The Answer Share › Methodology
Methodology · current as of the October 2026 edition
How The Answer Share is measured
What answer share means
Answer share is the percentage of AI answers in a market that name a given firm. It is the AI-era counterpart to share of voice. A firm named in 10 of a market’s 40 answers has a 25.0% answer share. It measures how often an assistant names a firm, and nothing about the quality of that firm’s legal work.
What we ask
The same 10 client-discovery questions run in every market, every month, written the way an injured person asks them. {city} is the market’s city and {state} its state; for Kansas City the state is Missouri.
- “best personal injury lawyer in {city}”
- “best car accident lawyer in {city}”
- “who should I call after a car accident in {city}”
- “should I hire a lawyer after a car crash in {state}”
- “how do I find a good personal injury attorney in {city}”
- “top rated accident and injury law firms in {city}”
- “best truck accident lawyer in {city}”
- “lawyer to help with an insurance claim after an accident in {city}”
- “I was injured in an accident in {city}, which law firm should I use”
- “which law firm wins the biggest injury settlements in {city}”
The questions are broad on purpose. None names a firm, so every firm in a market starts from the same place.
Where and when
The October 2026 edition covers 15 of the largest U.S. legal advertising markets: Kansas City, MO; Jacksonville, FL; Philadelphia, PA; Phoenix, AZ; Chicago, IL; Las Vegas, NV; Houston, TX; Orlando, FL; San Antonio, TX; St. Louis, MO; Tampa, FL; Atlanta, GA; Miami, FL; Dallas, TX; West Palm Beach, FL. Every market was collected on October 12, 2026, with US geolocation, so each market is a same-day snapshot.
Editions are monthly. Data is collected on the second Monday of the month and published the following Monday. The next edition is collected on November 9, 2026 and published on November 16, 2026.
Which AI platforms
Each question is asked once on each of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode: 40 answers per market, 600 in total. Answers are collected through an AI prompt-simulation service, not a logged-in personal account. A platform is only included when every answer for every market comes back; a platform that accepts a question and returns nothing is left out rather than scored as silence.
How a mention is counted
- A firm counts once per answer, however many times that answer names it.
- Spelling variants and misspelled web addresses of the same firm are merged into one firm.
- A web address an assistant gives is credited to a firm only when it is that firm’s own site or an evident misspelling of the firm’s name. An address that belongs to a different, identifiable business is credited to no one, even when the name looks close.
- Directories, bar associations and referral services, insurers, hospitals, news outlets, government sites and generic placeholder addresses are excluded. They are not law firms.
- Every firm that appears in a published table is checked against its live website before publication. A firm we cannot verify is left out of the table rather than guessed at, and the ranks below it move up.
- A firm reported at 0% was checked against every response in its market for any variant of its web address.
Ranking and ties
Firms are ranked by the number of answers that name them. Firms with the same count share a percentage and are listed alphabetically. Tables show the top six firms in each market; the downloadable data carries the same rows plus the well-known firms measured at zero.
Comparing editions
October 2026 is the first edition on four platforms with 40 answers per market. Earlier editions used three platforms and 30 answers per market. Firm-level percentages should only be compared between editions on the same basis, starting with this one. The September 2026 edition remains published as it ran.
Limitations
- AI answers vary with time, location, account history and phrasing. This is a same-method snapshot, not a guarantee of what any individual will see.
- A firm can be described without its name or address being picked up; counts reflect the firms each answer identifies.
- Answer share measures frequency of mention in AI answers. It implies nothing about any firm’s results, reputation or quality of representation.
Use, citation and corrections
The data is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Reuse it freely with credit to First Mind AI. Suggested citation: First Mind AI, The Answer Share: Personal Injury, October 2026 edition. https://firstmindai.com/answer-share/
Download the October 2026 data (CSV). To request a correction or a re-test of any firm named, email adam@firstmindai.com; every change is logged on the corrections page. Press: see the press kit.