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, increasingly, large-language-model context assembly. Personal injury (PI) law firms operate in a legal vertical characterized by high commercial intent and dense local competition. In this context, the practical question is whether the firms already winning Google Page 1 are using schema markup, and how completely they are using it. This study addresses that question 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 (personal injury, car accident, truck accident, medical malpractice, and wrongful death) 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. We anchor the findings 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, and offer a prioritized set of deployment recommendations for firms and their SEO teams.