Trades Marketing Statistics 2026: Reviews, Directories and AI Discovery

Trades marketing is one of the few corners of UK marketing where the old channel and the new channel still carry roughly equal weight. A recommendation from a neighbour still wins jobs. So does a five-star directory profile, a Google Business Profile, and increasingly a mention inside an AI chatbot.

The problem is that almost nobody measures it properly. Construction is the largest single SME sector in the country, yet most of what circulates about how trades win work is a directory quoting its own marketing copy.

This piece sticks to figures we could open and read on the source page. Where the best available number is American, or three years old, that is said out loud. Where two credible bodies disagree, both are given.

Key trades marketing statistics for 2026

• 885,000 UK SMEs operate in construction, 16% of the entire private sector business population and the largest single industry group, according to the Department for Business and Trade [1]
• 385,000 construction businesses were VAT or PAYE registered as of March 2025, 14.1% of all registered UK enterprises, per the Office for National Statistics [2]
• Around 900,000 people work in the trades and roughly 90% own their own business, on Checkatrade's figures [3]
• UK construction needs 206,000 extra workers between 2026 and 2030, an average of 41,200 a year, forecasts the Construction Industry Training Board [4]
• Workloads ran at a +22% balance and enquiries at +18% in the second half of 2025, and 72% of firms said a skills shortage affected their projects, according to the Federation of Master Builders [5]
• 45% of UK homeowners wrongly believe builders are licensed, and 81% would support a mandatory licensing scheme, found the FMB and HomeOwners Alliance [6]
• MyBuilder listed 287,319 available tradespeople, TrustATrader recorded 456,585 searches in a 30-day window and Checkatrade lists over 50,000 vetted trade businesses, on the platforms' own counters [19][8][9]
• Facebook and Messenger reach 93% of UK online adults (45.9 million), TikTok 56% (27.3 million), per Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 [10]
• UK consumers read an average of six reviews before booking a tradesperson, more than for a hairdresser and fewer than for a hotel, on Checkatrade research [11]
• 45% of US consumers now use AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier, according to BrightLocal [12]

How big is the UK trades sector, really?

Construction is the biggest SME industry in Britain by business count, and it is overwhelmingly made up of very small firms. That structure is the single most important fact about trades marketing, because it means the typical "marketing department" is one person with a van and a phone.

The Department for Business and Trade put 885,000 SMEs in construction at the start of 2025, 16% of the 5.7 million private sector businesses in the UK [1]. Across the whole population, 4.3 million businesses (75%) employ nobody beyond the owners [1].

The Office for National Statistics counts a smaller 385,000 construction businesses, 14.1% of the total [2]. The gap is not an error. ONS counts only businesses registered for VAT or PAYE, so it excludes the tail of sole traders below the VAT threshold, and that difference of half a million matters when you are sizing the market.

Checkatrade frames it more simply, saying around 900,000 people work in the trades and about 90% of them own their own business [3]. Treat that as an industry characterisation rather than a national statistic, because Checkatrade does not publish its method.

How do customers actually find a tradesperson in 2026?

There is no robust UK study that splits trades work cleanly between word of mouth, directories and search. The best available channel data is American, and it says search dominates the journey but rarely finishes it alone.

BrightLocal's 2026 study of 1,227 US consumers who had searched for a local business in the previous three months found Google Search was the first channel for 52% and was used at some point by 71%. Social media featured in 30% of journeys, AI tools in 23% and review sites in 19% [13]. Crucially, 75% used more than one channel.

That last number is the one that matters for trades. A homeowner who was told about you by a neighbour will still Google your name and skim your reviews before ringing. Word of mouth and search are not competing channels, they are sequential steps in the same decision.

Which is why "we get all our work by word of mouth" is usually only half true. The referral creates the shortlist. The online footprint decides whether the referral survives the check.

How much do reviews actually matter when hiring a trade?

Reviews are the strongest single filter in the trades category, and there is UK as well as US evidence for it. Consumers read a handful of reviews, weight star ratings heavily, and increasingly discount anything more than a few months old.

Checkatrade's Review-fluence study of 2,000 UK adults, published in May 2022, found people read an average of six reviews before booking a tradesperson, compared with seven for a hotel and four for a hairdresser [11]. It also found trades jobs get reviewed by customers about 24% of the time [11].

That 24% figure deserves attention. Roughly three in four completed jobs generate no review at all, so a trade with a thin review count is not necessarily a trade with unhappy customers. It is usually a trade that never asks.

On the US side, BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (n=1,002) found 97% read reviews for local businesses and 31% now require a 4.5-star minimum, up sharply from 17% in 2025 [20]. Seventy-four per cent prioritise reviews from the last three months, and 47% will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews [20].

BrightLocal's companion decisions study found that for trades and home repair specifically, star rating and review count carried more weight than the cross-industry average, and 36% of trade customers cited clear pricing as a deciding factor, higher than other sectors [14]. Only 6% simply clicked the top result.

Source: BrightLocal, Consumer Search Behavior: Decisions, 2026, n=1,227 US consumers [14].

The practical read for a trade business is unglamorous. A steady trickle of recent reviews beats a large pile of old ones, and the review request at the end of the job is probably the highest-return marketing activity available.

How fast do customers decide, and how fast must a trade reply?

Very fast. The window between a homeowner searching and a homeowner choosing is measured in minutes, not days, which reshapes what "marketing" means for a one-van business.

BrightLocal found 75% of consumers decide which business to use in under 30 minutes and 28% decide in under five [15]. Seventy-two per cent evaluate three or fewer businesses, and only 1% look at more than ten. Trades and home repairs sat among the slower categories, but even there just 10% spent more than an hour researching [15].

If three-quarters of the decision happens inside half an hour and the shortlist is three names long, the return on a fast, answered phone beats the return on another page of website copy. Missed calls are a marketing problem, not an admin problem.

Which directories do UK tradespeople use, and what do they cost?

The four big UK directories operate on materially different commercial models, which is the main thing to understand before comparing them. None of them publish audited lead volumes, and only some publish pricing at all.

Every figure there comes from the platform's own website and none is independently audited. The counts are not like for like either: Checkatrade's 50,000 is vetted members, MyBuilder's 287,319 is tradespeople available across the site, and TrustATrader's figure is searches rather than leads.

Rated People states that up to three tradespeople can quote on a job but that homeowners get one to two quotes on average [16]. That is a useful piece of honesty from a lead marketplace: competitive density on a typical lead is lower than the folklore suggests.

Checkatrade discloses that it ranked for over 518,000 keywords as of November 2024 on Semrush data [17]. That is the actual product a directory sells: a share of a search footprint no individual trade could build alone.

Directory economics vary enormously by trade and postcode, and no public dataset lets you compare cost per acquired job across platforms. Anyone quoting a single "average cost per lead" for UK trades directories is estimating.

Which social platforms are worth a trade business's time?

Facebook, on reach alone. It is the only platform where near-universal UK adult coverage overlaps with the local group behaviour that drives trades referrals.

Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report measured platform reach across roughly 49.1 million UK online adults in May 2025 [10].

Source: Ofcom, Online Nation 2025, May 2025 data [10].

Reach is not the same as commercial usefulness, and this is where trades marketing advice usually goes wrong. TikTok has produced genuine national audiences for a handful of UK trades accounts, but 27 million users spread across the country is worth less to a Doncaster plumber than one active local Facebook group of 8,000 people.

There is no published UK study of what proportion of tradespeople use each platform for business, which is a frustrating hole. The nearest proxy is BrightLocal's 2025 survey of 778 US small business owners: 50% used Facebook, 44% Instagram, 40% had a dedicated website and only 35% had a Google Business Profile [18]. Fifty-four per cent ran marketing entirely themselves.

If the UK trades picture resembles that at all, and the business-size profile suggests it might, then the biggest available win for most trade businesses is not a content strategy. It is claiming a Google Business Profile.

Are customers using AI to find tradespeople yet?

Adoption is moving quickly, though the hard numbers are still American and the verification behaviour behind them is more interesting than the headline.

BrightLocal found 45% of US consumers used AI tools for local business recommendations in 2026, up from 6% in 2025, with ChatGPT used by 31% of AI users and Google AI Mode by 23% [12]. Among AI users, 63% said they trusted the recommendations, but 88% verified them by checking sources [12] and, in a companion study, 43% of AI users went back to Google to confirm [13].

On the UK side, Ofcom recorded 1.8 billion UK visits to ChatGPT across the first eight months of 2025, against 368 million in the same period of 2024 [10].

The industry has noticed. Checkatrade launched an app inside ChatGPT in 2026 so consumers could find vetted trades without leaving the chat [9]. That is a directory hedging against the scenario where the assistant replaces the search box.

For an individual trade, the implication is narrow but real. AI assistants surface businesses that already have a strong presence in reviews, directories and Google Business Profiles, so AI-readiness work and local SEO work are currently the same work.

What is the skills shortage doing to demand?

It is tightening supply, which lowers the marketing pressure on established trades and raises it on new entrants. But the headline shortage figures in circulation vary by a factor of six, so handle them carefully.

The Federation of Master Builders State of Trade Survey for the second half of 2025 (n=493) reported a workload balance of +22%, enquiries at +18% and employment at +17% [5]. Seventy-two per cent of firms said a lack of skilled tradespeople affected their projects and 49% saw job delays [5].

Source: FMB, State of Trade Survey H2 2025, n=493 [5].

Now the forecasts. The Construction Industry Training Board projects the UK needs 206,000 extra construction workers between 2026 and 2030, an average of 41,200 a year [4]. Checkatrade says the UK needs 1.3 million additional tradespeople within the decade [7].

Those are not the same claim. CITB is forecasting net additional workers over five years on current output projections. The 1.3 million figure is a gross requirement over ten years tied to housebuilding and net zero targets that may or may not be met. Both can be true. Only one is a forecast of what will probably happen.

Meanwhile only 12% of trade businesses took on an apprentice in the last year, and apprenticeship starts fell from 522,000 in 2011 to 354,000 in 2025, on Checkatrade's survey of 3,000 UK adults and the government data it cites [7].

There is also a trust problem shaping how customers shop. The FMB and HomeOwners Alliance found 45% of homeowners wrongly believe builders are licensed, 65% wrongly expect insurance covering accidental damage, and 81% would back mandatory licensing [6]. Absent a licence, the directory badge and the review count are doing the regulator's job.

How to read these numbers

Most of the consumer behaviour data here is American. BrightLocal's panels are US-based, and while UK local search behaviour is broadly similar, review thresholds and AI adoption rates should not be transplanted without a caveat.

Directory figures are self-reported and unaudited. "Available tradespeople" and "vetted trade businesses" are marketing counts, not verified active user numbers, and search counts are not lead counts.

Survey samples here are small by national standards: 493 firms for the FMB, 778 owners for BrightLocal's SMB study, 3,000 adults for Checkatrade's youth research. Subgroup breakdowns off those bases carry wide margins of error, and self-reported behaviour is systematically unreliable in a way observed traffic data is not.

The Checkatrade Review-fluence study is from 2022, included because it is the only UK research we found measuring reviews read specifically before booking a tradesperson. Four years is a long time in this category.

Finally, the CITB workforce numbers are projections built on construction output forecasts, and the first of those forecasts is a 0.2% contraction in 2026. Projections that depend on a housebuilding programme happening are not observations.

What this means going into 2027

Expect the review threshold to keep rising. If the US pattern holds and a 4.5-star minimum becomes the norm for a third of consumers, trades sitting on a 4.2 average with sparse recent feedback will feel it in enquiry volume before they see it in rankings.

Expect AI-mediated discovery to become routine rather than novel. Checkatrade putting an app inside ChatGPT is a signal that directories expect to be disintermediated, and would rather supply the answer than be the destination that got skipped.

Expect the fundamentals gap to stay open. If anything close to the US figure of 35% Google Business Profile ownership applies to UK microbusinesses, a large share of trade businesses are invisible in the surface most local searches resolve on.

Expect supply to stay tight and demand firm. FMB enquiry balances were positive through H2 2025 and CITB forecasts a growing workforce requirement, which means the marketing problem for many established trades is qualifying better leads rather than generating more.

And expect the data itself to improve slowly, if at all. The trades are the largest SME sector in Britain, and among the least well measured. If you want help working out how findable your business really is in search and AI answers, you can book a call with me.