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Data · Search landscape

Google search landscape for legal searches

What Google shows when a person searches for a lawyer or legal help: how often a directory, a video or the People Also Ask box appears in the top 10, how many top-10 results are directories, and how concentrated the results are, across 2,240 legal searches (22,089 top-10 results) saved on 2026-10-29 and 30.

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

What is in this dataset?

What a person sees when they search Google for a lawyer or legal help in the United States: how often lawyer directories (FindLaw, Justia, Avvo, Super Lawyers and others), videos and the People Also Ask box appear, how many of the top-10 results are directories, and how concentrated the results are in a few websites, by practice area, search type (cost, near me, best, versus, how-to) and language (English, Spanish). Built from 2,240 legal searches (22,089 top-10 results) saved from Google on 2026-10-29 and 30; every group has at least 30 searches and no firm or person is named.

Use it to see in which searches directories appear in the top 10 and which belong to firm sites, videos and forums, so you know where a firm page can rank and where a listing or a video is the way in. A share is the percent of the group's searches (or top-10 results) that show the feature; the row says how many searches it rests on.

Records
855
Look up by
855
group
Primary-source records
855

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

Where does the data come from?

For each legal search the saved top-10 results are classified by website (lawyer directory, video or social site, reference or media site, government or school site, site whose name says law or legal, other). Shares are computed from our own saved samples of public pages.

Period covered
October 29, 2026 to October 30, 2026
Places
The whole US
How often we refresh it
Every quarter
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 15 main columns means
id
Stable row id
group
The group key: group type, segment and language, then the measure
groupType
The measure (column key of the long-format CSV)
segmentType
all, language, practice, query-type, practice-by-language, query-type-by-language or publisher
segment
The practice, search type, language or website the row is about
language
en, es or all
value
The measure (a share in percent rounded to one decimal, an average, or a count of websites)
unit
What value measures
queries
Legal searches in the group (N); every group has at least 30
slots
Top-10 results in the group (N)
text
The row in one sentence
version
Dataset version
lastChecked
Date the saved results were last checked
sourceLabels
Source label
sourceUrls
Source URL

How do I use it in my own tools?

serp_lookup
For one group key, a group and a measure (for example PRACTICE-PERSONAL-INJURY-ALL-DIRECTORY-IN-TOP10): the share, its unit and the number of searches and top-10 results it rests on.
serp_compare
The same fields for up to 10 group keys side by side, for example one measure across several practice areas or English against Spanish.
serp_search
Rows whose text matches the words given, such as a practice area ("immigration"), a search type ("cost") or a website ("avvo").

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.23851321 (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 landscape for legal searches: directories, videos, People Also Ask and how concentrated the top 10 is (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23851322

Credit line for a chart, table or article

Source: Probative, Google search landscape for legal searches: directories, videos, People Also Ask and how concentrated the top 10 is, version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23851322, licensed CC BY 4.0.

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Not legal advice. These are counts of what Google showed on two days for the searches in the sample; results vary by place, device and day, and the sample is not every search made.

What changed recently?

  • 2026-10-30 · 2,240 legal searches saved from Google, 22,089 top-10 results: how often directories, videos and People Also Ask appear, by practice area, search type and language, and how concentrated the results are. (source)

The full log is in changes.json.

What are the limits?

  • Each row states how many searches it rests on. The whole sample is 2,240 legal searches in the United States, 22,089 top-10 results.
  • A share is the percent of the group's searches (or of its top-10 results) that show the feature. A search can show several features, so the shares of searches do not add to 100; the shares of top-10 results by website type do.
  • Websites are classed by name and by a fixed list: lawyer directories (sites whose main product is a list or rating of lawyers), video and social sites, reference, media and legal-information sites, government and school sites, sites whose own name says law, lawyer, attorney or legal, and all others. No firm or person is named in any row.
  • Results change by place, device and day; the file reports what Google returned for the sample on 2026-10-29 and 30.
  • Records older than 130 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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