Finding
Of the 79 roofers Google AI Mode recommended across 20 UK towns in August 2026, 36 could not be matched to any Companies House company on a one-pass September check, and in three towns the only local name match was dissolved or in liquidation.
Source: Whito, whito.co.uk/research/ai-recommended-roofers-companies-house-check. Free to quote with a link to this page.
Last Updated on September 11, 2026
Ask Google AI Mode for a trustworthy roofer and it gives you an answer, not a list. One run of the same question in 20 UK towns produced 79 named roofing businesses. Whito has now taken every one of those names to Companies House. 36 of them could not be matched to any registered company. In three towns, the only name match at a local address was a company that is dissolved or in liquidation.
None of that means those firms are not real. It means the answer engine is not checking, and neither is anyone else in the chain. This page is the free finding. The full working, one row per business, is sold as a dated file so anyone can check ours.
What we collected, and when
On 22 August 2026 Whito put one fixed prompt, “Recommend a trustworthy roofer in [town]”, to Google AI Mode for 20 UK towns, one run each, no retries, signed in, UK. The towns are the same Ghost Trader panel used across the Whito AI Visibility Index: Reading, Sunderland, Swansea, Leeds, Nottingham, Coventry, Luton, Bristol, Doncaster, Ipswich, Preston, Stoke-on-Trent, Milton Keynes, Norwich, Plymouth, Glasgow, Belfast, Mansfield, Blackpool and Wolverhampton.
The 20 answers named 79 roofing businesses: 71 with a Google rating card, 8 in prose only. Leeds was the only town where every recommendation arrived as prose with no rating card at all.
On 11 September 2026 we checked all 79 names against the Companies House public register, one search pass per name, reading the top results for the name and the town. That pass depth matters, and the limits section below says exactly what it can and cannot claim.
This is Whito’s second roofer collection, not a rerun. In July 2026 Whito asked three engines the same kind of question across 15 towns: that study is here. This one is a different reading: one engine, 20 towns, one run, and, for the first time in this sector, every name taken to the register.
The register check: what 79 names produced
| Outcome on Companies House, 11 September 2026 | Businesses | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Matched to an active company, name and locality consistent | 33 | 42% |
| Matched to an active company, close call (name variant or distant registered office, flagged) | 7 | 9% |
| Only local name match is dissolved or in liquidation | 3 | 4% |
| Could not be matched to any registered company on one pass | 36 | 46% |
The three dissolved or in-liquidation matches deserve their own sentences, because a recommendation carried each of them as trustworthy on the day.
In Sunderland, the answer recommended David Graham Roofing with a 5.0 rating. The only company of that name on the register, at a Sunderland address, dissolved on 17 October 2023.
In Coventry, the answer recommended Sky Blue Roofing with a 4.8 rating from 50 reviews. The only company of that name, at a Coventry address, dissolved on 3 October 2017, almost nine years before the recommendation.
In Blackpool, the answer recommended Wyles Roofing with a 4.8 rating from 114 reviews. Wyles Roofing Limited, registered on Amy Johnson Way, Blackpool, is in liquidation. A similarly named company, Wyles Roofing North West Ltd, incorporated in December 2022, is active at another Blackpool address. We state the records as found and make no claim about the relationship between the two.
A dissolved company is not proof the business has gone. Roofers are often sole traders, and a sole trader is not on Companies House at all. What these three rows show is narrower and still worth knowing: the engine presents a name as trustworthy without looking at the one free register that would have raised a flag.
Who the engine actually leaned on
Every one of the 20 answers cited at least one trade platform among its sources. This is the highest platform dependence of any sector Whito has measured, and it is worth seeing by name.
| Source type in the answer’s citations | Towns (of 20) |
|---|---|
| Checkatrade | 17 |
| TrustATrader | 10 |
| Which? Trusted Traders | 7 |
| ThreeBestRated | 7 |
| Reddit or local Facebook groups | 7 |
| SEO ranking sites (topratedroofers.co.uk, top5trades.co.uk, ukroofingdirectory.co.uk and similar) | 5 |
| The recommended firm’s own website or profile | 15 |
For a roofing firm the practical reading is blunt. Your Checkatrade page, your TrustATrader page and a handful of anonymous ranking sites are feeding the machine that names one firm and stops. Your own website appears too, but mostly as supporting evidence for a name the platforms surfaced first.
The ratings the engine trusts
Of the 71 rated recommendations, 28 carried a perfect 5.0. The engine also recommended a roofer on a 5.0 rating built from a single review (JSR Roofing, Blackpool), two firms on two reviews each, and, at the other end, Rees Brothers (Swansea) Limited, whose own Google card in the same answer showed 2.0 stars from 4 reviews. Rees Brothers has been on the register since 1984; the answer leaned on its Federation of Master Builders membership rather than its rating. Trust signals are being read selectively, and review count is barely being read at all.
Company age is not being read either. Fix4u Roofing and Building in Wolverhampton was recommended with a 329-review rating; the matching company registration was 47 days old on the day of the answer. Ashley Purdy Roofing in Plymouth was recommended with 125 reviews against a company incorporated in February 2026. Long trading histories and young companies co-exist for good reasons, and re-registration is common in the trades. The point is that the engine cannot tell the difference, because it is not looking.
What money cannot buy
Nobody can pay to appear in this study, to improve a result, or to be removed from it. Whito sells the dataset behind it; the findings on this page stay free. A roofing business that wants to act on this can list itself free in the Whito directory, where every listing is checked against the public record, and run the free Visibility Check on its own site. Seventeen checks, about twenty seconds, no email, no sales call. Neither affects how a business appears in our research.
The dataset behind this study
Everything above is computed from a 79-row working file: town, business as named, rating and review count as shown, every source the answer cited, and the full Companies House result for each name with company number, status and the note behind every close call. It is sold as a dated edition, PDF plus CSV, for organisations that need to check the working or run the same pass on their own patch: AI Roofer Recommendations: UK, September 2026 edition, on the Whito Intelligence shelf. Buying it changes nothing on this page and nothing in the directory.
Method
Collection: one prompt, “Recommend a trustworthy roofer in [town]”, Google AI Mode (udm=50), signed in, UK, one run per town, no retries, 22 August 2026, 20 towns. Every named business, rating, review count and cited source was logged at collection. The raw log is preserved unedited and ships with the file.
Register check: 11 September 2026, Companies House public search, one pass per name. A match required the normalised company name to agree with the recommended trading name, read against the town. Name variants and distant registered offices were resolved by hand and flagged as close calls in the file, never silently. Where several namesakes existed and none belonged to the town, the row is recorded as could not be matched, with the nearest namesake noted.
Limits
One engine, one run, one day. Ask again next week and names will move. This is a reading, not a ranking, and it says nothing about any individual firm’s quality.
The register check is a one-pass name check, and pass depth changes the number. On a different Whito panel of 728 businesses, a single name-match pass failed 58% of the time while four passes of verification failed 5.2%. Our 46% could-not-match figure for roofers is a one-pass reading and should be quoted with that label. It is a measure of how hard these businesses are to verify, not a count of fake firms.
A sole trader is not on Companies House. Roofing has a high share of sole traders, which is legal and normal, and every one of them fails a company-register check by construction. That is why Whito says could not be matched, never does not exist. There is also no single mandatory roofing register: NFRC, CORC, TrustMark and competent person schemes are voluntary, which is exactly why the company register is the one uniform check available.
Free to quote with a link to this page.
Common questions
Can you trust Google’s AI to recommend a roofer?
Not without checking. In this study, 36 of 79 recommended roofers could not be matched to any registered company on a one-pass Companies House check, and in three towns the only local name match was dissolved or in liquidation. The engine presented every one as trustworthy. Search the name at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk before you pay a deposit, and if nothing comes up, ask the trader for their trading name or company number.
What decides which roofers AI recommends?
In this collection, platforms decided. All 20 answers cited at least one trade platform, Checkatrade appeared in 17 of 20, and anonymous SEO ranking sites fed 5 of 20. Review ratings were quoted but barely filtered: the same collection recommended a roofer with one review and a firm whose card showed 2.0 stars.
Does a dissolved company mean the roofer is not real?
No. It can mean the trader now works as a sole trader, restructured, or re-registered under another name, all legal. What it does mean is that the recommendation was not checked against the register, because a dissolved-company flag is free to find and none of the answers surfaced one.
The structural checks behind this research run on any website in about twenty seconds. Enter yours and read the full result on the page. Free, and we do not ask for your email.
Run the free Visibility CheckIf your business is named here and you think we have a fact wrong, email hello@whito.co.uk and we will check it and correct it. If you want to respond, send us a statement and we will publish it alongside. Full detail: Corrections, right of reply and removals.
