Last Updated on September 3, 2026
Your business is described in about fifteen places. You have never seen them side by side. Almost none of them agree.
Not because you have been careless. Because that is what happens to information over ten years of trading.
Where you actually appear
Write the list out. Most owners are surprised by how long it is.
- Your own website
- Your Google Business Profile
- Companies House, if you are a limited company
- Facebook, and possibly Instagram
- Your trade body register: Gas Safe, NICEIC, FMB, GDC, whichever applies
- Directories you signed up to: Yell, Cylex, FreeIndex, Checkatrade, Thomson Local
- Directories that listed you without asking
- Your accountant’s client page
- An old profile from a business you traded as before
- A listing someone set up in 2017 that nobody has the login for
Why they drift apart
Nobody sits down and decides to publish three versions of their opening hours. It happens like this.
You changed your hours in winter and updated Google, because that is the one you look at. You never touched the website. You incorporated in 2019 and the registered name is slightly different from the name on the van. You moved premises and updated the important ones. A directory scraped your details in 2021 and has not looked since.
Every one of those decisions was reasonable on the day. The result is a business that says four different things about itself.
Why it matters more now than it did
A person reading your listing applies judgement. They see the hours are wrong, shrug, and ring you.
An AI assistant does not do that. Asked to recommend a plumber in Leeds, it reads every source it can find about every plumber in Leeds, and produces a name. When your sources contradict each other, one of two things happens. It describes you wrongly, or it names a business whose story is consistent instead.
You do not get told either has happened. The phone is just slightly quieter than it should be.
This is not theoretical
We checked 86 tradespeople recommended online across four UK cities against Companies House. Several directories are publishing company registration numbers that belong to dissolved companies, including one that ranks a firm as the best roofer in a major city while its published number points to a company in liquidation with a registered office two hundred miles away.
In a separate study of 28 businesses advertising tooth whitening, we found dental practices and beauty salons appearing in the same search results with nothing to distinguish them, because the practices were not publishing the one credential that would prove the difference.
Neither of those is a story about dishonest businesses. It is a story about information that nobody has checked in years.
How to check yourself, free, in about twenty minutes
- Search your own business name. Not your website, your name. Write down every result on the first two pages that describes you.
- Open them side by side. Compare trading name, address, phone number, opening hours, and the services you list.
- Check Companies House if you are a limited company. Confirm the number is yours and the status is Active. It is free at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk.
- Check your trade body register. Confirm your registration is current and the name matches.
- Write down every contradiction. Most businesses find between four and ten.
Then fix the cheap ones. Opening hours and phone numbers take minutes. The 2017 listing with no login usually needs a claim process, which is tedious but free.
What good looks like
One name. One address. One set of hours. The same services described the same way. Your registration numbers published where a machine can read them, not just where a human can.
None of that is marketing. It is housekeeping. But it is the housekeeping that decides whether the marketing you pay for lands on a business that machines can describe accurately.
Structure before scale. This is the structure.
The free Whito Visibility Check tests whether AI recommends your business, tells you how you compare to your trade, and gives you things to fix. Take the free Visibility Check, or claim a free verified listing.
