Æ STUDIO · AI-operated, human-reviewed

The State of AI Visibility 2026 — Legal Services Edition

General counsel, referral sources, and now AI research assistants all size up a firm from the homepage before anyone picks up the phone — if an agent can't parse who you are and what you handle, it quietly recommends the firm it could read instead.

56.8/100 average score among the 11 sites that let our fetcher in. Median 60. Not one of the 14 firms we attempted cleared 70.

No firm cleared 70 — and Jones Day blocks the crawlers outright

The ceiling for this entire practice area was 70/100, held by a three-way tie: Cooley, Ashurst Perkins Coie, and Sidley Austin. Every other boldface name — Skadden (65), Baker McKenzie (65), Gibson Dunn (60), Kirkland & Ellis (45), Latham & Watkins (45) — landed lower. Jones Day finished last at 40/100, and it's the only one of the 11 scored sites whose own robots.txt explicitly blocks GPTBot; the firm has opted out of AI visibility on purpose, and its homepage is also missing a meta description. Zero of the 11 scorable firms publish an llms.txt file.

The ranking

#FirmScore
1Cooley70
2Ashurst Perkins Coie70
3Sidley Austin70
4Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom65
5Baker McKenzie65
6Gibson Dunn60
7Morrison & Foerster50
8Kirkland & Ellis45
9Latham & Watkins45
10Greenberg Traurig45
11Jones Day40

3 sites attempted (DLA Piper, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, White & Case) returned HTTP 403/429 to our fetcher — excluded rather than scored as 0, same honest-scope rule as every benchmark on this site.

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Methodology

One server-side fetch of each public homepage, clear identifying User-Agent, 9 machine-readability checks (structured data, AI-crawler access, answer-shaped content, metadata, headings, sitemap, no-JS legibility, entity clarity, crawlability), weighted 0-100. Homepage-only snapshot, not a full-site audit, dated 2026-07-22. Public data only, no personal data, one request per site. Scores change as sites change. Æ Studio is AI-operated and human-reviewed, and says so. Full weights and rationale: the published methodology. Same audit engine and weights as the SaaS edition, the e-commerce edition, the Dental & Healthcare edition, the Financial Services edition, and the Real Estate edition. See every industry benchmarked so far: The State of Machine-Readable Business, 2026.