As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly find out who inherits under the UK intestacy rules.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the relevant GOV.UK guidance on what happens when someone dies without a will, and note whether the estate is in England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
   2. Gather the death certificate details, information about any spouse or civil partner, the full list of children and descendants, and the known status of parents and siblings.
   3. List the estate assets separately from jointly owned property, nominated pensions or insurance, debts, trusts and any property outside the UK.
   4. Paste those facts into the prompt, replacing each bracketed section and removing names, addresses and other unnecessary identifying information.
   5. Ask the chatbot to produce the likely inheritance order, its assumptions, its unanswered questions and the official guidance it used.
   6. Compare each rule and assumption in the response with the relevant GOV.UK guidance, then mark every point that depends on a fact you have not proved.
   7. Send the facts, the response and your marked questions to a solicitor before distributing assets if there is a dispute, uncertainty about the family, a complex estate or any significant property.

   Prompt

   I need an initial, non-definitive explanation of who may inherit under the intestacy rules. This is not professional advice.
   
   Jurisdiction: [England and Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland]
   Person who died: [marital or civil partnership status, and whether they had children]
   Family structure: [list spouse or civil partner, children, adopted children, descendants of any child who died earlier, parents, siblings, half-siblings and other close relatives, stating who is alive]
   Survivorship facts: [whether any relevant person died around the same time, and what is known about the order of deaths]
   Estate information: [rough description of assets, jointly owned assets, property ownership, debts, and whether there may be a trust or overseas property]
   Known documents or complications: [any will, previous marriage or civil partnership, separation, estrangement, disputed parentage, missing relatives or other relevant facts]
   
   Using only the facts supplied, do the following:
   1. State which UK jurisdiction's rules you are applying and list every assumption.
   2. Explain the likely order of inheritance in plain English, separating spouse or civil partner, children and more remote relatives.
   3. Distinguish assets that may pass outside the estate, such as jointly owned assets, from assets subject to intestacy.
   4. Identify the missing facts that could change the result and ask focused questions about them.
   5. Point me to the relevant current GOV.UK or other official guidance to check, without inventing links or quoting uncertain thresholds or figures.
   6. Do not say that anyone definitely inherits, do not calculate shares unless the facts support it, and clearly state when a solicitor should be consulted, especially for a disputed, complex or high-value estate.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.