For home and trade services
When a pipe bursts, people ask AI who to call. Do they get you?
Emergency trade work is the clearest case of AI answers deciding a sale. Someone with water spreading across a kitchen floor is not comparing five quotes — they are asking for a plumber and calling the first number they are given. If the assistant hands them a competitor two towns over, or hands them your old number, you never hear about the job at all.
What your customers are asking
Every scan runs a battery of local-intent prompts like these across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, then compares each answer against your real details.
- “Emergency plumber near me open now”
- “Who can fix a boiler in [town] this weekend?”
- “Best rated electrician in [area]”
- “Does [your business] cover [neighboring town]?”
What goes wrong for home and trade services
A wrong phone number is a job that never rings
Trades change numbers — a new mobile, a switch away from a landline, a number that came with the van. Old numbers persist in directories long after you stop using them, and assistants repeat what the directories say. This is the failure mode with no feedback loop whatsoever: the phone simply does not ring, and nothing tells you the reason.
Service area gets guessed at
Trade businesses are defined by how far they will travel, and that is exactly the detail assistants are worst at. An assistant that thinks you only cover the town you are registered in will not recommend you three towns over, even when you drive there daily. Verity shows what each assistant believes about your coverage so you can see where you are being written out.
The competitor set is the real story
For most trades, the useful question is not whether AI mentions you but who it mentions instead. Verity reports the competitors each assistant recommends in your place and how often — which tells you whether you are absent from the answer entirely or simply losing to a specific rival, two problems with very different fixes.
The detail that matters most here: how you are reachable
Restaurants lose customers to wrong hours; trades lose them to wrong contact details and misjudged service areas. Both are facts on your Google Business Profile, which is what Verity checks each assistant's claims against — so the report tells you not just that a number is wrong, but which assistant is giving it out and where it likely came from, so you can correct the source rather than guessing.
Questions from home and trade services
I am a sole trader with no shopfront. Does this apply?
Yes, provided you have a Google Business Profile — service-area businesses without a storefront can and should have one, and it is the reference Verity fact-checks against. Sole traders are often the most exposed here, because there is no office phone as a fallback when a wrong mobile number goes out.
Can Verity get an assistant to recommend me over a competitor?
No, and nothing honestly can — nobody edits a model's answers per business. What Verity does is show which competitors are being recommended instead of you and trace the likely sources behind those answers, so you can correct the listings and pages feeding them, then re-scan to see whether the answer moved.