October 2026 snapshot: who held page one in 14 towns

One search per town, recorded as a person would see it

We typed "personal injury lawyer" followed by the town and state, the way someone writes it who knows where they are, into Google from a desktop browser 1,366 pixels wide, in English with United States settings, with no Google account signed in, from Austin, Texas, leaving the search location to Google. For each town we recorded whether an AI Overview appeared, how many businesses the map pack listed, how many organic web results the first page carried, and what kind of site held each web result: the firm's own site, a directory or review site, a national or regional advertising firm, or something else.

We did not count ads. Google shows ads unevenly to a signed-out browser, and an ad we did not see is not an ad that is not running. In Tyler the Local Services Ads block appeared above the map with the heading "Sponsored, Personal injury lawyers, Tyler"; in Johnson City a sponsored block appeared; elsewhere we saw none, and we draw nothing from that.

One search per town is a snapshot. Results move by the hour, by device, and by exactly where the searcher stands; a person on the square would see a map pack weighted to the square. Read the tables as a pattern across 14 towns on one day.

Towns: Tyler, Texas; Joplin, Missouri; Bowling Green, Kentucky; Grand Junction, Colorado; Dothan, Alabama; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Bend, Oregon; Muncie, Indiana; Yakima, Washington; Lafayette, Louisiana; Johnson City, Tennessee; Rapid City, South Dakota; Florence, South Carolina; Sioux City, Iowa. They were chosen before the searches were run, for size and spread across states.

Directories held two or three of the nine web results in all 14 towns, so firms compete for six or seven

• Directory sites
• National or regional firms (offices in several states or metros)
• Firms' own websites

Town by town, "personal injury lawyer [town] [state]", October 21 and 22, 2026.

The practical reading for these 14 towns: firms' own sites averaged 6.4 of the nine web results, and the two directory spots went to the same two directories in all 14. A firm cannot push Justia or Super Lawyers off the page, and it does not need to. It needs one of the six or seven.

An AI Overview appeared in 6 of 14 towns, always above a map that still listed local firms

We read this cautiously. Six of 14 is not a trend line, and Google changes where it shows these summaries without notice. What we can say is that in every one of the six towns, the map pack with two or three local firms, their ratings and their phone numbers sat directly below the summary. People hiring a lawyer still mostly start with a search engine (54.4% in the AttorneySync study) and under 2% said they would hire through an AI tool. The summary is above the fold; the firm's name and number are the thing being summarized.

The map pack listed three firms in 11 towns and two in 3

Two firms in the pack is a smaller door than three. Google decides how many to show; the firm decides whether its profile is the kind that gets through. Each pack listed two or three firms with ratings, and the rating is the first thing a person compares.

Seven of eight independent injury firms in four towns had lost a third of their ranked searches since 2021

In the first week of October 2026 we picked the independent personal injury firms we could identify in Tyler, Joplin, Bowling Green and Grand Junction, eight in all, and compared a third-party estimate of how many searches each firm's website ranked for against the same estimate five years earlier. Seven had lost a third or more. In the same searches, large regional and national injury firms were buying the ads at the top of the page. Eight firms is a small sample and we treat it as a reason to look closer at any one firm.