Sector Index, September 2026
The SRA made you publish your prices. AI cannot read them.
We scanned 136 solicitor websites across Surrey the way an AI assistant reads them. Four in five have no machine readable description of what they do or what it costs. No firm is named.
The transparency problem
Published is not the same as readable
Since December 2018 the SRA Transparency Rules have required firms to publish price and service information for certain areas of work. Most Surrey firms have done it. The pages exist, the fee ranges are there, and the compliance box is ticked.
The rules were written for a world where a prospective client reads that page. Increasingly they do not. They ask an assistant, and the assistant reads the page instead. When it does, it finds prose with no structure around it and no statement of what the page even is.
Without it, an assistant answering “what does a divorce cost in Guildford” has to work out from the prose whether your page is a price list, a blog post or a careers advert. With it, the page says plainly that it is a law firm, in this town, offering this service, at this range of fees.
You are already required to publish this. The work is making it legible to the thing that now does the reading.
The headline
Where the 121 firms landed
Eighty five percent of firms sit in the two middle bands. There is no leading group pulling away and no long tail of disasters, which means very little on any of these websites is helping an assistant tell one firm from another. Nobody at all cleared 80.
Where they differ
The checks that separate one firm from another
| Failing check | Firms | Worth |
|---|---|---|
| Frame protection | 103 of 121 | 5 points |
| Strict transport security | 100 of 121 | 20 points |
| Primary page schema | 98 of 121 | 20 points |
| Content map for AI | 98 of 121 | 20 points |
| Author attribution | 94 of 121 | 10 points |
| Content type protection | 92 of 121 | 5 points |
| Content freshness signals | 84 of 121 | 5 points |
| Form field autocomplete | 58 of 121 | 10 points |
Two things stand out for a profession that handles client money and confidential matters. A hundred firms are not sending strict transport security, which is the header that stops a browser being talked out of using an encrypted connection. A hundred and three have no protection against their pages being framed inside somebody else’s site.
Neither is an AI problem. Both are settings on a web server, both take minutes, and both are worth raising with whoever looks after your site regardless of anything else on this page.
What to fix first
Three changes that would move most firms
Add a typed description to your price and service pages saying what the service is, who provides it, and what the fee range covers. You have already written the content. This is structure around it, and it is worth 20 points.
A hundred of the hundred and twenty one firms are missing it. Worth 20 points, and a reasonable question for a client to ask a firm holding their money.
Ninety four firms publish legal guidance with no machine readable author. In a profession where the author is a qualified solicitor, that is a credibility signal being thrown away for no reason.
None of these requires a new website. All three are changes to the one you have.
What comes next
Not one firm is ready for AI to act
Everything above is about reading. The next question is whether an assistant acting for a client can do anything on your website. Make an enquiry. Request a quote for a conveyance. Book an initial call.
- A machine readable version of each page
- Any action an assistant could take on a client’s behalf
- A published description of what those actions are
- Discovery tags saying any of it exists
For a law firm this one deserves care rather than speed. An assistant that can submit an enquiry on a client’s behalf touches client confidentiality, conflict checking and anti money laundering obligations before it touches marketing. The right answer is a deliberate one, with limits and an audit trail, not a switch somebody flips.
Method
How this was done
The list was built from public sources including the Surrey Law Society membership, which publishes member firms and their websites, together with local searches. National chains and firms acquired into larger groups were excluded, because the marketing decisions for those sit elsewhere.
Each website was checked from the outside, exactly as an AI assistant or answer engine sees it. One anonymous request per public page, no JavaScript, no logins, nothing that is not already published. The same tests were applied to every site on the same day, 15 September 2026.
Of the 136 websites we tried, 121 returned a readable page and are in the figures above. The other 15 did not, mostly domains that no longer resolve, certificates that have expired, and servers that did not answer. Sites that served nothing were retried with a browser identity, to separate a site that is genuinely down from one that refuses anything that is not a browser.
No firm is named here and no individual score is published. If your firm is in this index and you want your own result, ask and we will send it, whether or not you want anything else from us.
The honest part
What a score does not tell you
A low score does not mean a bad firm. Plenty of the lower scoring practices here are long established and busy, and win work through referral and reputation rather than search. If that describes you, this page is information rather than a problem.
Nothing here is a comment on SRA compliance. We tested whether published information is machine readable, which is not something the rules require and not something a firm can be criticised for under them. The rules were written before this mattered.
These tests also measure only what a machine can read on one day. They do not measure whether an assistant recommends you when somebody asks for a solicitor in Epsom, which depends on what is written about you elsewhere as much as on your own website. We built the scanner, so we have an obvious interest in what it measures. The tests are public standards rather than our invention, and where one is for something new that almost nobody has adopted, we have said so rather than counting it against people quietly.
See where your firm sits
The same scan used for this index is free on your own website. About a minute, the same tests, the same score, and a list of what to fix first.
In this index and want your own result? Email dev@shopstartup.co.uk with your domain and we will send it.