I Asked ChatGPT for the Best plumberHVAC engineerelectricianrooferjoinerlocksmithlandscapertilerplasterermechanicglaziercleanerplumber in Town. You Weren't in the Answer.

Last year, 6 people in 100 asked an AI to find them a local business. This year it's 45. And an AI doesn't hand back ten blue links — it hands back two or three names. If yours isn't one of them, you never even got the chance to be compared.

Do it now. It takes sixty seconds.

Open ChatGPT. Or Gemini, or whatever's on your phone. Type the thing a customer would type: "best plumber in [your town]". Swap in your trade and your town.

Read what comes back. There are only three ways this goes.

One: it names you. Good — skip to the last section and make sure you stay there. Two: it names your competitor. Three: it names nobody local at all, just Checkatrade and a council page, which means the AI couldn't confirm a single real business in your town well enough to say the name out loud.

Screenshot whatever you get. That's your baseline, and in about ten weeks it should look different.

Notice what isn't there. No list of ten. No "showing results 1–10 of 4,300." No little map you can scroll. Three names and a favourite.

The numbers moved fast, and nobody sent you a letter

This didn't creep up over a decade. It happened in about eighteen months, while you were on the tools.

Here's what the search page itself looks like now, before anyone even opens a chat app:

Read the last bar again. Six per cent to forty-five per cent in a year. Nothing in local search has moved that fast since phones got maps.

And read the second one. Most people getting an AI answer never chose to use an AI. They typed into Google like they always have, and Google put the answer above the map box before they got a chance to scroll.

Now the part nobody tells you: the phone is ringing more, not less

Every article about this ends with "the sky is falling, traffic is dead." That's a website owner's problem, and you are not a website owner. You're a business with a phone.

So here is the number that actually matters to you. Actions taken straight off Google Business Profiles — calls, directions, bookings — grew by this much last year, according to Google's own data:

Year on year — calls, directions and bookings, direct from Google profiles

Both things are true at once. Websites got fewer visitors. Businesses got more calls.

The customer didn't disappear. He stopped doing the middle bit — the browsing, the comparing, the opening of four tabs — and went straight from question to phone call. Whoever the answer named got the call. Everyone else got nothing, including the ones ranked #4 through #40.

Where an AI actually gets its answer from

This is the bit people imagine is mysterious. It isn't. The model is not clever about your town — it's cautious.

It will not put a name in front of a customer unless several independent sources agree that name is real, is in that town, does that work, and doesn't upset people. It is a machine that hates being wrong in public. Everything below follows from that one fact.

If that bottom bar surprises you, it shouldn't. Your website is the only source on the list where you wrote every word. The model knows that. It weighs your own marketing roughly the way you'd weigh a bloke telling you he's the best in town.

The five things that decide whether you get named

You don't need all five to start showing up. You need them in this order, because each one makes the next one count for more.

1. A claimed, complete, active Google Business Profile. It's the most structured record of your business anywhere on the internet — verified category, service area, hours, phone, photos, reviews, all in one place. It's the first thing a model can confirm and the last thing it doubts. If you've never claimed yours, nothing else on this list will save you. We walked through claiming it here.
2. Reviews that say what the job was. Stars are a number. Words are evidence. "Came out at 11pm for a burst pipe in Grappenhall, sorted in an hour" tells a model your trade, your hours, your patch and your reliability in one sentence. "5 stars, great service" tells it nothing it can repeat.
3. The same name, address and phone number everywhere. If one directory has your old mobile and another has "Ltd" on the end, the model can't be sure the two are the same firm — so it quietly drops both and names someone it's certain about. Boring admin. Enormous consequences.
4. Mentions on sites that aren't yours. One website saying you're excellent is marketing. Four unrelated sources mentioning you is a fact. Suppliers, local news, trade bodies, a sponsored under-11s kit, a supplier's "approved installer" page — all of it counts as somebody else confirming you exist.
5. Pages that answer real questions in plain words. The last 10%, and the only bit that's actually writing. Cover it and you become quotable rather than merely real.

Why "just write more blog posts" doesn't work here

Every agency in the country is currently selling "AI optimisation," and most of it is the same advice they sold in 2019 with a new label on the tin. Publishing forty articles about boilers will not get you named.

The model isn't reading your site the way a customer does. It's cross-checking. It wants the same fact from more than one place before it repeats it.

The left column is what most trade websites are made of. The right column is what gets your name said out loud to somebody with a leak.

Say it the way a customer says it

Here's the cheapest fix on this whole page, and it costs you an afternoon.

Nobody types "emergency plumbing solutions provider." They ask a question, in their own words, the way they'd ask a mate. Your pages should contain that question — and then answer it in the next sentence.

Every line on the right is a question a model is being asked today. If your page contains the question and a straight answer underneath it, you're a candidate to be quoted. If your page contains the left column, you're wallpaper.

The same trick works on your Google profile. Put the question in the description. Put the towns in the service areas. Say "Sunday call-outs" if you do them, in those words.

What ninety days of this actually looks like

Nobody gets named tomorrow. Models refresh what they know on their own schedule, and the businesses being recommended today became confirmable months ago. Here's the realistic shape of it.

One warning on the last row. Google now measures whether a profile is alive — go 30 days without a photo, a post or an update and visibility slides. This isn't a job you finish. It's a job you keep ticking over, about fifteen minutes a week.

Three things that haven't changed at all

It's easy to read all this and conclude everything you knew is obsolete. It isn't. The plumbing underneath is identical — the tap on top just changed shape.

• The map box still pays the bills. It's what the AI reads, and it's still where the call button lives. The free listing still beats the £2,000 website — by more now than it did last year.
• Reviews are still the fuel. They were the ranking signal. Now they're also the raw material an AI quotes from. Same habit, two payoffs. Here's the review playbook.
• None of it pays until someone picks up. Being named by an AI produces exactly one thing: a ringing phone. And you're currently answering 8 out of 20.

That last one is worth sitting with. Getting named is the hard, slow, expensive part. Answering the phone is free. Doing the first without the second is the most expensive mistake in this entire trade.

What to do this week

1. Run the test and screenshot it. Ask an AI for the best in your trade in your town. Save the answer. That's your before picture, and it takes a minute.
2. Google your own business name. Look for wrong phone numbers, old addresses, dead listings, a second profile you forgot you made. Every contradiction is a reason for a model to skip you.
3. Claim and finish the profile. Right category, every field, real photos, the towns you genuinely cover. Ten minutes of admin that outranks a year of website tinkering.
4. Ask for reviews with a sentence in them. Instead of "leave us a review," try "if you've got twenty seconds, could you mention what the job was?" You'll get words instead of just stars.
5. Write six questions and answer them. The exact ones from the table above, in your own words, on your own site. One afternoon.
6. Put fifteen minutes a week in the diary. A photo, a post, a reply to a review. That's what keeps a profile alive after the 30-day mark.
7. Re-run the test in ten weeks. Compare it to the screenshot. That's the only scoreboard that matters now.

Questions we get asked every week