Every 1% of four consumer legal markets in England and Wales is worth between £25.5m and £30.5m a year in fees. That’s probate, divorce, contested financial settlements and conveyancing, counted from official volumes and priced at the Legal Services Board’s national medians.
5% is worth £127.5m to £152.4m. 10% is worth £255.1m to £304.8m.
We built the same sum for the other sectors we work in. Each 1% of private dentistry is £84m a year. Each 1% of the new clients financial advisers win in a year is worth £11.2m in annual revenue, and those clients tend to stay. Each 1% of self-pay patients for three common operations is worth £4.6m to £5.9m.
Every number below has its source next to it. Further down is how a ranking or an AI citation turns into those pounds, and where the model stops being reliable.
How we worked it out
The method is simple on purpose. For each sector, an official count of how much work happens in a year, multiplied by a sourced price for that work. That gives a market value. Then 1%, 5% and 10% of it.
Visibility is the share of the searches and AI answers in your market where you appear. Market share is the share of the work you win, and the gap between the two is where most agency maths goes wrong. A point of visibility only becomes a point of share for the work that actually passes through search, and only if you convert what arrives as well as you do now.
So read the market figures as what a point of share is worth. The sections further down show how much of each market searches before it buys, and what a ranking is worth per 1,000 searches.
Every price excludes VAT. Every volume is the latest full year we could find.
Law: £25.5m to £30.5m for every 1%
England and Wales, national median prices from the Legal Services Board’s 2024 prices survey of 1,534 providers.
| Market | Annual volume | Price (LSB median) | Market value | 1% | 5% | 10% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Probate, grants to legal professionals (2025) | 163,698 | £1,000 grant only to £3,570 full administration | £163.7m to £584.4m | £1.6m to £5.8m | £8.2m to £29.2m | £16.4m to £58.4m |
| Divorce and dissolution applications (2025) | 109,184 | £750 to £1,450 with children | £81.9m to £158.3m | £0.8m to £1.6m | £4.1m to £7.9m | £8.2m to £15.8m |
| Contested financial remedy (2025) | 12,555 | £6,000 | £75.3m | £0.75m | £3.8m | £7.5m |
| Residential conveyancing (2025-26) | 1,013,490 transactions | £2,200 (£1,000 sale plus £1,200 purchase) | £2,229.7m | £22.3m | £111.5m | £223.0m |
| Total | £2,550.6m to £3,047.7m | £25.5m to £30.5m | £127.5m to £152.4m | £255.1m to £304.8m |
Volumes: grants and divorce from the MoJ’s Family Court Statistics Quarterly for October to December 2025, Tables 12b, 14 and 22. Property from HMRC’s monthly property transactions, residential transactions over £40,000 in England (959,900) and Wales (53,590) for the 2025-26 financial year.
A few choices worth knowing about.
Probate uses only the 55.4% of grants that went to a legal professional, because the other 131,720 were families applying themselves. Financial remedy uses only the 12,555 contested cases, because the LSB’s £6,000 scenario is a divorce with a disagreement over assets and it would be wrong to price the 36,512 uncontested consent orders at that.
Conveyancing assumes a solicitor or licensed conveyancer on each side of each sale.
These are national medians across every type of provider, including one-person firms and online services. Your own fees may differ, and every firm now publishes its prices under the SRA Transparency Rules. If yours sit above the median, your 1% is worth more than this table says.
How people actually choose a lawyer. The Legal Services Consumer Panel’s 2026 tracker, 3,802 people who’d used a legal service in the previous two years, found:
- 42% shopped around before choosing.
- 11.5% said searching for a provider on the internet was the one thing that best described how they chose, up from 10.2% in 2025.
- Of those who’d been recommended a provider, 54.4% looked the provider up themselves before getting in touch.
- 89% rated reputation as important, and 75.6% said positive published reviews would increase their trust.
That third figure is the one firms underrate. Recommendation still brings the work, but more than half of recommended clients check you before they call. If what they find is thin, or a competitor shows up instead, the referral leaks.
It’s also why a commercial law firm we work with put its effort into named partner authority rather than content volume, and went from 4% to 41% AI citation share across 75 priority queries in 12 months.
Financial advice: £11.2m a year for every 1% of new clients
UK, from the FCA’s own data.
The FCA’s 2025 survey of advice firms puts the typical client at £250,000 of assets and £2,000 of revenue a year. Its retail intermediary data shows firms took on 559,926 new ongoing advice clients in 2025 (Table 23), and earned £6.47bn from retail investment business across 4,406 firms (Table 3).
| Share | New ongoing clients a year | Revenue in year one | Over five years at the same fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1% | 5,599 | £11.2m | £56.0m |
| 5% | 27,996 | £56.0m | £280.0m |
| 10% | 55,993 | £112.0m | £559.9m |
The five-year column is simple multiplication and assumes the client stays and the fee stays flat. The reason it’s there: 56% of advised adults have used the same adviser for more than five years, according to the FCA’s Financial Lives 2024 advice findings. A client won is rarely a one-year client.
Measured against the whole market instead, 1% of £6.47bn of retail investment revenue is £64.7m.
Where advice is harder. Advice is the most relationship-led market in this article. In the same FCA survey, 51% of advised adults said the main prompt for their most recent advice was the adviser getting in touch for a review, and only 1% named online sources. Of those who’d chosen an adviser in the last two to three years, 35% shopped around.
So visibility in advice is mostly about the moment someone has been told your name, or is comparing two or three firms, and checks. That’s a smaller slice than in law or dentistry, and it’s the slice where the money compounds. The IFA practice in our case studies went from no AI citations to 31% across 45 Consumer Duty queries in 90 days, mostly by restructuring guidance it had already written.
One more figure from the same Financial Lives data: 77% of adults have low or no trust in fully automated advice. We cover the detail for advisers in our IFA guide.
Private healthcare: £4.6m to £5.9m for 1% of three self-pay operations
UK, from PHIN, the Private Healthcare Information Network.
PHIN’s June 2026 market update counted 953,000 private admissions in 2025, a record for the fourth year running. 70% were paid for by insurance and 282,625 were self-pay. We’ve used self-pay only, because insured patients are largely steered by their insurer, and self-pay patients choose the hospital or clinic themselves.
The three biggest self-pay procedures, priced at PHIN’s average package prices across 17 UK cities (collected March 2026):
| Procedure | Self-pay admissions (2025) | Package price range by city | Market value | 1% | 5% | 10% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cataract surgery, per eye | 49,655 | £2,522 to £3,417 | £125.2m to £169.7m | £1.3m to £1.7m | £6.3m to £8.5m | £12.5m to £17.0m |
| Hip replacement | 15,590 | £13,847 to £17,540 | £215.9m to £273.4m | £2.2m to £2.7m | £10.8m to £13.7m | £21.6m to £27.3m |
| Knee replacement | 8,150 | £14,341 to £18,236 | £116.9m to £148.6m | £1.2m to £1.5m | £5.8m to £7.4m | £11.7m to £14.9m |
| Three procedures | 73,395 | £458.0m to £591.7m | £4.6m to £5.9m | £22.9m to £29.6m | £45.8m to £59.2m |
For the whole self-pay market, LaingBuisson estimates acute self-pay at about £1.6bn in 2025. That’s a vendor figure from a paid report, but on it each 1% is worth about £16m.
Where the demand comes from. NHS England’s referral to treatment figures put the waiting list in England at 7.4 million pathways in August 2026, about 6.2 million people, with 65.2% seen within 18 weeks against a standard of 92%.
In a Healthwatch England poll of 2,593 adults in England, 16% had used private services in the past year, against 9% in a smaller 2023 poll, so treat the rise as a direction rather than a precise trend. 39% of them gave long NHS waits as the main reason.
How patients look. YouGov found 26% of UK adults go to a search engine first for health information and 8% go to an AI tool first, rising to 13% of millennials. Health is also the sector where Google is most likely to answer with an AI Overview, 69.68% of the time in DataForSEO’s US data, which we broke down by industry earlier this week. More detail for clinics is in our private healthcare guide.
Dental: £84m for every 1% of private dentistry
UK, from LaingBuisson’s Dentistry UK Market Report.
Private-pay dentistry was worth £8.4bn in 2023/24, 69% of a £12.16bn high street market and the highest private share since LaingBuisson started recording in 2007.
| Share | Annual value |
|---|---|
| 1% | £84m |
| 5% | £420m |
| 10% | £840m |
That’s LaingBuisson’s estimate rather than an official statistic, and it covers high street dentistry only.
The shift to private is still running. Healthwatch England found 32% of adults in England used private dentistry in the past year, up from 22% in 2023. NHS dentists in England saw 18.8 million adults in the 24 months to March 2026, 40% of the adult population, according to NHSBSA.
The value per patient is where dentistry differs from the other sectors. A single implant with a crown is priced from £2,800 to £3,200 at five practices we checked in November 2026, and clear aligners from £1,525 to £4,950. There’s no national price survey for cosmetic treatment, and the CMA’s market study won’t report until March 2027, so those are named practices’ “from” prices rather than averages.
How patients look. The ONS asked adults in England with no dentist and an urgent need how they chose which NHS practice to contact. 30.9% used an online search, more than used the NHS website (25.5%), in its September 2026 bulletin. It’s a narrow group, and it’s the only official figure we found on how people pick a practice. Practices can find more in our dental guide.
B2B SaaS: about $18,800 of first-year contract value per 1,000 organic visitors
There’s no credible UK figure for the size of the SaaS market, so this one works from the funnel instead.
| Step | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Organic visitor to lead | 2.1% | First Page Sage, B2B SaaS funnel benchmarks |
| Lead to customer (SEO channel, four stages multiplied) | 3.69% | First Page Sage stage rates, our arithmetic |
| Customers per 1,000 organic visitors | 0.77 | arithmetic |
| Median annual contract value | $24,266 | SaaS Capital, 2026 survey |
| First-year contract value per 1,000 visitors | about $18,800 | arithmetic |
| Per 10,000 visitors | 7.7 customers, about $188,000 | arithmetic |
Median gross revenue retention is 91% in SaaS Capital’s 2025 retention benchmarks, so most of that first-year value comes back the following year.
Both sources are vendors. Neither states where its sample comes from, and both are likely weighted to the US, so this is a shape rather than a UK benchmark. The funnel rates come from First Page Sage, an SEO agency, and the contract value from SaaS Capital, a lender to SaaS firms.
Why AI answers matter in SaaS. G2, a software review site, published 2026 buyer research finding that 51% of 1,076 B2B software buyers now start research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, against 29% in its 2025 report.
6sense, which sells buyer-intent data, ran a 2026 study of all B2B purchases, not only software, that included UK and Ireland buyers. As reported by MarTech Edge, 82% of buyers chose the vendor they already preferred before contacting anyone. That’s correlation from what buyers say, and the same study found only 26% used AI to discover vendors in the first place, but the direction is clear enough.
The SaaS firm in our case studies went from 9% to 38% citation share on 180 UK buyer queries in 14 months, and the US category leader fell from 49% to 22% on the same queries.
What a ranking is worth per 1,000 searches
The market figures tell you what’s at stake. This is how a position turns into it.
Clicks per 1,000 searches, from First Page Sage’s 2026 CTR study (US, blended across results with and without an AI answer), with enquiries at Ruler Analytics’ organic conversion rates by industry:
| Where you appear | Clicks per 1,000 searches | Legal enquiries (7.3%) | Finance enquiries (5.4%) | Health enquiries (1.8%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Position 10 | 2 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.04 |
| Position 5 | 7 | 0.5 | 0.4 | 0.1 |
| Position 3 | 17 | 1.2 | 0.9 | 0.3 |
| First citation in the AI answer (where one appears) | 52 | 3.8 | 2.8 | 0.9 |
| Position 1 | 71 | 5.2 | 3.8 | 1.3 |
| First in the local pack (where one appears) | 148 | 10.8 | 8.0 | 2.7 |
The organic rows are per 1,000 of all searches. The AI citation and local pack rows are per 1,000 searches where an AI answer or a local pack shows, so they’re a guide to each feature rather than a straight ranking against position one.
Moving from fifth to first is roughly ten times the clicks. And position one is now worth far less than it was. The same study’s 2025 edition had it at 39.8%, which is the figure most people still quote. We covered the collapse in desktop click-through rates separately.
The local pack row matters most for practices, clinics and high street firms. It held up far better than organic results did, falling 16% year on year against 82% for organic position one in the same data.
The same clicks, bought instead. WordStream’s 2026 Google Ads benchmarks put the median cost per click at $9.87 for legal, $8.00 for dentists, $4.76 for physicians and surgeons, $5.87 for business services and $3.39 for finance and insurance. Those are US auctions. There’s no primary UK-wide benchmark for click costs.
On those prices, if 1,000 people a month search for your service, the 64 extra clicks between fifth and first would cost about $632 a month to buy in legal and $512 in dentistry, every month, for as long as you keep paying.
A worked example for one law firm
Say 1,000 people a month search for your core service in your area.
| Position 5 | Position 1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Clicks a year | 84 | 852 |
| Enquiries a year at 7.3% | 6.1 | 62.2 |
That’s about 56 extra enquiries a year. How many become instructions depends on your own close rate, and we couldn’t find an independent figure for UK law firms anywhere, so here it is at three rates. Replace them with yours.
| Close rate | Extra instructions a year | At £1,200 (one side of a conveyance) | At £3,570 (estate administration) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20% | 11.2 | £13,455 | £40,030 |
| 30% | 16.8 | £20,183 | £60,045 |
| 40% | 22.4 | £26,911 | £80,059 |
And those are national median fees. Price it at your own.
What these numbers can’t tell you
Market share and visibility are different measures. Plenty of work arrives by recommendation, repeat business and insurer referral, and never passes through a search. The tables show what a point of share is worth. They don’t show that a point of visibility wins it.
Nothing here shows cause. None of these sources tests whether more visibility causes more clients. The healthcare, dental and advice trends all line up with NHS waits and access problems as much as with anything a firm did online.
Counts aren’t clients. Joint divorce applications are one case covering two people. Each property sale usually has two conveyancers. Contested financial remedy cases also sit inside the divorce row, so the two overlap slightly. We left out the count that breaks worst: 1.33 million powers of attorney registered in 2025 are documents, not people.
The click data is American. We couldn’t find a published UK click-through curve with positions one to ten, or a primary UK benchmark for click costs. The conversion rates are vendors’ client data. Use the shape, then your own Search Console.
The prices are medians. Your fees, your mix of work and your region will move every figure here.
Where to start
Put your own five numbers in: how many people search for your core services, where you appear, your enquiry rate, your close rate and your fee. That gives you your own version of every table above.
If you’d rather we did the first part, the free AI Visibility Audit shows where you appear across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude and Microsoft Copilot for the queries that bring you work, and who’s named instead of you.
Questions we get asked about this
What is 1% of the UK legal market worth?
Across four consumer markets in England and Wales (professionally handled probate, divorce, contested financial remedy and residential conveyancing), 1% is worth £25.5m to £30.5m a year in fees at the Legal Services Board’s 2024 national median prices, which exclude VAT. 5% is £127.5m to £152.4m and 10% is £255.1m to £304.8m. Conveyancing is most of it: 1% of the 1,013,490 residential transactions in England and Wales in 2025-26 is about 10,135 transactions, worth £22.3m with both sides instructed.
What is one new financial advice client worth?
About £2,000 a year in revenue, which is the FCA’s own typical figure from its 2025 survey of more than 4,100 advice firms. Firms reported 559,926 new ongoing advice clients in 2025, so 1% of that flow is about 5,599 clients and £11.2m of revenue a year. 56% of advised adults have used the same adviser for more than five years, so a client won is rarely a one-year client.
How much is the UK private dental market worth?
LaingBuisson values private-pay dentistry at £8.4bn in 2023/24, 69% of a £12.16bn high street dental market and the highest private share since it began recording in 2007. On that figure, each 1% of the private market is worth £84m a year. It is a vendor estimate from a paid report, so treat it as LaingBuisson’s number rather than an official statistic.
Does more search visibility mean more clients?
Not automatically, and nothing in this research proves that it does.
Visibility is the share of searches and AI answers where you appear. Market share is the share of the work you win. The link between them runs through clicks, enquiries and how well you convert them, and a lot of work never passes through search at all. These figures show what a point of market share is worth. How much of it you can win through visibility depends on how much of your market searches before it buys.
How many clicks does position one get on Google now?
On First Page Sage’s 2026 US data, position one gets 7.1% of clicks blended across results with and without an AI answer, 22.6% where there is no AI answer and 3.6% where there is one. Position five gets 0.7%.
The first local pack result gets 14.8% where a local pack appears, and the first citation inside an AI answer gets 5.2% where an AI answer appears. These are US figures from an agency’s own client data, so use them for the shape rather than as a UK forecast.
How do people choose a solicitor in England and Wales?
The Legal Services Consumer Panel’s 2026 tracker found 42% shopped around, and 11.5% said searching for a provider on the internet best described how they chose. Recommendation still matters, but of those who were recommended a provider, 54.4% looked the provider up themselves before making contact. 89% rated reputation as important and 75.6% said positive published reviews would increase their trust.
Why are the healthcare figures only for self-pay patients?
Because 70% of private admissions are funded by insurance, and insured patients are largely steered by their insurer and their GP or consultant referral. Self-pay is where the patient picks the hospital or clinic themselves, so it is the part of the market visibility can move most directly. PHIN recorded 282,625 self-pay admissions in 2025. Applying a visibility figure to all 953,000 private admissions would overstate it.