Your Next Customer Won't Google You. They'll Ask AI.

Picture a scene that's starting to play out across the country. A plumber wins a boiler job, and out of habit asks the customer how she found him. She doesn't say Google. She doesn't say Checkatrade. She says: “I asked ChatGPT for a good boiler engineer near me, and your name came up.”

It sounds like a one-off. The data says it isn't — and the more tradespeople I talk to, the more I hear versions of it. So I want to lay out what's actually happening, as plainly and honestly as I can, without selling you anything. The way people find a tradesperson is changing faster than almost anyone in the trade has noticed. Not in five years. Now.

UK customers have quietly switched to AI

In 2025, AI search stopped being a novelty and became a habit. Ofcom — the UK regulator, about as neutral a source as you'll find — reported that 54% of UK adults now use AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini. A year earlier it was 31%; the year before that, 23%. That's usage more than doubling in two years.

Among under-35s it's already the default: 79% of 16–24s and 74% of 25–34s use these tools — prime homeowner and landlord age. ChatGPT alone drew 1.8 billion UK web visits in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million in the same stretch of 2024.

I don't quote those numbers to impress you. I quote them because every one of those people is someone who used to open Google — and a good chunk of them are your customers.

The page of ten just became a shortlist of three

Old search gave you ten links and made you do the work. AI does the work and gives you a few names. Google “emergency electrician Leeds” and you'd get ten blue links, a map and some ads, then ring around. Ask ChatGPT or Google's AI the same thing and you get a tidy answer: two or three names, a line on each, done.

Around 30% of UK Google searches now trigger an AI summary at the very top of the page (Ofcom), and 53% of adults say they see these often. That changes everything. On the old page of ten, being result #7 still got you seen. On the AI Shortlist there is no #7. You're one of the three names, or you may as well not exist.

And the clicks are following the answers. Ofcom found Google search clicks fell by about 26% in the six months after someone's first ChatGPT visit (measured on US proxy data, so treat it as directional), and Semrush pegs a ~40% drop in click-through when an AI Overview sits on top. The traffic isn't vanishing — it's being answered before anyone scrolls.

Do people really use AI to choose a tradesperson?

Increasingly, yes — to build the shortlist. They still check reviews before they call. I'll be straight with you here, because I've watched too many people in this space wave around scary stats they can't back up. Using AI to pick a local business is newer and messier than the headline adoption figures. But the direction is unmistakable.

In BrightLocal's 2026 research — a survey of around 1,000 US consumers — 45% said they'd used an AI tool like ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity to find a local business in the past year, rising to 64% among 30–44-year-olds. Around 63% of active AI users said they trust its recommendations for local businesses. I flag that it's US data deliberately: the UK usually trails American consumer habits by a year or two, which makes it less a foreign curiosity and more a preview of where we're heading — sitting right on top of the UK adoption Ofcom is already measuring.

Here's the nuance that actually matters, though: 97% still double-check against real reviews before they act. So AI isn't replacing human judgement — it's building the shortlist that judgement gets applied to. You don't win the job inside the AI answer. You get into the room where the job is won. Which is exactly why being on that list is everything.

The uncomfortable bit: most trades are invisible to AI

Being findable on Google does not mean you're findable by AI. They're different systems, with different memories, updated in different ways. When LocalFalcon ran nearly 190,000 AI searches against 16 million Google results, 83% of businesses that showed up fine on Google were missing from ChatGPT's answers. (That study was US restaurants, so take the exact number as illustrative — but the pattern holds everywhere I've looked; one UK agency that checked 100 local firms in ChatGPT found just three clearly visible.)

I call this the invisible middle: thousands of genuinely good trades who are doing fine on Google, have no idea there's now a second front page, and are quietly absent from it. The frustrating part is that it's usually not a quality problem. It's a legibility problem — and that one you can fix.

So how does AI actually decide who to name?

An AI recommends the business it's most confident actually exists, does the job, and can be trusted. No one publishes the exact recipe — OpenAI openly says ChatGPT can pull from third-party search and doesn't reveal a fixed local-business order. A whole young discipline has sprung up around this, usually called GEO or answer-engine optimisation; I'm not claiming to have invented it. What we've done is boil it down to the five signals that actually move the needle for a trade business — the things that make an AI confident enough to say your name. We call it Entity Confidence:

1. Clarity. The machine can plainly tell who you are, what you do and where. Consistent name, number and services everywhere; structured data (JSON-LD — the code that spells your facts out for machines).
2. Consensus. More than one independent source agrees you exist and you're good — reviews, directories and mentions that line up. (Yext found 86% of AI citations trace back to sources a business can actually influence. This is not out of your hands.)
3. Answer-readiness. Somewhere online, in plain words, you actually answer the questions customers ask: what you do, your area, your hours, rough prices.
4. Trust. Real reviews, accurate details, a real named human behind the business. AI is trained to be cautious about who it vouches for.
5. Context. You're clearly tied to a place, and your information is current — not three years stale.

That's it. It isn't magic, and it isn't gameable trickery. It's being unmistakably legible to a machine that's trying very hard not to be wrong.

What I'd do about it this month (even if you never touch Whoza)

Make yourself easy for a cautious robot to recommend. In rough order of payoff:

• Claim and clean up your Google Business Profile — hours, services, area, all correct and matching your website.
• Make your name, number and trade identical everywhere they appear. Mismatches make AI hesitate.
• Put plain answers on your own site — the jobs you do, the areas you cover, whether you do out-of-hours call-outs, rough pricing. A lot of AI citations come straight from a business's own pages.
• Keep reviews coming, and reply to them. Consensus and freshness in one move.
• Ask the AIs about yourself. Type “best [your trade] in [your town]” into ChatGPT and Google's AI. If you're not there, now you know. It's free, and it's the wake-up call for most people. Do it today.

Where Whoza fits (the honest bit)

Full disclosure, since you've read this far: this is part of the problem we built Whoza to solve. Our agent Rex checks where you show up across AI answers, watches what your local competitors are doing, and tells you the specific moves to make. I'm not going to pretend it's the only way — everything in the list above you can do yourself. But someone has to keep watching it, because the AIs change their answers constantly, and that's the bit a busy tradesperson never has time for.

Where this goes next

A prediction, then I'll let you get back to work. Within a couple of years, “I found them on Google” will sound the way “I found them in the Yellow Pages” sounds now — not wrong, just clearly a certain age. The trades who win the next decade won't necessarily be the best marketers. They'll be the ones a machine can confidently vouch for at the exact moment a customer asks. The bar isn't being loud. It's being legible. That's a very winnable game — but only if you know it's being played.

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