Why it matters
Five gaps in how the sector measures itself.
No standard measure of visibility
Legal rankings reward size, not visibility — bigger, generalist firms dominate them by default. Audiences now get answers from AI Overviews and LLM chats without visiting a site at all. A measure built on rankings and site visits misses most of what's happening.
We optimise what we can see
Marketing gets judged on short-term, visible behaviour — clicks, visits, page reads. These were always a fraction of real audience behaviour. We can't let them stand in for the whole picture.
The real impact stays hidden
Marketing moves three things: Reputation, Relationships, Revenue. In an AI-mediated market, reputation is the one we track least — and the one that matters most.
No year-on-year benchmark exists
Firms have no size-neutral way to see whether they're outperforming the market, improving year on year, or losing ground to named competitors.
Generic benchmarks don't fit a specialist market
A benchmark has to work two ways: against the whole market, and against the firm's own sectors and services.