Findings, September 2026

The BigLaw GEO Leaderboard snapshot of 4 September 2026 covers 118 US law firms and 15,752 AI citations in total. Every figure below is an Ahrefs-reported citation count, compared against the previous snapshot of 20 August 2026. A citation proves that a platform read a page on a firm's site and used it as a source. It does not prove the firm was named in the answer, it does not prove a recommendation, and it says nothing about any firm's legal work. Joe Ashta reads the snapshot below on those terms.

Top ten by total citations

All ten sit in the Big Law segment. For a marketing lead at a firm outside that segment, the useful reading is that the top of the table is a different competition from the one your firm is in. Compare your row against your own segment, and treat these ten as the ceiling of what a domain-wide citation count reaches at this scale, rather than as a target for the year.

Rank changes since 20 August 2026

Of the 118 firms, 116 carry a rank from the previous snapshot. Jones Day and Hogan Lovells Cadwalader do not, because neither appeared in it. Among the 116, 106 rows moved up, 8 moved down and 2 held their place. The gains run from 25 places down: Shook Hardy & Bacon 25, King & Spalding 22, Milbank 19, Weil Gotshal 17, Steptoe 15, Husch Blackwell 15, Dechert 14, Ashurst 14, then another 34 firms between 13 places and 10. The falls were smaller: Duane Morris 9 places, Willkie Farr 3, Holland & Knight 2, Finnegan 2, then four firms one place each.

A marketing lead should read those two lists with the counts in mind. When 106 of 116 rows move up and 42 of them move ten places or more, the tracked list has changed shape between pulls, so a gain is not on its own a signal about the firm holding it. A rank also responds to what neighbouring firms did. Before reporting a gain internally, check whether the firm's own citation count grew, because a rank move can hide a flat count.

Platform coverage gaps

22 of the 118 firms, 18.6 percent, record zero citations on at least one of the four published platforms. The gaps are not evenly spread: 13 firms sit at zero on Gemini, 13 at zero on AI Overviews, 9 at zero on ChatGPT and 9 at zero on AI Mode. Three firms record zero across all four.

This finding has an action attached to it. A zero on one platform beside a healthy count on another usually points at a coverage problem on that platform rather than at the quality of the firm's content, since the same pages are on offer to all four. If your firm shows a zero column, that column is the place to look first, and one check to run first is whether that platform can reach the site at all.

Where the citations come from

Across all 118 firms, ChatGPT accounts for 5,807 of the 15,752 citations, 36.9 percent. AI Mode accounts for 4,300, 27.3 percent. AI Overviews accounts for 2,956, 18.8 percent. Gemini accounts for 2,689, 17.1 percent. Google's three surfaces together account for 9,945 citations, more than ChatGPT alone.

The reading for a marketing lead: budget attention across surfaces the way the citations land. ChatGPT is a single platform carrying over a third of the total, so it earns single attention. Google's three surfaces are separate counts with separate behaviour, and a firm can be strong on one and absent on another, which is why the leaderboard keeps them apart. Treating AI search as one channel hides the gap that the zero columns above expose.

Concentration at the top

The ten firms in the first table hold 5,048 citations, 32.0 percent of the 15,752 counted. The top twenty hold 7,945, 50.4 percent. The other 98 firms share the remaining half.

For a firm outside the top twenty, that distribution is the argument for a narrower target. Domain-wide citation share at this concentration is bought with size and volume of published pages. A firm competing on a defined set of questions, in a defined practice area, is playing on a part of the distribution the totals column does not show. Use the totals to understand the market, and set your own goal at the level of the questions your buyers actually ask.

How to quote these figures

Each figure above is a vendor-reported count from a single snapshot date, and the same boundaries apply that are set out on the entity record. The numbers change between pulls, and the ranking they produce is a ranking of website visibility in AI answers.

Related

The Leaderboard method page states how the snapshot is produced and what its known caveats are. The BigLaw GEO Leaderboard holds the full table for all 118 firms, and the glossary defines every term used here.