The AI for PI Index™ tracks how personal injury firms appear across AI engines each week, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

These are the AI for PI Insights™ for the week of July 13, 2026.

That week’s corpus included:

• 22,754 AI answers
• 23,590 distinct firms named
• 177,390 source citations tracked
• 259 cities
• all 50 states plus D.C.

Every week, we share one big finding, which firms moved, why it matters to your firm, and a client data point. Let’s dive in.

One Big Finding

No firm is winning AI recommendations in personal injury right now

Of every firm AI named this week, 56% were named exactly once. One mention proves an AI can surface a firm. It says nothing about whether it will do it again tomorrow.

Even the most-named firm in America, Morgan & Morgan, appears in fewer than 7 of every 100 answers.

Of the 177,390 URLs the engines cited this week, the eight most-cited domains are all legal directories. The first law firm website in the entire corpus, Morgan & Morgan’s forthepeople.com, shows up at #9.

And a national brand doesn’t buy recommendations. A local firm leads 47 of the 51 states, and Cooper Hurley rode Virginia alone to #4 in America.

The index measures where that conversation ends. Most of it happens earlier, and on the still-deciding questions, seven out of ten AI answers name no firm at all.

One AI mention doesn’t turn into case flow you can count on. Fixing that starts well before intake, by reaching injured people much earlier in the process. It means analyzing the entire window from injury to intake, not just the end.

The open field: the biggest cases have no go-to firm

In trucking accident answers, the most-named firm in the country appears 3.9% of the time. Slip-and-fall, the case type with the most established names, tops out at 18.8%.

The biggest cases in the profession are the ones no firm owns yet.

Which case types are winnable in your market is one of the things our AI for PI Audit™ maps.

Who Moved?

The firm tracker: Morgan & Morgan pulls away

The top of the table held steady – the same six firms led in the same order (Morgan & Morgan, Ben Crump Law, Farah & Farah, Cooper Hurley, Munley Law, Morris Bart).

The gap between the top two didn’t. Morgan & Morgan rose from 5.77% to 6.52% of all answers, up within every engine, while Ben Crump slid from 4.60% to 4.06%. The #1/#2 gap more than doubled in one week, and Morgan & Morgan took #1 in Miami-Ft. Lauderdale from Ben Crump.

Position in the index runs on a rolling four-week window, so one hot week doesn’t move it. A move on this list means the trend itself shifted.

Here are the biggest moves in the rolling index this window:

The name at the top of the risers list is Sarkisian Sarkisian & Associates, up three spots to #18 in America. More on them below.

New York, the state that changed hands last issue, held its new order: Finkelstein & Partners leads again at 12.3%, and Cellino Law, the leader two issues ago, now sits at #10 at 3.9%.

And the ceiling moved. In the last issue, no firm was named in a majority of its market’s answers. This week, Cooper Hurley crossed it, named in 52.3% of Virginia’s answers.

Why It Matters to Your Firm

The injured person who calls you was coached by AI first

By the time someone calls your intake line, AI has already walked them through the decision.

Three in ten answers this week included a how-to-choose-a-lawyer framework. Three in four told the injured person to expect a free consultation, and most said no fee unless you win.

The caller arrives checking your firm against a list AI handed them:

• Specialization
• Results
• Reviews
• Communication (least mentioned by AI)

That last one is the answer your intake call gives – how fast the phone was picked up, how clearly someone explained what happens next.

Put that checklist in front of your intake team this week. Callers were told those four things are how you judge a firm. Make sure the call answers all four.

Because the comparison doesn’t end when the call does.

A personal injury attorney told us about a client who was interviewing several firms, his included. After eventually hiring his firm, they said they had taken every firm’s contingency fee agreement and fed them all into ChatGPT. Even though the fees were identical, ChatGPT analyzed everything and picked his firm as the best fit.

Checking these boxes on the first call will go a long way when the AI helps the person decide which firm to go with.

What LawShift Clients Have Seen

That riser at the top of the movers list is a LawShift client. Sarkisian Sarkisian & Associates climbed to #18 in the rolling index this window and stayed the #1 most-named firm in Indiana, in 27.6% of the state’s AI answers.

Lopez & Humphries runs the Cooper Hurley play at the local scale. AI named them the #1 firm in Bartow and a top-3 firm in Lakeland this week.

Malloy Law Offices is the #1 most-named firm in Bethesda and the #2 indexed firm in all of Maryland.

And every LawShift client named in the index holds the Consistently (4/4) badge this week, recommended every week their market was sampled over the last four weeks.

Closing Thoughts

The firms winning AI visibility are becoming easier for AI to understand, trust, cite, and recommend before intake ever begins.

Everything in this issue happens before a firm ever hears from the injured person. What happens in that window, from injury to intake, is what we call The Pre-Intake Problem™ – and no one is serving it.

You can find that mini-book here: The Pre-Intake Problem: When Injured People Are Searching for Answers, Personal Injury Attorneys Are Missing From The Conversation

All the best,
Nick & Lydia