Schema Markup Adoption in Top-Ranking Personal Injury Law Firm Websites: A Structured Data Audit of 1,005 Google Page-1 Sites Across 50 US States

Structured data markup on the open web has moved from a rich-snippet convenience to a load-bearing input for entity extraction, knowledge-graph onboarding, disambiguation, corroboration, and large-language-model context assembly. Personal injury (PI) law firms operate in a legal vertical characterized by high commercial intent and dense local competition. This study addresses whether the firms already winning Google Page 1 are using schema markup, and how completely they are using it, through a targeted audit of 1,005 unique PI law firm websites ranking on the first page of Google Search for five core practice-area keywords across the largest city in each of the 50 U.S. states plus Washington, D.C. For every domain we crawled the homepage plus up to four ranking practice-area pages, extracted all JSON-LD blocks, scored the implementation against a five-dimension Schema Completeness Index (SCI), and evaluated eligibility for ten Google Rich Results features. We find that 63.7% of top-ranking PI firm websites deploy some schema, yet only 35.3% use the industry-specific LegalService type and only 20.6% emit Person or Attorney schema for their lawyers. Only 4.7% ship an Organization payload complete enough to constitute a brand-quality entity declaration. Spearman rank correlation between SERP position and SCI is a weak but consistent -0.0581, and between rank and Rich Results feature count is -0.084: schema quality is a tiebreaker, not a primary lever, in this sample. The findings are anchored to Google and Microsoft patents and published research that establish structured data as the codified interface into entity recognition, knowledge-graph onboarding, and generative-answer surfaces.