Research and reference

Leaderboard method

The BigLaw GEO Leaderboard ranks 118 US law firms by the AI search citations Ahrefs reports for their websites. Joe Ashta publishes it and refreshes it monthly. This page states where the firm list comes from, what the number counts, what changes between refreshes, and the limits a reader should hold in mind before quoting a row.

The firm universe

The table tracks 118 US law firms, sorted into four leaderboard segments: Big Law, firms of Am Law 100 scale; Global, internationally headquartered firms with major US practices; Mid-Law, selected mid-size and regional firms; and Boutique, elite litigation boutiques. The segments exist so that a firm is read against firms of its own size rather than against the whole table.

Each firm is tracked at one domain, the one it uses now. Merged and renamed firms therefore appear under their current address. Counts are domain-wide, covering every practice area, every office and every page on that domain. No firm pays to appear, and no firm can pay to move.

The data source

Every count comes from Ahrefs. Ahrefs reports the number of citation links to a domain that it observed inside AI-generated answers, and it reports that figure separately for each platform. Four platforms are published: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews. The All AI column is the sum of those four and nothing else.

Platforms outside those four are excluded from the published table. Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Grok were tracked in earlier snapshots and are not shown now. Claude carries no citation column at all, because no vendor publishes a citation dataset for it. Ahrefs is the only data source named for this table, and it is the only one used.

The refresh and the delta

The table is rebuilt monthly. Each firm carries a delta against the previous month's snapshot, showing how many places its rank moved between the two pulls. A delta is a change in position, so it responds both to a firm's own citation count and to what the firms around it did. A firm can gain places in a month when its own count barely moves.

Only the current month is published. Earlier snapshots are kept in a private archive. That archive is what allows a movement claim to be checked against a record rather than taken on trust.

The context columns

DR and organic traffic come from the same Ahrefs pull and sit on the table for context. DR scores the strength of a site's backlink profile. Organic traffic estimates monthly visits from unpaid Google results. Neither one measures AI visibility. They are there so a reader can see whether a firm's citation profile tracks its conventional search strength or departs from it.

What the number is, and what it is not

The number is a count of vendor-reported citations: one company's sample of AI answers, reported at scale. The vendor-reported vs. measured distinction is the one to hold on to. A citation proves a platform read a page on the firm's site and used it as a source. It is a proxy for visibility, and a useful one, because it is broad, third-party and countable.

The number is not a count of mentions. It does not record whether a firm was named in the answer text a buyer read. It is not a recommendation count, so it says nothing about whether any platform tells a buyer to hire the firm. It is not a measure of legal ability, and no part of the table should be read that way. The same boundaries are stated on the entity record.

Known data caveats

Domain migrations reset counts. When a firm moves to a new domain after a merger or a rename, citation counts largely start again at the new address. Those rows understate the legacy firm.
Some sites show near-zero tracked traffic. A healthy DR beside almost no tracked organic traffic is consistent with a site migration or with crawler restrictions on the firm's site. Those rows are flagged on the leaderboard and deserve caution.
All figures are third-party estimates at a point in time. They can contain errors and they change between pulls. Corrections are reviewed against the next snapshot: contact Joe.

Where this method stops

This page describes one instrument. The measured work, the AI Visibility Index, uses a different instrument, and that instrument is not published.

The BigLaw GEO Leaderboard is the table this method produces. Findings, September 2026 reads the current snapshot figure by figure. AI citations defines the unit being counted, and the glossary holds every term used above.