Morgan & Morgan Leads Ad Spend in 15 Markets

AI search is quietly taking the search click away from law firms. Pew Research found that when an AI summary sits on the results, people click a traditional result in 8% of visits, down from 15% without one. They click a link inside the summary just 1% of the time.

So the firms that plan to win are buying attention somewhere the AI can’t intercept it. We track that spend across 35 markets. It runs $141.6 million a month. And one firm leads more of it than anyone else.

One Firm, 15 Markets

Morgan & Morgan is the top legal advertiser in 15 of the 35 markets we track. No other firm comes close to that footprint.

The lead isn’t thin. In Jackson the firm takes 38% of the entire market. In Washington DC it’s 31.1%. In Boston, 30.4%. In Little Rock, 29.5%. In Savannah, 26.3%. In Tampa, 24%. Market after market, one firm owns a quarter to a third of every ad dollar spent.

This is what buying brand demand at scale looks like. A person who has seen the name a hundred times searches that name directly when a case lands. That search clears every AI summary and every ranked list. It goes straight to the firm. Building that kind of demand is the core of our services, and Morgan & Morgan spends to make that name unavoidable in 15 markets at once.

Why Firms Are Spending Off Search

For years the plan was to rank on Google and collect the clicks. AI search broke that plan.

The Pew numbers are the whole argument. Half the clicks that used to come from a non-branded search now vanish into the summary. We measured the same collapse on our own site, where non-branded queries pulled a 0.09% click rate last month while branded search held page one. We wrote that up in rank no longer buys the AI citation.

The response the leaders chose is to build name recognition off search, so the demand arrives already branded. Connected TV, broadcast, and radio put the name in front of the household before the case exists. When the search finally happens, it’s a branded one, and AI search can’t touch it. That’s the strategy behind the $141.6 million we track every month, and why only branded search survives explains the mechanism in full.

The Channel Most Firms Are Missing

Here’s the gap in the map. Firms are spending to build brand demand, but many are buying the wrong channel to do it.

New York is the largest market we track at $14.5 million a month, and only 11% of it goes to streaming. Washington DC runs just 3% streaming. Meanwhile Atlanta puts 48% of its legal ad spend into connected TV, the highest share in the country, and its market grew fast. The households a firm wants have moved to streaming. A large share of legal ad budgets have not.

The lesson from the spend map is not “spend more.” It’s “spend where the attention actually is.” AI search is compressing the search click. Brand demand is the answer. And the firms building that demand on streaming, not just legacy broadcast, are buying the version of brand that reaches the household that already cut the cord.

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Market count, spend, share, and channel-mix figures are from our December 2025 panel across 35 US DMAs. The click-behavior figures are from Pew Research Center, July 2025.