San Francisco, California – Custom Legal Marketing (CLM), the legal marketing and law firm SEO agency behind the CLM Sequoia platform, has published results from a large-scale study looking at how much AI-generated content exists in Google’s top organic results for law firms and whether any of it is actually helping those pages rank.
CLM ran the study through its proprietary CLM Sequoia platform, pulling the top 5 organic Google results for 28 legal keywords across 24 major U.S. cities in February of 2026. Each law firm page in the dataset was then fed through Winston AI, which scored every page for AI-generated content percentage. CLM also captured word count and readability scores for each URL. When the dust settled, the working dataset covered 2,435 law firm ranking appearances, 1,618 unique URLs, and 1,021 unique domains across 8 practice areas including personal injury, criminal defense, family law, estate planning, business law, workers’ compensation, medical malpractice, and employment law.
The headline finding? AI content percentage and organic ranking position have no statistically significant connection. The Spearman correlation came back at r = 0.065 with a p-value of 0.138, which lands well above the 0.05 cutoff that would indicate a real relationship.
“For the past two years, the loudest conversation in legal marketing has been whether AI content helps or hurts your Google rankings,” said Jason Bland, Co-Founder and CEO of Custom Legal Marketing. “We went out and measured it across more than 2,400 ranking appearances. The answer turned out to be neither. You are not going to leapfrog your competitors by publishing AI content, and you are not going to get slapped for it either. The algorithm just does not care.”
Key Findings on AI Content and Law Firm Rankings
AI content shows up on nearly every ranking law firm page, but the way it distributes is striking. Roughly 54.7% of ranking pages have 5% or less AI-detected content. On the other end, 21.4% clock in at 70% or higher. What is missing is the middle. Fewer than one in four pages land in the 6 to 69% range. Rather than a gradual shift toward AI adoption, the industry appears to be splitting into two distinct camps: firms that barely use it and firms that use it for almost everything.
Of all the practice areas CLM studied, personal injury has the most AI content by a wide margin. The median AI detection for PI pages sits at 14%, which is roughly five times the 3% median across all practice areas. Not a single personal injury law firm page in the top 5 results came back clean. Every one of them had some detectable AI content. Criminal defense, on the other hand, looks completely different. Eighty-seven percent of pages ranking at Position 1 for criminal defense keywords had less than 10% AI, making it the most human-written category in the study.
The data points toward a blended workflow as the strongest approach. Pages landing in the 26 to 50% AI range, which likely reflects content where a writer used AI for drafting or research and then did heavy editing, posted the best average ranking position at 2.83 and the highest average word count at 2,958 words. Meanwhile, pages at the 71 to 100% AI level averaged only 1,561 words and ranked a bit worse at an average position of 3.23.
There is also a readability problem that firms using AI heavily need to know about. CLM found a correlation of r = -0.233 (p < 0.0001) between AI percentage and readability score. Put simply, the more AI on the page, the harder it is to read. That matters on its own, but it also matters because word count (r = -0.089, p = 0.042) turned out to have a stronger statistical tie to rankings than AI percentage did. Firms pumping out AI content without editing it down may be quietly undermining their own performance through readability issues they have never measured.
Where a firm is located also plays a role in how much AI content surrounds it in the search results. Columbus, OH came in as the biggest outlier at 59% mean AI content and a 76% median, most likely because national firms dominate the rankings there. On the low end, San Antonio (16.9%), Jacksonville (18.3%), and Houston (19.3%) had the least AI content, reflecting markets where regional and local firms still rely on traditionally written pages.
Study Methodology
CLM built the study inside Sequoia’s Research Tool, which runs regular studies to train its AI marketing platform.
The team executed all 672 keyword-city queries on mobile, matching how Google indexes and ranks pages under its mobile-first approach. Pages were scraped using a headless browser with an HTTP fallback for pages that resisted rendering. Winston AI handled the detection side, returning a percentage score for each page, estimating how much of the content appeared to be machine-generated. All told, CLM processed 1,889,828 words across the full law firm dataset. Of those, 615,934 words (32.6%) came back flagged as AI-generated.
The 24 cities in the study span the country: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Austin, Jacksonville, Fort Worth, Columbus, Charlotte, San Francisco, Indianapolis, Seattle, Denver, Boston, Nashville, El Paso, Detroit, and Oklahoma City.
Implications for Law Firms
Bland was blunt about what the findings should mean for how firms spend their marketing dollars. “What gets you from Position 5 to Position 1 in competitive legal markets has not changed. It is still domain authority, content that actually says something, pages people can read without a headache, strong E-E-A-T signals, and solid local SEO. AI content does not appear anywhere on that list. If a firm is pouring money into AI content production but ignoring editorial quality and link building, they are focused on the wrong thing.”
One other number stood out: 18.2% of Position 1 results for personal injury keywords came from pages with 70%+ AI content. But those pages belong to a handful of firms with enormous authority behind them, which strongly suggests it is the domain strength doing the work, not the AI-generated copy.
Custom Legal Marketing is a law firm marketing agency built for how clients actually find lawyers today. Founded in 2005, CLM combines award-winning creative with a purpose-built AI platform to help law firms stand out, get chosen, and grow in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.
Custom Legal Marketing
1111 Kearny Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
800-789-6451
Are Law Firm’s Using AI Content to Rank at the Top of Google Search?
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