Southern California Professional Services Discoverability Benchmark — methodology

Evidence date: October 14, 2026
Sample: 150 firms — 50 legal, 50 consulting and 50 dental
Markets: 75 Los Angeles County and 75 Orange County firms
Research standard: Growth Friday SEO + AI Standards 1.1.0
Standards commit: 792021de37e211545e6618286fcaf1b86c889189

PURPOSE
This study measures whether a buyer can verify a professional-services firm’s sampled service, people, location, proof, educational expertise, independent entity evidence and next step from public web evidence. It does not rank firms or assess service quality, professional competence, outcomes, demand, leads, revenue or market share.

SAMPLE AND SELECTION
The sample contains 25 firms in each vertical-and-county block. The first 30 records formed a calibrated pilot. Sixty fixed service-and-location queries then selected two additional eligible firm-owned organic results per query family, excluding directories, ads, social posts, institutional resources, pilot domains and duplicate domains. This is a query-selected convenience sample. Search visibility was part of entry into the sample, so the results cannot estimate every firm in either market.

EVIDENCE PASSES
1. Firm-owned evidence was scored against frozen rubric v1.
2. Every expansion record received a targeted official-site search to recheck negative fields and locate a dedicated service page.
3. Every expansion record received an independent corroboration search; one qualifying source was recorded and assigned to the frozen three-tier provenance scheme.
4. Quality control rechecked every positive proof limitation, every Tier 1 corroboration, every missing dedicated service page and a deterministic 10% sample of the remaining expansion records.
5. The calibrated 30-firm pilot and 120-firm expansion were reconciled into one 150-row dataset.

CALCULATION RULES
Website rates use all firms in the stated group. Proof-context rates use only records with proof_present=yes. County and vertical comparisons are descriptive. No composite score or ranked list is produced. Third-party tiers measure source provenance, not endorsement or firm quality.

AI EVIDENCE
Controlled AI observations remain limited to the separately documented 30-firm pilot. They are not expanded or generalized to the 150-firm website sample, and no blended AI visibility score is reported.

LIMITS
Search results and public pages vary by engine, location, personalization, device and time. One sampled intent cannot describe every buyer journey or every page on a site. The expansion used structured research extraction and targeted search review rather than a full manual site crawl. A no means qualifying evidence was not found in the constrained review; it does not prove that the evidence is absent. The study does not assess advertising or professional-rule compliance, accessibility conformance, backlink quality, review sentiment, conversion performance or causation.