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Data · Ad costs

What a lawyer search ad costs, practice by practice

What advertisers bid to appear at the top of Google for lawyer searches in every practice area and niche we track, for the English and the Spanish search, in the whole US, all 50 states and DC, from Google Ads Keyword Planner. Each family shows the bid band and how crowded the auction is.

Checked October 30, 2026 · CC BY 4.0 · Not legal advice

What is in this dataset?

What advertisers bid to show at the top of Google for lawyer searches, practice by practice. For 86 query families (English and Spanish) in the whole US, all 50 states and DC, the file gives the top-of-page bid band of each family's English and Spanish head query (Google Keyword Planner's low and high top-of-page bid estimates: the range advertisers have historically bid to show above the results), the competition level and index, plus the family's median low and high bids across its queries. Figures come from Google Ads Keyword Planner (October 2025 to September 2026) and are shown as bands with that period; for the US and 27 states, a DataForSEO pull of the same Google Ads data agrees on every bid band it shares. For the US, families are grouped into demand tiers by searches a month with the median high bid of each tier. Our own anonymized benchmark of what law-firm clicks actually cost is linked as a separate measure and never mixed into these figures.

Use it to budget search ads before launch: the band says what a click at the top of the page has cost in a state, the Spanish head shows whether Spanish searches are cheaper, and competition says how many advertisers bid. A bid band is the auction's history for the 12 months before the as-of date, not a quote: your own cost depends on quality, match type, hours and place. For what law firms really paid per click on live campaigns, see Probative benchmarks, 2025–2026 (figures are approximate and shown as ranges).

Records
2,725
Look up by
52
US, state or DC
Primary-source records
2,725

The letters are explained in what P, S, D and U mean.

Where does the data come from?

Google Ads Keyword Planner for the whole US, all 50 states and DC (12 months): each family's head query in English and Spanish (the query with the most searches in the place) gives the top-of-page bid band (low and high) and the competition level and index; medians run over the family's queries with a bid; US demand tiers group families by searches a month; a DataForSEO pull of the same data is compared where it overlaps.

Period covered
October 2025 to September 2026
Places
The whole US, all 50 states and DC
How often we refresh it
Once a year
The source's next release
October 2027
Records read
October 30, 2026

The sources the records cite most

What does a record look like?

The full records add the dates, the quoted source text and every field in the CSV and JSON files below.

What each of the 17 main columns means
level
family (one query family in one place) or tier (US: families grouped by searches a month)
head_en
The family's English query with the most searches in the place
bid_low_en
Top-of-page bid, low end, USD per click (Google Ads)
bid_high_en
Top-of-page bid, high end, USD per click
competition_en
LOW, MEDIUM or HIGH: how many advertisers bid, relative to all keywords
competition_index_en
0-100 version of the same
head_es
The family's Spanish query with the most searches in the place; the _es columns repeat the measures for it
family_bid_low_median
Median low bid over the family's queries with a bid
family_bid_high_median
Median high bid over the same queries
queries_with_bid
How many of the family's queries have a bid
head_searches
Searches a month of the head query (English, else Spanish)
tier
tier: searches-a-month band of the families in it
families
tier: query families in the tier
benchmark
US rows of practices our benchmarks measure: a link to Probative benchmarks, 2025–2026 (a separate measure, never mixed)
asOf
Date of the Keyword Planner export the figures come from
jurisdiction
US for the whole country, else the two-letter code of a state or DC; together the records cover the whole US, all 50 states and DC
stateName
The place's name: United States, or the name of the state or DC

How do I use it in my own tools?

adcosts_lookup
For US or a two-letter state code: top-of-page bid bands and competition of the English and Spanish head query of 86 practice query families, with the period and export date.
adcosts_search
Records whose text matches the words given, such as a practice ("truck accidents"), a query or a state name.

How to cite this dataset

You can reuse, adapt and republish this data, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). The only condition is that you credit Probative and link to the source.

Version
1.0.0, released November 1, 2026
Every version
10.5281/zenodo.23851277 (always points to the newest)
License
CC BY 4.0

Download the data

Free, no email or login. The files are hosted on this site and Zenodo, a public research archive.

Suggested citation

Probative. (2026). Google search-ad costs for lawyer searches by practice area and state: top-of-page bid bands and competition (Google Ads Keyword Planner) (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23851278

Credit line for a chart, table or article

Source: Probative, Google search-ad costs for lawyer searches by practice area and state: top-of-page bid bands and competition (Google Ads Keyword Planner), version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23851278, licensed CC BY 4.0.

Add to a reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote)

Not legal advice. These are bid bands and competition levels from Google's keyword data on the date shown, kept for research and marketing planning. They are not a price quote, and the cost of any campaign depends on its own settings.

What changed recently?

  • 2026-10-31 · First release: top-of-page bid bands and competition for 86 practice query families (English and Spanish heads), for the United States, the 50 states and DC (Google Ads Keyword Planner, Oct 2025–Sep 2026). (source)

The full log is in changes.json.

Where is this data used?

AI assistants read these bid bands, practice by practice and state by state, with the get_practice_market tool of our markets MCP server.

A separate measure, never mixed into these figures: what law-firm search-ad clicks actually cost (Probative benchmarks, 2025–2026; figures are approximate and shown as ranges).

Marketing by practice area

What are the limits?

  • Bid bands are Google Ads Keyword Planner figures for October 2025 to September 2026. They describe the auction, not a quote for your campaign.
  • The band is Keyword Planner's low and high top-of-page bid estimate (the range advertisers have historically bid to show at the top of the page) for the family's head query (the query with the most searches in the place). The family medians run over every query of the family that has a bid.
  • Competition is Google's measure of how many advertisers bid on the query compared with all keywords; it is not the number of law firms.
  • Our own benchmark of what law-firm clicks actually cost on live campaigns is a separate measure (Probative benchmarks, 2025–2026); it is linked, never mixed into these figures.
  • Records older than 400 days since their last check are marked stale in the files until we re-check them. Every confirmed error we fix is listed in the data corrections log.

Found a wrong value? Report an error with the record id and the source that shows the right value.

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