Who Google's AI Recommends for Lawyers in Vancouver

A directory outranks every firm in the city. bclegalservices.ca — which describes itself as an independent directory and publishes no street address anywhere on its site — takes 13 citations. The most-cited law firm in Metro Vancouver takes 7. Add Reddit (8), the Law Society (6), Clicklaw (5) and two Justice Education Society sites, and 24% of Vancouver's legal answers never reach a practising firm at all.

British Columbia has a competitor no other province has. In BC, notaries public may legally handle residential conveyancing, and 4 notary practices are cited on the real-estate question. They are small in volume — 5 citations, 2% — but they are structurally new. This category of competitor simply does not exist in our Toronto, Ottawa or Calgary studies.

Realtors take the real-estate fee question here too. Six realtor and brokerage domains hold 15 citations, all on real estate. Combined with Reddit and the directories, 20% of real-estate citations go to organisations that cannot do the work. Metro Vancouver firms hold only 30% of that question, against 51% of divorce.

Listings are concentrated on the North Shore. North Vancouver alone returned 33 Google Business Profile citations — more than any other sub-market in any city we have studied. Vancouver, Richmond and Surrey returned none between them. Every listed business was named exactly once.

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.

One of the 21 queries — the divorce question in North Vancouver — returned no AI Overview and contributes no citations. One domain, khakilaw.ca, blocks automated retrieval and is reported as unverified rather than assigned to a region. Only three practice areas were tested; corporate, immigration, employment, criminal and estates work may behave differently. Sub-market labels follow Google's own location targeting rather than municipal boundaries.

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.