We checked 9 personal injury law firms for AI visibility. Eight B's, zero A's.
After an accident, more people now ask ChatGPT and Google's AI "who's a good personal injury lawyer near me?" So we took 9 real personal injury firms in Columbus, OH and scored how well an AI assistant can actually understand and recommend each one from its website.
We ran every homepage through a tool that reads a site the way an AI assistant does and scores it from 0 to 100 on the things a model needs to recommend a business: what it does, where it serves, its services, structured data, contact details, pricing signals, hours, answers to common questions, and trust signals. Personal injury is one of the most competitive, ad-heavy niches in all of local marketing, so if anyone's site is built to win, it's these. Here's what came back.
Everyone competes to be found. No one is built to be picked.
Eight of the nine firms were readable, and every one had structured data in place. These are sites with real budgets behind them. And yet they landed in a remarkably tight band:
Every readable firm graded a B. Not one reached an A. In a niche that spends enormous sums to rank on Google, the sites are all optimized for the old game, being found, and none is optimized for the new one: being the firm an AI is confident enough to name.
What AI couldn't tell about these firms
An assistant could tell each of these is a personal injury firm in the Columbus area. What it repeatedly couldn't pin down was what actually decides who a hurt person calls: the exact case types they take (car accidents, medical malpractice, workers' comp), concrete past results, whether the consultation is free and the fee is contingency, the precise area served, and plain answers to "do I even have a case?" When those specifics aren't in readable text, the model hedges, and names whichever firm it happened to understand a little better.
And one firm was invisible. One of the nine couldn't be read at all, most likely heavy JavaScript or bot-protection blocking the crawl. For a firm spending to be found, that's the cruelest outcome: when someone asks an AI for a lawyer, it isn't even in the running.
The takeaway
When the most competitive niche in local marketing averages a 75 with zero A's, it tells you how new this shift is: nobody has optimized for it yet. That's the opening. The first firm to put its real case types, results, fee terms and straight answers into readable text becomes the one an AI names, while the rest stay an interchangeable row of B's. It isn't a rebuild, it's clearer content and structured data.
See where your firm scores →More from this series: plumbers, dentists, HVAC companies, and med spas. Also: why ChatGPT doesn't recommend your business.
Method: 9 personal injury law firm homepages in Columbus, OH, scanned in September 2026 with BotDesk's AI Visibility Checker. A spot-check, not a census; individual firms are not named.