AI search for tradies: how Australian trades get found by ChatGPT

More Australians are asking AI to find a tradie. "Who's a good electrician near me," "best plumber in Geelong that turns up," "reliable builder on the Gold Coast." The assistant answers with two or three names, and one of them gets the call. If you run a trade, that is a new front door, and most of your competitors have not noticed it yet.

We pulled the data

We ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity who the best businesses are in each trade and city, then count how often each one gets named (out of 16 answers). For electricians, the picture is striking:

Same trade, same country, completely different realities. In Perth one firm has basically locked it up. In Sydney and Melbourne the "leader" is named in just 4 of 16 answers, which means nobody owns it. The slot is sitting there empty.

That is the whole opportunity. In most cities and most trades, AI has not settled on a clear winner yet. The businesses that make themselves the obvious answer now will be very hard to dislodge later, the same way early Google rankings were.

Why some tradies get named and others do not

It is not who does the best work. The assistant cannot see your work. It can see how clearly you are described and how well you are backed up. Three things decide it:

1. Clarity. "Emergency electrician serving the eastern suburbs of Melbourne" beats "quality electrical solutions." Name the service, name the suburbs.
2. Evidence. Genuine reviews and a few credible local mentions give the model a reason to recommend you. Specific reviews that name the job and the suburb help most.
3. Consistency. Same business name, phone and service area across your site, your Google profile and every directory. Mismatches make the model unsure, and it picks someone else.

If you want the full version of this, How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT is the step-by-step.

The tradie's short list

You are busy and on the tools, so keep it to four things:

• Rewrite your homepage line to name your trade and your suburbs in plain words.
• Get your Google Business Profile accurate and matching your website exactly.
• Ask your next few happy customers for a review, and nudge them to mention the job and the suburb.
• Make sure any directory listings have your current name and number.

None of that costs money. It costs an afternoon, and it is the same afternoon your competitors keep putting off.

See where you stand

Before you change anything, find out what AI says about you today. A free AI check runs the questions your customers actually ask across all four assistants and shows how often you get named and who gets named instead. You can also see who currently leads your trade in your city in the Australian AI Visibility Index, and if AI is not naming you at all yet, here are the usual reasons.

The trades that win the AI answer in the next year will not be the biggest. They will be the ones who did the basics first. In most cities, that race has barely started.