Last Updated on July 29, 2026
The question this answers: can you trust Google’s AI to recommend a tradesperson? Whito asked Google AI Mode for an electrician, a plumber and a roofer in 20 UK towns on 29 July 2026, then checked every business it named against the Companies House register. Original UK research, 2026 data.
Last updated 29 July 2026.
Ask Google for a trustworthy roofer in Coventry and it does not hand you ten blue links any more. It gives you an answer. One firm, named, with an address and a phone number, described as one of “the most highly recommended, fully vetted local choices”.
On 29 July 2026 that firm’s only company registration had been dissolved for eight years.
Not struck off last month. Dissolved on 3 October 2017.
The mistake most people are making
Everyone in marketing is arguing about whether AI search will send you traffic. That is the wrong argument. The interesting question is not how much traffic the answer sends. It is whether the answer is true.
A link is a suggestion. An answer is a recommendation. When ten blue links pointed at an out of date directory page, the reader did the filtering. When one AI answer names one business and tells you it has been vetted, the filtering has supposedly already happened. It has not.
What we did
One prompt shape, used identically everywhere. Recommend a trustworthy [trade] in [town].
Three trades: electrician, plumber, roofer. Twenty towns: Reading, Sunderland, Swansea, Leeds, Nottingham, Coventry, Luton, Bristol, Doncaster, Ipswich, Preston, Stoke-on-Trent, Milton Keynes, Norwich, Plymouth, Glasgow, Belfast, Mansfield, Blackpool and Wolverhampton.
That is 60 answers, collected from Google AI Mode in one day. Every business named in those answers was then searched on the Companies House public register.
We tried to run the same panel through ChatGPT and Gemini. Neither could be collected cleanly in the time available, so this is a single engine study and we are saying so up front rather than quietly implying more.
What came back
Sixty answers named 220 businesses. Not one business appeared in more than one answer, which tells you something on its own about how local these results are.
Of those 220, 144 could be matched to a company on the register. The other 76 could not, and that is not a criticism of them. Sole traders do not appear on Companies House at all, and plenty of good firms trade under a name that is not their registered one. It is a limit of the check, not a verdict on the business.
Of the 144 that could be matched:
- 128 were active
- 15 were dissolved
- 1 was in liquidation
Sixteen looked wrong. Then we did the work that separates a headline from a fact.
Why sixteen became five
A name match proves nothing on its own. A name like “[town] Plumbing Services” is the kind several companies have held over twenty years. If you publish sixteen, you are publishing coincidences.
So we applied two tests.
Is there also a live company with that name? Two names had both a dissolved company and an active one. Those come out.
Is the dissolved company anywhere near the town? Six names matched a dissolved company registered in a completely different part of the country. A Belfast recommendation matching a dissolved company in Bath is a coincidence, not a finding. Those come out too.
That leaves five.
| Town | Trade | Status of the only matching company |
|---|---|---|
| Coventry | Roofer | Dissolved 3 October 2017 |
| Sunderland | Electrician | Dissolved 31 December 2019 |
| Sunderland | Roofer | Dissolved 17 October 2023 |
| Bristol | Plumber | Dissolved 9 February 2010 |
| Plymouth | Plumber | Dissolved 23 August 2022 |
Five answers out of sixty. Four towns out of twenty. Around one in twenty nine of the businesses we could actually verify.
Two more cases sit in a grey area and we are not counting them: a Blackpool electrician whose matching company is in liquidation, and a Plymouth plumber whose nearest matching dissolved company is 45 miles away.
The Coventry case is the one that matters
For most of these you could argue about name matching until the argument gets boring. Coventry closes the argument.
The AI answer did not only name the firm. It gave the address, down to the house number. That address is the registered office of a company of exactly that name, dissolved in 2017.
Same name. Same street. Same number. A company dissolved in 2017, presented in July 2026 as a fully vetted local choice.
What this does not mean
We are not saying these businesses have vanished. A dissolved limited company is a fact about a company, not about a person. Some of these people will still be working, legally, as sole traders. We have deliberately not named the firms, because the failure here belongs to the engine, not to them.
We are also not claiming this happens on every search or in every engine. One run per question, one engine, one day. Ask again next week and the names may move. That is not a caveat we are hiding behind, it is the next study.
Why a small business owner should care
Two reasons, and both are about money.
The sources feeding these answers are not neutral. Look at what the engine leaned on across the 60 answers and the same names keep coming back: Checkatrade, TrustATrader, ThreeBestRated, Facebook groups, Reddit threads. Your presence on those platforms, and how current it is, now feeds a machine that names one firm and stops. Not being on them is not a stylistic choice any more.
A stale record can outlive the business it describes by nine years. If old listings for a firm that closed in 2017 are still strong enough to be named today, your own outdated entries are working just as hard, and possibly against you. An old address, a dead phone number, a company name you stopped using: those are not tidy up jobs, they are the raw material the answer is built from.
The 20 minute version of this, for your own business
- Search your business name on Companies House. Check the status says Active and the address is current.
- Ask Google AI Mode for a trustworthy [your trade] in [your town]. See whether you appear, and who does.
- Open every directory listing you have. Fix the address, the phone number and the trading name so they match everywhere.
- Close or correct any listing for a company you no longer run.
- Check your Google Business Profile hours and category. That is the record the answer leans on hardest.
This is Build stage work. Not clever, not new, not a growth tactic. Get the record straight everywhere it exists, then worry about being recommended.
The sharp takeaway
The engines have stopped giving you a list and started giving you an answer. An answer carries authority that a list never did, and nothing has been added to earn it.
Check what the internet still says about your business. Then check what it says about the company you closed.
Method
Collected 29 July 2026. Google AI Mode, queried in the UK while logged in. One prompt shape, one run per prompt, 60 answers, 20 towns, 3 trades. Business names taken from the local business cards inside each answer. Every unique name searched on the Companies House public register, counted as a match only where the recommended name and the registered name were identical after normalising case, punctuation and company suffixes. Three answers returned no business card and are recorded as zero mention answers. Individual firms are not named.
Figures that are safe to quote from this study: 4 of 20 towns, 5 of 60 answers, 5 of 144 verifiable businesses (3.5%). The unfiltered figure of 16 does not survive the locality test and should not be used.
Is your own record straight?
The free Whito Scorecard checks the basics this study is really about: whether your details are consistent, current and findable. It takes a few minutes and costs nothing.
Common questions
Can you trust Google’s AI to recommend a tradesperson?
Not without checking. In this study of 60 answers across 20 UK towns, five recommendations named a business whose only company registration on Companies House is dissolved, one of them dissolved since 2017. The engine gave no indication that anything was wrong.
Does AI recommend businesses that no longer exist?
It can. Four of the 20 towns tested returned at least one recommendation matching a dissolved company at a local address. The answer presented those businesses as vetted and highly rated.
How do I check a tradesperson is a real company?
Search the name on the Companies House register at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk. Check the status says Active and the registered address is somewhere plausible. If nothing comes up the person may be a sole trader, which is perfectly legal, so ask for the trading name and check the relevant trade register instead.
Will AI recommend my business?
Only if the sources it reads are current. Across these 60 answers the engine leaned repeatedly on Checkatrade, TrustATrader, ThreeBestRated, Facebook and Reddit. Old and inconsistent records on those platforms are what the answer is built from.
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