A personal injury firm can check its Google rankings, website traffic, advertising performance, reviews, and lead volume with relative ease. Each metric offers an imperfect view of the market, but together they give firms a way to understand where they are visible and how prospective clients are finding them.
AI recommendations are much harder to observe. A firm may appear when someone asks ChatGPT for attorneys in a particular city, disappear when the question is phrased differently, and perform differently again on Perplexity or Claude. The law firm does not receive a notification when it is recommended, nor does it know how often another firm appears instead.
LawSHIFT developed the AI for PI Index to put some structure around that uncertainty. The weekly benchmark tracks more than 1,894 personal injury firms across 259 markets and measures how they appear across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The company also maintains data covering approximately 9,000 firms.
“We audited 80 firms at a PILMMA conference to see how they show up in AI. Most of the room didn’t show up at all, and winning at Google made no difference. That’s why we built the Index,” said Nick Kringas, founder and CEO of LawSHIFT.
The value of the Index depends less on producing a permanent ranking than on observing how AI visibility behaves over time.
National Recognition Does Not Settle Local Competition
One recent weekly corpus included 22,560 AI answers, providing enough responses to examine the difference between national prominence and performance within individual markets.
Morgan & Morgan was the most frequently named personal injury firm nationally, appearing in 7.22% of the answers LawSHIFT analyzed. Its strongest positions, however, were concentrated. The firm led Florida with a 24.8% appearance rate and Kentucky with 31.2%, while other firms led elsewhere.
For a market as geographically dependent as personal injury law, that distinction matters. Consumers generally need attorneys who can handle cases where they live or where an injury occurred. A national appearance rate can therefore obscure the competitive conditions that an individual law firm encounters in its own market.
The Index allows LawSHIFT to examine those local differences rather than assuming the most recognizable national brands will dominate AI recommendations everywhere.
Weekly Movement Shows How Quickly Visibility Can Change
The data also shows why LawSHIFT chose to update the Index weekly.
Ben Crump Law moved from a 2.82% national appearance rate to 4.03% over a two-week period, an increase of 43%. Looking more closely at the results showed that the movement was concentrated heavily in Perplexity, where mentions increased from 201 to 491.
The firm’s website was cited 817 times by Perplexity during the later measurement period.
“People see a jump like that and assume the firm did something. Sometimes they did. Sometimes an engine just changed how it reads the web that week and they got carried along with it. It’s not like Google where you hold a position. That’s not how these things work. Until you look underneath the number, you don’t know which one happened,” said Bill Wilson, Monetization and Data Science Lead at LawSHIFT.
Without separating results by platform, the national increase would reveal little about what had actually changed. Tracking the underlying responses allowed LawSHIFT to identify where the additional visibility was coming from and which information source appeared repeatedly within those answers.
That kind of movement also makes AI visibility difficult to capture through occasional audits. A firm’s position can change as platforms alter how they retrieve and assemble information, making repeated measurement more useful than a single score.
The Answers Reveal What AI Carries Forward
The Index also examines what AI systems say about firms once they include them.
During the same weekly analysis, approximately 87% of responses restated at least one concrete claim found in law firm materials, while about 93% of those responses presented the claim without attribution. The finding gives LawSHIFT another way to study AI visibility beyond counting mentions.
A firm’s presence in an answer matters, but so does the information that accompanies its name. Looking across thousands of responses can reveal which details consistently make their way into AI-generated descriptions and which common claims become indistinguishable from those of competitors.
That is ultimately what makes the Index useful as a data-driven visibility and benchmarking tool rather than simply another law firm ranking. PI attorneys can use the data to see how they compare within their own markets, identify where competitors are gaining visibility, and understand which authority signals are carrying into AI-generated answers.
That visibility data can then inform how firms compete. Rather than guessing whether AI understands their experience or relevance, attorneys can use the Index to identify gaps and build stronger, more consistent authority through the same kinds of specific, verifiable signals LawSHIFT tracks across the market.
“There’s a lot of advice being sold right now about showing up in AI and almost none of it comes with evidence. I’d rather hand an attorney a number they can check every week than a theory. If what you’re doing is working, it shows up. If it isn’t, you find that out in a month instead of a year,” said Wilson.
For firms trying to compete in an AI-driven discovery environment, the first advantage is simply being able to see where they stand. The Index gives them a benchmark for that position and a way to measure whether the authority they are building is actually translating into greater visibility over time.
