What putting Vedder back in front of buyers in Google and AI is worth

Moving to vedder.com in January cut the search terms Vedder ranks for by 78%, from 895 to 200. On buyers' own questions, ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews name Vedder in 5.7% of answers, 12th of 17 firms, though Chambers ranks it Band 1 in aviation finance and level with Holland & Knight in asset finance. In equipment finance, AI names Holland & Knight and Chapman and Cutler about 5x as often as Vedder. Pick a tier, then replace our placeholder rates with Vedder's own.

Reach: search, AI answers and ads

Buyer searches reaching a Vedder page8.0%

Of ~11,820 searches a month across 42 practice terms (Ahrefs, US). About 0.7% today (~80 clicks). Repaired redirects and pages rebuilt as answers.

Buyers' AI answers naming Vedder20%

Peec today: 5.7% (Holland & Knight 22.8%). Of ~8,274 buyer questions a month, 10% of answers naming Vedder send a visit (placeholders).

Search ads a month$3,000

27 buyer terms (M&A, PE, fund regulation, aircraft leasing, OFCCP, Chicago firm searches) at a volume-weighted ~$7.99 a click; Form PF and investment management run $35–40. No peer buys search ads today.

New clients

Buyer visits that send a new-matter inquiry0.3%

Placeholder until Vedder shares its own. Ad clicks convert at 75% of this rate.

Inquiries that become clients15%

Placeholder until Vedder shares its own.

First-year fees per new client$150,000

Placeholder: 5–15% of a $1B company's ~$1.9M a year in law-firm spend (ACC/MLA 2026).

New client fees a year (first year)

new clients a year

more buyer visits a month

—

first-year fees per $1 of ads

First-year fees a year, by where the buyer came from

Search (practice pages)

AI answers

Search ads

What one buyer is worth vs what a click costs

organic buyer visit

ad click (costs ~$7.99)

3-year value

If buyer visits inquire at	Clients / yr	Fees / yr

What waiting costs

Old vedderprice.com addresses still answer with temporary (302) redirects, and 125 sites, including Wikipedia, Forbes and Cornell Law, link to Vedder pages that now return 404. Chambers' profile still reads "Vedder Price" and links to vedderprice.com, while Google's AI names ten equipment finance firms without Vedder. GC teams' use of gen AI doubled in a year, from 44% to 87% (FTI 2026). Each month without the plan defers about $0 of first-year fees at these rates.

Search demand: Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, US, 42 head terms buyers of outside counsel use for Vedder's practices (11,820 searches a month; Ahrefs undercounts the B2B legal long tail, so this is a floor). Search today: ~80 category and topic clicks a month to vedder.com (Ahrefs, 15 Oct 2026). Before the move vedderprice.com ranked for 895 terms; vedder.com ranks for 200. AI: Peec, ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, 110 prompts, 888 answers, 15 Oct 2026 (day one): Vedder named in 5.7% of answers to the 92 prompts that don't name it. AI buyer questions are a proxy: one per search × 70% of GC teams using gen AI for general queries (FTI/Relativity General Counsel Report 2026, n=224, via Global Legal Post). Ads: 27 terms, 8,640 searches a month, volume-weighted CPC $7.99 (Ahrefs), capped at 15% of those searches. Directories: Chambers USA 2026, Chambers Global 2026, Legal 500 US 2026.

Formula: buyer visits = searches × reach + AI questions × share naming Vedder × 10%, counted only above today's ~127 a month. Ad clicks = ads ÷ $7.99. New clients a year = (new buyer visits × inquiry rate + ad clicks × inquiry rate × 75%) × inquiry-to-client × 12. Fees = new clients × first-year fees. The 3-year view assumes 75% of clients stay each year. Fees per $1 counts only ad-driven fees. Every rate and the fee per client are placeholders until Vedder shares its own; ROAST's fees aren't included.

Part of the ROAST × Vedder search, AI and new-client analysis, October 2026.