Readiness study · 31 August 2026
Of 32 Birmingham professional firms, one scored above 50.
Their clients are starting to ask an AI assistant to shortlist before they ever open a search tab. We checked what those assistants can actually read about 32 independent firms in Birmingham, Alabama — law, tax, financial advice, insurance and estate agency. The average score was 37 out of 100.
What was measured
Not design, traffic or rankings. One narrow question: when an AI assistant goes looking for a machine-readable account of what this business does, is one there?
The check fetches the four documents an assistant looks for, plus the structured data on the homepage, and reports what each URL returned with its HTTP status and the time. It is the same free check published at /scan, run against each firm’s own public pages. Nothing was submitted to any site and nothing was changed.
What we found
The problem is not a handful of laggards. It is the whole category. Thirteen of the 22 scored firms landed between 31 and 45, and they landed there for the same reason: they publish schema markup, which tells a machine who they are, and nothing that tells it what they can do or carries evidence for it.
- 0–151
- 16–307
- 31–4513
- 46–601
- 61 and above0
10 of the 32 firms returned no score at all. That is deliberate: when the check cannot complete a request it reports unknown rather than missing, because a failed request says nothing about the business being checked. Those firms are excluded from every average on this page.
By profession
| Profession | Firms | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Law firms | 8 | 45 |
| Estate agents | 7 | 36 |
| Insurance | 2 | 36 |
| Financial advisors | 2 | 36 |
| Tax advisors | 2 | 29 |
Law firms lead, and the reason is instructive: they already publish individual practitioner pages with real detail, because that is how a firm gets hired. That habit happens to be most of what an assistant needs.
Doing best in Birmingham
Named because they earned it. No firm is named for scoring badly — the point of this study is the size of the gap, not a list of who is in it.
- 57BKM Injury LawyerLaw
- 43Alabama Divorce & Family LawyersLaw
- 43Guster Law Firm, LLCLaw
- 43Revill LawLaw
- 43H2 Real EstateEstate agency
What it means if you are one of them
An assistant asked to recommend a firm still answers. If it cannot read your own account of yourself, it answers from a directory listing, a review aggregator, or an inference. You do not see that happen and you cannot correct it.
Nobody can promise you that fixing this makes an assistant recommend you, and anyone who does is selling something. What it does is make your own account of your practice readable, with a source behind every claim.
Method, so you can repeat it
Firms were identified from OpenStreetMap’s open business data for the Birmingham metropolitan area, filtered to independent businesses that publish their own website. Franchise agent pages and hosted microsites were excluded, because those businesses do not control the site being measured.
Each domain was then checked with the public readiness check on 31 August 2026. Scores move as sites change; re-running any single domain today may return a different number, and the link above lets you do exactly that.
Study by River Cade Concepts. The scheme behind the check is published in full.