poll. We defined the population as the top 30 organic law-firm websites returned by Google for “Denver personal injury attorney,” captured logged out with location set to Denver, with ads and directories excluded. We audited all 30 with the same engine on the same day, so every finding below is a share of the real population, not an estimate.
Research question: when someone asks AI for the best injury lawyer in Denver, how short and how concentrated is the list?
Across the generic “best personal injury lawyer in Denver” answers, AI named 179 different firms. But two firms show up in more than half of those answers, and the rest of the field thins out fast.
“Best personal injury lawyer in Denver” is the phrase every firm wants to win, and it is the one you are least likely to win. A handful of large, long-established names occupy most of that answer. That is the crowded front door. The rest of this study is about the other doors, which are wide open.
Research question: does the same firm win every kind of case, or does the leader change by practice area?
The firms that lead the generic term do not automatically lead each practice area. Ask about dog bites, trucking, or brain injury and a different firm is named first, and in a couple of lanes that firm is a focused specialist rather than one of the largest names.
You do not have to win the whole category to be recommended by AI. You have to be the clearest answer to a specific question. Because the leader changes from one practice area to the next, the firm that dominates “best injury lawyer” does not automatically dominate “best truck accident lawyer” or “best dog bite lawyer.” Those are separate contests, and each one is winnable on its own terms.
Research question: of all the website fixes the AEO industry recommends, which ones actually track with being named by AI?
We measured every firm’s AI visibility against the full checklist of on-site signals the AEO industry sells. Page speed was the strongest, and the only statistically significant, relationship. Generic schema markup and “citability” scoring showed essentially no relationship with who AI actually named.
Much of the AI-visibility industry sells structured data as the path to getting recommended. On this real Denver market, that claim did not hold: firms with the markup were no more likely to be named than firms without it. Speed, on the other hand, tracked visibility clearly. The most visible ten firms load in about 5 seconds; the least visible ten take about 13.
The practical read is simple. Do not pay for a pile of schema tags and call it an AI strategy. Make the site fast, be the most substantive answer to a specific question, and earn a presence on the sources AI trusts. That is the work that moves visibility.
Research question: is there one AI ranking to win, or five separate ones — and do they matter equally?
There is no single “AI ranking” to conquer. When the same question is asked of all five engines, 82% of the firms named appear on only one of them. Winning is engine by engine. But the engines are worlds apart in how many people they reach, which is what decides where the cases actually come from.
You do not have to win “AI.” You have to win the engines that matter, in the right order. Being named is engine-specific, so a single “how am I doing in AI” check is misleading unless it looks at each engine separately. But being named is not equally valuable everywhere. You can rank first on Perplexity and still miss most of the clients, the same way ranking first on Bing means little if you are absent from Google.
The strategy that follows is concrete: win ChatGPT and Google first, because that is where the people and the cases are, then extend to Perplexity, Copilot, and Claude. Knowing how each engine picks its answers, and which one to fight for first, is the whole game.
Research question: what share of Denver firms have the basic structured data AI can read, and is it a differentiator?
Nearly every firm already lets AI crawlers in and serves readable pages. That is the floor, and it is not where the gap is. The gap is in the specific, trust-bearing markup: only 5 of 30 firms expose their reviews to AI, and not one exposes an aggregate rating.
The plumbing on most Denver firm sites is fine. AI can reach and read them. So the honest headline is not “your site is broken.” It is: the readable basics are done, almost nobody has the trust-bearing specifics, and even the firms that do are not winning on markup alone. The next edge is off the website entirely.
Every one of the 30 firms has an individual result: the exact queries where AI named a competitor instead of you, engine by engine. We are happy to walk any Denver firm through its own numbers.
See your firm’s results