Who Google's AI Recommends for Legal Help in Ottawa

Ottawa and Toronto now share an answer set. 29 of the 65 firms cited in Ottawa also appear in our Greater Toronto Area study — the same domains, in both datasets. Together they take 110 of Ottawa's 205 firm citations, or 54%.

Personal injury is the most merged. 71% of firm citations on personal injury queries go to firms also cited in Toronto, against 37% for real estate. Injury work travels; conveyancing is stickier, because a real-estate answer has to survive contact with provincial land registry detail.

Within Ottawa, geography does nothing. 45 of 65 firms appear in more than one sub-market and many in all seven. Kanata, Orléans and Barrhaven return substantially the same firms as downtown. The distinct-firm count almost equals the citation count in every sub-market: firms are rarely cited twice within one area, but the same firms recur across areas.

Nobody covers more than one practice area. Not one of the 65 firms was cited across all three. Real estate, personal injury and family law behave as entirely separate markets, which means the fastest gain is rarely general visibility — it is one specific page, on one specific service, answering the cost question directly.

This is a single-point-in-time snapshot. AI Overviews are generated fresh per query and vary between runs, so exact citation lists will differ if re-run; trends require repeated sampling. Firm identification is by website domain, and where a group operates several sites each is counted separately unless the study states a merge.

“Also Toronto” means the same domain appears in both datasets; it is not a claim about where a firm is headquartered, and only the head offices in the verification table were individually confirmed. Only three practice areas were tested; corporate, employment, immigration and criminal work may behave differently.

AI Overviews reach the largest audience of any AI answer surface — no login, no app, shown to anyone searching Google — so this is the widest-reach measurement available. It is not the whole picture, and a business performing well here may perform differently elsewhere. Every figure comes from search results captured on the date stated and can be independently checked by running the same queries yourself.