How to Get Your Trade Business Found on ChatGPT and AI Search (UK)

A growing share of UK homeowners no longer type "electrician near me" into Google and scroll. They ask ChatGPT, or they read the AI answer at the top of the Google page, and they get three names with a sentence about each. Then they ring one.

There is no ad slot in that answer. You cannot buy your way in. The assistant builds its recommendation out of whatever it can read about you in public.

What actually moves it, in order:

• Reviews. Count, recency and your replies. The biggest lever, and the one most trade businesses are weakest on.
• Your Google Business Profile. Complete, correct categories, real service list, real service areas.
• Your website, written to be quoted. Services named, towns named, prices given, questions answered, one fact per block.
• Directory listings that agree with each other. Same business name, same address, same phone number, everywhere.
• Pages an assistant wants to cite. Ranked lists and how-to guides get pulled into answers far more than anything else.

All of it is free and none of it needs a developer. If you want a starting point rather than a reading list, run the free Tradehand AI report. It checks your website and your Google Business Profile, scores how you show up against the traders ranking above you, and tells you whether an assistant can read your details at all.

Old search gave the homeowner a page of blue links and three map results. They compared, they clicked around, they made their own shortlist. Being sixth was still worth something.

AI search gives them a paragraph. "For a boiler repair in Leeds, three well reviewed options are..." and then three names. Being sixth is worth nothing, because sixth is not in the paragraph.

The paragraph is not sold. Google says there are no special requirements or optimisations to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a normal search snippet. No schema to add, no fee to pay. The assistant is reading the open web and summarising it.

What the homeowner sees	Old Google search	ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity
Number of businesses shown	10 links plus 3 map results	Usually 3, sometimes 1
Can you pay to be there	Yes, ads and Local Services Ads	No paid slot at all
What decides inclusion	Keywords, links, proximity, reviews	What can be read and quoted about you, with reviews weighted heavily
How your page is used	A link the reader clicks	A block of text the assistant paraphrases
Being ranked sixth	Still gets some clicks	Invisible
Vague copy like "quality workmanship"	Harmless filler	Unusable, so you get skipped
Cost to compete	Ads budget or an SEO agency	Free, if you do the work

The last row is the reason to act now. Most UK trade businesses have not touched any of this. A sole trader with 60 recent Google reviews and a plainly written services page can beat a bigger firm with a slick site that says nothing specific.

Assistants do not hold a private database of UK tradespeople. When someone asks for a plumber in Leeds, the assistant runs its own searches, reads pages, then writes a summary of what it found. Four sources do nearly all the work.

1. Your Google Business Profile. The strongest single record of your business on the open web. Name, category, service area, hours, services, photos and the whole review pile in one place, in a fixed structure. Assistants lean on it because it is unambiguous.

2. Your reviews, as text. Not just the star average. A review saying "came out at 11pm on a Sunday for a burst pipe in Headingley" tells the assistant you do emergency call-outs in a named area. A page of "Great job, thanks" tells it nothing it can use.

3. Your own website. ChatGPT reaches sites through its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI states this is the crawler that surfaces sites in ChatGPT search, so a site that blocks it will not appear in those answers even though it is public. Perplexity works the same way, with PerplexityBot for indexing and Perplexity-User when someone asks a live question. Google's AI answers use the ordinary Google index.

4. Directories and listing sites. Trade directories, registration bodies, council listings, anything that lists businesses in your area. These carry weight because they are structured and independent of you.

Two of the four are entirely yours to control. The other two you influence, one review and one listing at a time. For a shorter single-trade walkthrough, see how to get a plumbing business found on ChatGPT.

Do not skip this. Ten minutes here tells you exactly which of the next steps you need, and the answer is often uncomfortable enough to make you do them.

Open ChatGPT, then Google (look at the AI answer at the top), then Perplexity. Run the same questions in each, using your real trade and your real town.

• "Who are the best electricians in Harpenden?"
• "I need an emergency plumber in Leeds tonight, who should I call?"
• "Recommend a Gas Safe registered engineer near LS6."
• "Tell me about [your business name]. Is it any good?"
• "Who does EICR testing in [your town] and roughly what does it cost?"

Write down four things for each answer: whether you were named at all, who was named instead, what the assistant said about them, and what it said about you when you asked directly.

The last one is where most trade businesses get their shock. When we track how AI assistants describe businesses in this market, the weakness they name most often is some version of "limited publicly available customer reviews". The assistant is not saying you are bad. It is saying it cannot find enough evidence to recommend you over someone it can verify, so it does not.

Watch for stale facts too. An old phone number or a service you dropped three years ago is out there being read, and it will keep being read until you correct it at the source.

Run this again in eight weeks. The change in the answer is your scoreboard. If you would rather have it done for you, the free AI report runs the checks, names the competitors ranking above you and gives you a mark out of 100.

If you do only one thing on this page, do this one. Your Google Business Profile feeds Google's own AI answers directly, and it is the record other assistants trust most because it is verified and structured.

The fields that change what an assistant can say about you:

• Primary category. Specific beats broad. "Electrician" not "Contractor". The assistant uses this to decide whether you belong in the answer at all.
• Additional categories. Add every service you genuinely run as a line of work. An electrician who fits EV chargers should carry "EV Charging Station Installation" as well.
• Service area. The towns and postcodes you actually cover. Vague coverage means you get left out of "near me" answers for places you serve every week.
• Services list. Every service, named the way a customer says it, with a sentence each and a price where you can give one. The most under-used field on the profile, and pure raw material for an AI answer.
• Business description. 200 to 300 words covering what you do, where, and what you are registered for. Plain English, no keyword stuffing.
• Hours. Accurate, including whether you take emergency calls. "Open 24 hours" when you do not answer at 2am costs you the review that would have won the next job.
• Photos. Recent work, your van, your certificates. Photos do not get quoted, but an active profile is a trusted profile.

Do not stuff keywords into your business name. Google suspends listings for it, and a suspended listing is invisible to every assistant at once.

The full walkthrough, including verification when you work from a van rather than a shop, is here: Google Business Profile for trade businesses.

Reviews always mattered, but differently. Old search used your star rating and review count as ranking signals. An AI assistant reads the actual words and uses them as evidence for a claim it is about to make to a homeowner. That changes what a good review pile looks like.

Signal	What an assistant does with it	What to aim for
Review count	Decides whether there is enough evidence to name you	50 or more, then keep going
Recency	Recent reviews mean the business is trading and reliable now	At least a few every month, never a gap of months
Detail in the review text	Supplies the specifics quoted back to the homeowner	Reviews that name the job, the area and the timing
Your replies	Read as evidence of how you treat people, and confirm the job details	Reply to every one, positive and negative
Rating	A filter, not a ranking	4.6 or above; a perfect 5.0 with 8 reviews loses to 4.7 with 90
Spread across sites	Independent corroboration	Google first, then wherever else customers look

How to get reviews with detail in them. Ask the moment the job is finished and the customer is visibly pleased. Say what you would like them to mention. "If you could say what the job was and that we got there the same day, that really helps." Most people are happy to and would not have thought of it. Send the direct review link the same day, from your phone, before you have driven off the street.

Never pay for reviews or offer a discount for one. Google's review policies prohibit incentivised reviews, and a purge takes your whole pile with it.

The hard part is not knowing this. It is remembering to ask at half past five when you are covered in dust and have two more calls to make. Your Tradehand office team sends the review request the day the job finishes, with your direct Google link already in the message, so the pile grows whether or not you remembered. Two guides go deeper: how to get more 5-star reviews and the printable get more reviews checklist.

Replies do two jobs in AI search. They show a business that engages, which assistants read as a trust signal. And they let you add facts the reviewer left out.

A reply like this puts the trade, the job, the town and the timing into a block of text read together with the review:

"Thanks James, glad the consumer unit swap went smoothly and that we could get to you in Harpenden the same week. Certificate is with you, shout if you need anything else."

Compare that with "Thanks!". One is evidence. The other is nothing.

The bad review matters more than you think. An assistant summarising your business reads the one-star along with the rest. Left unanswered, it is the only version of that story on the record. Keep the reply short, do not argue, do not rebut point by point, and move it offline:

"Sorry to hear that, and thanks for telling us. We would like to put it right. Give us a ring on the number on our profile and we will sort it."

The long defensive reply is the one to avoid. Future customers read it as a red flag no matter who was right, and an assistant has more negative text to work with. The full approach: how to respond to negative reviews.

Assistants do not read your website the way a person does. They pull one block of text, roughly a few hundred words, and try to answer a question with it. If that block does not make sense on its own, it gets dropped. This is why beautiful trade websites often produce nothing. "Quality workmanship you can trust since 2009" contains no fact, so there is nothing to quote.

The rule is one fact per block, and every block standing alone. Assume the assistant will read that paragraph and nothing else on the page. Here is the same information written both ways.

Unusable	Answerable
"We offer a comprehensive range of electrical services."	"We carry out EICRs, consumer unit replacements, EV charger installations, fault finding and full rewires."
"Serving the local area and surrounding towns."	"We cover Leeds, Headingley, Horsforth, Otley and Wetherby, plus LS1 to LS29."
"Competitive rates, free quotes."	"An EICR on a three-bedroom house is £150 to £220. Call-out during working hours is £60."
"Fully qualified and insured."	"Gas Safe registered, number 123456. £5m public liability insurance."
"Fast response times."	"We answer emergency calls 24 hours a day and aim to be on site within two hours in Leeds."
"Contact us today."	"Call 0113 496 0000 or email hello@example.co.uk. We reply to enquiries within the hour on weekdays."

The pages worth having: one per main service, one per main town you cover, an about page naming the person and the qualifications, a prices page with real numbers, and an FAQ answering the questions you get on the phone every week.

Three technical points, and then no more. Nothing in your robots file should block Google, OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. Your content must be in text on the page, not baked into an image or a PDF. And your name, address and phone number should appear as local business structured data, the standard machine-readable format Google documents for local businesses.

If you have no site yet, or the one you have was built by someone who stopped answering the phone, Tradehand builds you a fast one for free, written this way from the start, with those crawlers allowed. Doing it yourself, start with the fastest way to set up a trade business website. If you already have one that never shows up, why your website is not showing on Google covers the usual causes.

Not all pages are equally quotable. When we track which sources AI engines cite in answers about local search and trade services, two formats do most of the work: ranked lists first, then how-to guides. Everything else shares what is left. Both are pages a trade business can write honestly.

A ranked list on your own site. Not a list of yourself. A genuinely useful comparison for the customer you want. "The 7 things to check before hiring an electrician in Leeds." "5 signs your consumer unit needs replacing." "The 6 most common causes of a boiler losing pressure, in order." Number them, keep each item to a short block that stands alone, and put the answer in the item's first sentence.

A how-to guide. Anything you explain to customers on the phone. "How to find your stopcock." "How to reset a tripped RCD safely, and when to stop and call someone." "What happens during an EICR, step by step." These get quoted because they answer the question the homeowner actually typed, and your business name travels with the quote.

This works. Our own tracking of AI answers on local search topics shows Tradehand named in about 30% of them, against about 7% for Checkatrade, a far bigger and older brand. The difference is not budget. It is having structured, specific, quotable pages where a brand page used to be.

Practical rules for both formats:

• Put the answer first, then the explanation. Assistants quote opening sentences.
• Use real numbers, real towns and real timings. Specifics are what get pulled through.
• Give each item its own heading so it can be retrieved on its own.
• Say who wrote it and when it was updated. A dated page with a named author beats an anonymous one.
• Two good pages a month beats twenty thin ones. Thin content does not get cited.

Directory pages are structured, independent of you, and heavily read by assistants. Every extra place that says the same thing about you makes the assistant more willing to name you.

Worth claiming, all free:

• Google Business Profile. Already covered, and still the important one.
• Bing Places. Feeds Microsoft Copilot answers, and takes about ten minutes.
• Apple Business Connect. Feeds Apple Maps, where a lot of iPhone users start.
• Your registration body listing. Gas Safe, NICEIC, NAPIT and the rest publish public records assistants treat as authoritative.
• Your local council or chamber of commerce listing, where one exists.
• One or two established UK business directories, rather than fifty low-quality ones.

Then make them identical. This is the boring part that quietly decides everything. Your business name, address and phone number should be word-for-word the same in every place. Not "Smith Electrical Ltd" in one and "Smith Electrical" in another. Not an old mobile on a listing you forgot about in 2019.

When the records disagree, an assistant has two versions of you and no way to tell which is right. Sometimes it picks the wrong one and gives a homeowner a dead number. Sometimes it decides the evidence is too messy and names someone else.

How to clean it up: search your business name and your old phone numbers, list every result, write down the exact wording you want, then fix each one. Redo the search once a year. If you have moved or changed number, do it this week.

Paid lead sites are a separate decision from AI visibility, and the honest comparison is here: the best lead generation websites for tradespeople.

None of this is a weekend project, and none of it needs to be. Here is a realistic order, assuming an hour or two a week.

Weeks	What you do	Time
1	Run the AI check. Record what ChatGPT, Google and Perplexity say about you and who they name instead.	1 hour
1 to 2	Complete your Google Business Profile. Categories, service area, every service with a price, description, 10 photos.	2 hours
2	Reply to every review you have ever had, oldest first. Name the job and the town in each reply.	1 hour
2 onwards	Ask every customer for a review on the day, with the direct link. Never stop doing this.	2 minutes a job
3 to 4	Rewrite your homepage and services pages using one fact per block. Add real prices and real town names.	3 hours
5	Claim Bing Places and Apple Business Connect. Fix any listing where your details disagree.	2 hours
6 to 10	Write one ranked list and one how-to guide for your trade and your area.	2 hours each
11	Add an FAQ page answering the ten questions you get asked most on the phone.	1 hour
12	Run the AI check again. Compare it against week 1.	1 hour

Reviews are the slow one and they are the one that matters most, which is why they start in week 2 and never stop. Everything else is finite work you do once and maintain.

Most traders who are invisible to AI search are not doing anything obviously wrong. They are doing these.

• Too few reviews, or a long gap. The most common weakness by a distance. Fifteen reviews, newest from eighteen months ago, reads as a business that might not be trading.
• A website that never names a place. If the word "Leeds" appears nowhere, you cannot be the answer to a question about Leeds.
• Prices hidden behind "call for a quote". Every price you publish is a fact an assistant can use. Ranges are fine. Silence is not.
• Details that disagree across listings. Three versions of your phone number is three chances to lose the call.
• Key information trapped in images. A price list saved as a JPEG, or a services list inside a PDF brochure, is unreadable as far as most assistants are concerned.
• Crawlers blocked. Rarely on purpose, usually by a plugin or a previous web designer. If OAI-SearchBot is blocked you are absent from ChatGPT search whatever else you do.
• Relying only on a paid lead site. A profile on someone else's directory builds their AI visibility, not yours.
• Chasing tricks instead of facts. There is no keyword to stuff and no schema that unlocks AI answers. Google says so plainly.
• Doing it once. Answers change as the sources change. This is a quarterly check, not a project you finish.

If you have twenty minutes, ask ChatGPT who the best tradesperson in your trade and your town is, and then ask it about your own business by name. Whatever comes back is your brief.

If you have an hour, complete your Google Business Profile properly and reply to every review you have.

If you want it checked for you, the free Tradehand AI report looks at your website and your Google Business Profile, scores how you show up in local search and whether an assistant can read your details, and names the traders currently ranking above you. It costs nothing and takes a couple of minutes.

And if the honest answer is that you will never remember to ask for the review at half past five, that is what the office team is for. It answers the calls you miss, chases the quote, asks for the review the day the job is done and chases the invoice until it is paid. It earns 5% of the invoices it collects and nothing else, so an office admin on £25,000 a year, paid whether or not the money lands, stops being the only way to get this done. Get your office set up.