The GBP Completeness Gap: A 9-Attribute Audit of 1,005 US Personal Injury Law Firms

For a personal injury law firm on Google, the Knowledge Panel that renders when the firm's brand name is queried is almost always a Google Business Panel: a place-template entity surface backed by the firm's Google Business Profile, not a person-template entity backed by the firm's Wikipedia article. The completeness of that Business Panel governs how the firm appears in the local pack, the map surface, AI Overviews for local-commercial queries, and every downstream AI answer engine that draws on Google's local entity graph. This paper introduces the Google Business Panel Completeness Index (GBPCI), a nine-attribute composite score, and reports the first large-N baseline audit of GBPCI across 1,005 top-ranking US personal injury law firms covering 51 US markets. The nine attributes are (1) Google Business Profile presence, (2) address populated, (3) phone populated, (4) website populated, (5) any Google Business category assigned, (6) a specific personal-injury category assigned (rather than a generic legal-services category), (7) star rating shown, (8) review corpus of ten or more reviews, and (9) multi-location presence (more than one office place entity returned). We find that 95.9% of the 1,005 firms return a Business Panel entity when the firm brand is queried, and that the mean GBPCI is 7.05 / 9 with a median of 8 / 9. Attribute-level prevalence exposes the three areas of the vertical's collective missed opportunity: 43.0% of firms use a generic Google Business category rather than the specific Personal injury attorney category, 33.8% have fewer than ten reviews, and 49.9% operate as a single-office firm. GBPCI does not correlate with SERP rank in this sample (Spearman −0.011, p = 0.73) nor with the Schema Completeness Index reported by the companion structured-data paper (Spearman +0.036, p = 0.26), evidence that on-page schema hygiene and off-site Business Panel completeness are governed by two distinct decision loops inside the firm. We situate the findings inside Google's own patent record on local-business ranking (US-8312010-B1), category-density (US-2014074820-A1), and sentiment-based review ranking (US-9317559-B1), and offer a prioritized recommendation set for firms and their SEO teams targeting Business Panel quality as an AI Visibility surface.