San Francisco, California – Custom Legal Marketing (CLM), the law firm marketing agency behind Sequoia, the AI marketing platform for lawyers, released its largest study to date on AI content and law firm rankings. The study scored every law firm page ranking in the top eight Google results for 26 competitive legal searches across 93 U.S. metropolitan areas, 2,418 queries in all, eight days after the September 2026 spam update finished rolling out and two weeks after Google updated its guidance to call manual fact-checking of AI-generated content “critical.”
The findings show that neither event changed what ranks. Across 5,182 unique law firm pages and more than six million words, 27.9% of all content was flagged as AI-generated. 21.6% of pages scored 76% or higher, and 13.4% scored exactly 100%. The share of mostly-AI pages was 28.3% at position one and 29.4% at position eight, with no measurable correlation between a page’s AI score and where it ranked.
The study also tracked the firms themselves. Law firm domains whose pages averaged 51% or more AI content in a matched February 2026 Sequoia study held their rankings through the spam update at the same rate as firms averaging under 10%.
“Google did not penalize AI content. It added a warning label to a product it already allows,” said Jason Bland, co-founder and CEO of Custom Legal Marketing. “The data is unambiguous on that point. Whether AI content ranks is already answered. The question every firm should be asking is whether anyone checked that content before it went live.”
What a Generated Law Firm Page Looks Like
Beyond the headline numbers, the study documents the anatomy of AI-generated legal content ranking today. The distribution has no middle: 60% of pages score 10% or less and 22% score 76% or more, with fewer than one page in five landing in between. Generated pages run roughly 60% longer than human-written pages, with a median of 1,149 words versus 704, and read measurably harder. They are concentrated on interior practice-area and location pages rather than homepages.
The heaviest users are multi-market firms. The 154 law firm domains ranking in 11 or more of the 93 metros hold 37% of all law firm results in the study and are mostly AI on 34% of their pages, compared with roughly 24 to 26% for firms with a smaller footprint. The search term predicts AI content far better than the market does: the share of mostly-AI pages ranges from 15% for “dwi lawyer” to 40% for “assault lawyer,” while market size and individual metro showed no effect.
Custom Legal Marketing Made Fact-Checking Critical Before Google Said it Was “Critical”
CLM built claim-level fact-checking into CLM Sequoia before Google’s October guidance made it an industry talking point. Every page produced on the platform is broken into individual factual claims, and each claim is tested against public sources and a knowledge base maintained for that specific firm, covering its attorneys, offices, bar admissions, verdicts, and local details. Claims come back verified, flagged, or replaced, with sources attached, regardless of whether a person or a model drafted the page.
The capability was developed as part of CLM’s law firm AEO program, which helps firms to be cited by Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Answer engines cross-reference a firm’s claims against the rest of the web before recommending it, and an inaccurate page gives them a reason to cite a competitor.
Custom Legal Marketing is a law firm marketing agency built for how clients actually find lawyers today. Founded in 2005, CLM combines award-winning creative with a purpose-built AI platform to help law firms stand out, get chosen, and grow in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.
Custom Legal Marketing
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Distributed by Law Firm Newswire
