How AI Search Is Changing the Way Customers Find You: There’s a quiet shift happening at the top of Google, and most local service businesses haven’t clocked it yet.
Not long ago, finding a plumber, a dentist or a roofer meant typing something into Google, scrolling past a few ads, and picking from the map pack or the blue links underneath. That’s how it worked for the better part of twenty years. Customers searched, you ranked, the phone rang.
That’s not quite how it works any more. Search a question like “how much does a new boiler cost” or “what should I look for when hiring an electrician” today, and Google increasingly answers you itself, in plain English, right at the top of the page. No scrolling required. And a growing slice of people aren’t even starting on Google, they’re asking ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity instead, and getting back one or two recommendations rather than a list of ten.
If you run a service business, this matters a great deal. The way customers discover you is being rewritten, and the businesses that adjust early are going to be very hard to catch.
What’s actually changed
A few things have happened more or less at once, and together they add up to a proper structural shift rather than a passing fad.
The first is AI Overviews, those AI-written summary boxes that now sit above the normal search results. By the middle of 2026, roughly one in three Google searches in the UK triggers one, up from about one in five at the start of 2025. For question-style and research-led searches, that figure is higher still. Google is steadily turning itself from a search engine into an answer engine, and it has every commercial reason to keep going.
The second is the rise of standalone AI assistants as a starting point. Around 47% of UK adults have now used an AI search tool of some kind, and among under-45s a meaningful chunk begin their research inside ChatGPT or Perplexity before they ever touch a traditional search bar. BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey put the share of people who’ve used AI to find a local business recommendation at 45%, a number that sat at around 6% just twelve months earlier. That isn’t growth. That’s a behaviour going mainstream in barely a year.
The third, and this is the one that should really get the attention of anyone in the trades, is that the platforms are starting to handle the booking too. Checkatrade has launched an app inside ChatGPT. A homeowner can describe the job, answer a couple of qualifying questions, and for straightforward work get a fixed price and a vetted local tradesperson they can book then and there, without ever leaving the chat. For bigger jobs it hands back a shortlist of suitable trades to contact. The whole journey, from “I need this sorted” to “they’re booked in”, now happens inside an AI assistant.
Put those three together and the picture is clear enough. Your future customer is increasingly being handed an answer, sometimes a single name, before they reach the page where your hard-won SEO does its work.
Why this is a problem (and an opportunity) at the same time
Here’s the uncomfortable bit. When the AI answers the question directly, far fewer people click through to a website. Studies through early 2026 suggest AI Overviews can cut clicks on the searches where they appear by around half. If your strategy has been “rank on page one and wait for the traffic”, that traffic is quietly leaking away even while your rankings hold perfectly steady.
But, and this is the part worth sitting with, the businesses that get named inside those AI answers see the opposite effect. Being cited by the AI is the new version of ranking number one. It comes with a kind of built-in endorsement: people tend to trust a recommendation that the assistant has handed them more than a link they’ve found themselves. Get mentioned, and you’re not just visible, you’re vouched for.
So the question stops being “where do I rank?” and becomes “when someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI for the best [your service] in [your town], does my business come up, and if not, who does?”
Most owners have never actually checked. That’s the opportunity. Across the UK, fewer than one in ten service firms have any deliberate strategy for showing up in AI search, while well over half of their potential customers are already using it. That gap won’t stay open forever. The businesses that move while it’s still wide are the ones that’ll be sitting in the recommended spot when everyone else catches on, and once an AI has settled on who it trusts in your area, it gets harder to shift.
So how do you actually get found?
The good news is that none of this requires you to learn to code or chase some secret algorithm trick. The AI is trying to do one fairly sensible thing: recommend businesses it can clearly understand, verify and trust. Make yourself easy to understand, verify and trust, and you tend to get picked. Here’s where the effort actually pays off.
Get your Google Business Profile properly sorted
This is still the single most important asset you’ve got, and the AI leans on it heavily. Fill in everything, categories, every service with its own description, service areas, opening hours including bank holidays, contact details, photos. Half-finished profiles leave gaps, and AI has a nasty habit of filling gaps with guesses that aren’t always right. Treat your profile as a structured fact sheet about your business, because that’s exactly how the machines are reading it.
Answer the questions your customers actually ask
The content that gets pulled into AI answers isn’t the “we’re a family-run firm established in 1998” stuff. It’s the content that directly answers a real question. “How much does a bathroom refit cost in Leeds?” “How long does a boiler service take?” “Do I need planning permission for a loft conversion?”
Write proper, honest answers to those questions, with real numbers where you can give them. Local, specific pricing beats vague national averages every time, when the AI needs a figure, it reaches for the page that actually gives one. A clear cost guide for your area will earn you citations that a generic services page never will.
Keep your details identical everywhere
AI systems cross-check your business across the web before they’ll confidently recommend it. Your name, address and phone number need to match exactly on your website, your Google profile, Checkatrade, Yell, Facebook and any trade directories you’re listed on. Even small inconsistencies chip away at how trustworthy you look. It’s tedious, unglamorous work, but it’s foundational.
Take reviews seriously, and keep them fresh
AI answers routinely lean on reviews to summarise whether a business is any good. What matters isn’t just a big total, it’s recent reviews and the fact that you reply to them. Set up a simple system to ask every customer for a review within a day of finishing the job, and reply to the ones you get, the lukewarm ones included. An active, well-tended review profile reads as a real, engaged business to both people and machines.
Get mentioned by other people
AI weights independent, third-party coverage heavily, more than anything you say about yourself. A mention in the local paper, the regional business pages or the trade press carries real credibility into AI answers. Local PR has quietly gone from “nice to have” to something genuinely worth a bit of budget.
Add a little structure to your website
This is the one slightly technical piece, and it’s worth getting your web person to handle it. Schema markup, particularly LocalBusiness and FAQ schema, is basically a way of labelling your information so AI can read it cleanly without having to guess. Pages with FAQ schema are noticeably more likely to get used as a source, because you’re handing the AI a ready-made answer it can lift straight out.
A quick reality check you can do right now
Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Ask each one to recommend a business in your category in your town, “best [your trade] in [your town]”, that sort of thing. See whether you come up. See who does.
Whoever the AI names is your real competition in 2026, and that list often looks nothing like your Google rankings. It’s a slightly sobering five minutes, but it tells you exactly where you stand and what you’re up against.