Get found where your customers are searching in the AI era.

What is AI Search?

AI search refers to the use of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity to answer user queries directly — often without the user clicking through to a website. For trades businesses, this means your potential customers may be asking “who is the best roofer in Leeds?” and getting a direct AI-generated answer. If you’re not optimised for AI search, you’re invisible to this growing audience.

What makes AI search particularly significant for trades businesses is the way these systems source their recommendations. AI models don’t rank websites in the traditional sense — they build recommendations based on the information they have learned about businesses, their reputation, their reviews, their mentions across the web, and the structured data that signals authority and trustworthiness. This means that the businesses most likely to appear in AI-generated answers are those with strong local SEO foundations, abundant positive reviews, consistent citations across reputable directories, and clear, authoritative content about their services and areas.

For Yorkshire trades businesses, this represents both a threat and an opportunity. The threat is clear: if AI tools don’t know about you, or know very little about you compared to your competitors, they will recommend someone else. The opportunity is equally clear: by building the right foundations now, while AI search is still evolving, trades businesses can position themselves to be the AI-recommended option for their trade and area before their competitors understand what is happening.

Grwthhub helps Yorkshire trades businesses optimise for AI search as part of a comprehensive digital marketing approach. This includes structured data markup that helps AI systems understand your business, review and reputation management to build the trust signals AI tools rely on, content strategy that positions you as an authoritative local expert, and consistent NAP (name, address, phone) citations that reinforce your local presence across the web. We monitor how AI tools are representing local trades businesses and continuously adapt our approach as this landscape evolves.