BigLaw GEO Leaderboard

Questions

Why are there three Google columns?

Google runs three separate AI surfaces, and Ahrefs counts citations on each one separately. Gemini is Google's standalone AI assistant, an app and website like ChatGPT. AI Overviews is the AI-written summary that appears above the normal results on a regular Google search. AI Mode is the newer chat-style tab inside Google Search itself. Together with ChatGPT, these four platforms make up the leaderboard. A firm can be strong on one and absent on another, which is why they stay separate columns.

What exactly is being counted?

AI citations: the number of links to a firm's website that Ahrefs observed inside AI-generated answers on each platform, domain-wide: every practice area, every office, every page. All AI is the sum across the four platforms shown.

Why is the Claude column a lock?

Claude appears in no vendor's citation dataset, so no citation count exists to publish. Claude visibility comes from the AI Visibility Index instead, and is reported as a mention rate in percent rather than a citation count. For that reason it is never added into All AI. It is available to members: contact Joe.

What are DR and organic traffic?

Context columns from traditional SEO, same Ahrefs pull. DR (Domain Rating) scores the strength of a site's backlink profile from 0–100. Organic traffic is Ahrefs' estimate of monthly visits from unpaid Google results. Neither measures AI visibility. They show whether a firm's AI citations track its conventional web strength or break from it, which is where the interesting rows are.

How often does this update?

Monthly, matching Ahrefs' own refresh cycle. Only the current month is published; every prior snapshot is archived privately, which is what makes month-over-month movement verifiable when it is reported. More definitions: the glossary.

Why Ahrefs?

Large language models were trained on web content. The same pages that rank in search results formed the training data that taught these models what to say and who to cite.

Ahrefs is the search industry's standard database of organic search data: 14 years of crawl history across billions of pages. SEO practitioners and agencies worldwide use it as the authority on:

• which pages rank,
• which sites link to which, and
• how visible a domain is in search.

When those same models began generating answers with citations, Ahrefs was the vendor positioned to measure it, and did. The AI citation counts on this page come from the same crawl infrastructure that already tracks the web these models learned from.

What this measures, and what it does not

AI citations are the number of citation links to each firm's domain that Ahrefs observed in generated answers on each platform, as of the date above. The counts are domain-wide: every practice area, every geography, every page. They are a visibility proxy from one vendor's sample of AI answers. Grok was tracked through August 2026 and removed after Ahrefs reported zero citations across all firms.

They are not a measurement of whether AI recommends a firm when a buyer asks for counsel. A firm can earn thousands of citations from a popular client-alert blog and still never be named when a general counsel asks ChatGPT who should handle a matter. Knowing that requires direct measurement. See the note at the bottom.

Method

• Universe, four segments.
  • Big Law: US firms of Am Law 100 scale. The roster is compiled from the 2025 Am Law 100 ranking, and a handful of members may be absent until the next verification pass. "Am Law 100" is a ranking published by The American Lawyer, referenced descriptively.
  • Global: internationally headquartered firms with major US practices.
  • Mid-Law: selected mid-size and regional firms.
  • Boutique: elite litigation boutiques.
• AI citations: Ahrefs Site Explorer AI citation data (citation links per platform), pulled per domain. "All AI" is the sum across the four platforms shown.
• Platforms not shown: Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Grok were tracked in earlier snapshots but are excluded from the current table.

Known data caveats

• mwe.com (McDermott Will & Schulte) and sheppardmullin.com show near-zero tracked organic traffic despite healthy Domain Ratings, which is consistent with site migrations or crawler restrictions. Treat those rows with caution.
• winston.com (Winston & Strawn) also shows unusually low tracked organic traffic relative to its citation profile.
• fenwick.com (Fenwick & West) shows unusually high tracked organic traffic. About 220,000 of its estimated visits come from one deal-announcement page that ranks for the brand search "scribd" in Brazil. Those visitors are looking for Scribd, not for a law firm, so the figure overstates Fenwick's legal search traffic.
• ChatGPT citation counts fell across almost every firm between the September and October 2026 snapshots (101 of 118 firms down). A drop that broad points to a change in Ahrefs' ChatGPT sample rather than to the firms themselves, so month-over-month ChatGPT movement this month should not be read as a change in any firm's visibility.
• Recently merged or renamed firms are tracked at their current domains (FBT Gibbons at fbtgibbons.com, Kilpatrick at ktslaw.com, Hunton at hunton.com); citation counts largely reset after a domain migration, so their numbers understate the legacy firms.

Disclaimers

• Independence. This leaderboard is independent research by Joe Ashta. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or approved by any law firm listed, by any AI platform named, or by any data vendor. No firm paid to appear, and no firm can pay to move.
• Trademarks.
  • "Am Law 100" and "The American Lawyer" are trademarks of ALM Global, LLC.
  • ChatGPT is a trademark of OpenAI.
  • Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode are trademarks of Google LLC.
  • Claude is a trademark of Anthropic, PBC.
  • Copilot is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
  • Perplexity is a trademark of Perplexity AI, Inc.
  • Ahrefs is a trademark of Ahrefs Pte. Ltd.
  All firm names and marks are the property of their respective owners. All third-party names on this page are used descriptively, to identify the entities being measured or the sources of data, and no endorsement is implied in either direction.
• Not a ranking of legal ability. Citation counts measure online visibility in AI-generated answers. They say nothing about the quality of any firm's legal services, and this page is not legal advice, not attorney advertising, and not a lawyer referral service.
• Data as-is. All figures are third-party estimates (Ahrefs) at a point in time. They may contain errors, and they change between pulls. Corrections are welcome: contact Joe and the row will be reviewed against the next snapshot.