How many page-one slots a personal injury firm can actually win, measured across 20 cities

Personal injury is the category where everyone assumes Google’s page one belongs to somebody else. Avvo, FindLaw, Super Lawyers, Justia: the folk wisdom says the directories own the results and a firm’s job is to buy a profile on each of them and fight for whatever is left.

We wanted to know how much is actually left. So on September 8, 2026 we captured Google’s page one for “personal injury lawyer” in 20 US metros, from Phoenix to Pittsburgh, and sorted every organic result into two piles: a law firm, or something that is not a law firm and never will be.

Page one is shorter than you think

The first thing the data says is about the page itself. Across 20 cities, Google returned between 8 and 10 organic results per query, not 10. The rest of the page went to ads, the local map pack, and other features we did not measure. That matters for every number below: the competition is not for ten slots, it is for eight or nine.

Directories hold about one slot in five

Of 170 organic results captured, 38 were directories, review sites, lead marketplaces or pages on unrelated domains. That is 22 percent.

The firms behind the other 132 results, deduplicated across cities, are 125 distinct law firms. Not one of them is a location of a brand appearing in three or more of our markets, so the field is regional firms, not national chains.

Who holds the directory slots is concentrated:

• Super Lawyers appeared on page one in 6 of the 20 cities
• FindLaw in 6
• Thumbtack in 4
• Thervo and LawInfo in 3 each
• Martindale, Lawzana and LinkedIn in 2 each

Two directories, Super Lawyers and FindLaw, account for a third of the directory presence by themselves.

The number to write down: 7 slots

Because the question a firm actually asks is about its own city, we counted firm slots per market:

	Firm slots on page one
Fewest (Salt Lake City)	3
25th percentile	6
Median	7
75th percentile	7
Most (Minneapolis)	9

In the median city, seven of the visible organic results are law firms. In two of the 20 cities, Salt Lake City and Nashville, directories took half or more of the page and firms were left with 3 and 4 slots respectively.

That is the benchmark. If you are a personal injury firm in a large metro, there are roughly seven organic slots you could conceivably hold, and about two are structurally unavailable because a directory holds them.

The surprise: lawyers have it easier than HVAC contractors

Last week we ran the same screening on “HVAC company” results across 12 cities. There, 35 of 105 results were not HVAC companies: 33 percent. Yelp alone appeared ten times.

Personal injury, the category with the reputation for directory saturation, came in at 22 percent. Fewer of the slots are taken. The difference is who takes them: HVAC page one is crowded by consumer review platforms and lead marketplaces, while legal page one is crowded by legal-specific directories that firms already pay to appear in. The legal directories are fewer and more predictable, which is a different competitive problem than a general marketplace that ranks for everything.

What the firms that rank look like

For the 99 firms with a readable sitemap, the median website carries 552 pages. A quarter carry 308 or fewer, a quarter carry 1,197 or more, and the largest is 11,207. Forty-eight percent are under 500 pages, and only 6 percent are under 100.

Compare the other categories we have measured: the median top ten HVAC site had 378 pages and the median top 20 dental practice had 72. Personal injury firms publish more than either, by a wide margin, and their blogs are real. The median firm has 25 pages under a blog or resources path, and among the 80 firms with dated posts, the median published 42 in the last twelve months. That is a working content operation, not a placeholder. Still, 26 of the 90 firms with a blog link had one post or none behind it.

Site size does not track position, though. The rank correlation between page count and position is 0.154 across 99 firms, which is not significant, and the direction runs against the folk wisdom: firms in positions 1 through 3 had a median of 445 pages, positions 4 through 6 had 629, and positions 7 through 10 had 818. The biggest sites on the page are not at the top of it. The sample cannot rule out a small effect either way, but it can rule out a large one.

How the field talks about itself

Legal homepages are the most assertive we have measured. The median firm makes 4 superlative claims on its homepage, such as best, top-rated or award-winning. The median number of checkable numeric claims, such as years in practice or cases handled, is 1. Twenty-two of 113 firms make three or more superlatives and no checkable number at all.

Structured data is nearly universal: 92 percent publish some JSON-LD, 52 percent identify as a local business, and 42 percent publish review or rating schema, the highest review-schema adoption of the three categories we have measured. Thirty-five percent mention a guarantee on the homepage, which in this category usually means no fee unless you win. Fifteen percent run a chat widget.

What changed during verification

Our first pass on this study reported that directories held 18 percent of the slots. It was wrong, because four sites had passed the screen that should not have.

One was a lawyer directory whose sitemap listed nearly twenty thousand pages and whose search result was titled like a ranking list. Two were marketplaces we had not seen in other categories. The fourth was a page titled “Best Personal Injury Lawyers Columbus OH” hosted on the domain of a car dealership, which is not a law firm by any definition. Screening them out moved the directory share from 18 to 22 percent and removed the largest site in the sample.

We report that because the screening decision is where studies like this are made or broken. The exclusion list is published with the dataset, every excluded row is retained with its reason, and if you think we drew the line in the wrong place, the data is there to redraw it.

Limits: what this cannot tell you

Results were captured once, on September 8, 2026, one query per city, with Google’s default location for that city. Two of the 22 cities we attempted, Kansas City and Raleigh, failed to return results and are not in the sample. Rankings vary by device, personalization and time.

We measured organic results only. The map pack, ads and AI overviews were not counted, so “page one” here means the organic list, which is why it holds 8 to 10 results rather than 10.

Page counts come from published sitemaps; 26 firms had none we could read and are reported as missing, not as zero. Blog counts cover URLs under a blog, news, article or resources path. Claim counts are phrase counts on the homepage.

Every firm here already ranks. This study describes what the top of the page looks like and who shares it. It cannot say what separates these firms from the ones that do not appear, because those firms are not in the data.

What to do with it

Count the slots in your own city. Search your category, ignore the ads and the map, and sort the organic results into firms and not-firms. If you land near the median, you are competing for about seven positions and two are spoken for. If you are in a Salt Lake City, where firms hold three, the organic list is not where the fight is, and the map pack and the directories you already pay for deserve the attention instead.

The dataset below has every result, every exclusion and its reason, and the measurements behind each firm. Rerun it for your city and tell us what you find.