Most of what we publish here teaches homeowners how to check a tradesperson before they hand over money. This piece is for the tradesperson being checked. Maybe you typed your own business name into Google on a quiet evening. Maybe a customer mentioned that an AI assistant brought your firm up when they asked who to call. Either way, you are asking the same question they did: what exactly can they see?
The honest answer is quite a lot, and it is worth ten minutes of your time to know what. So this article goes through the public record about your business, one part at a time: what shows, where it comes from, what the dates on it mean, and the free ways to check it and put anything wrong right. There is nothing to buy at the end. We do not sell placement, position or ratings to anyone, which is the whole reason the record is worth reading.
Two kinds of reader, one record
The first reader you already know. A homeowner with three tabs open, comparing you against two competitors. The advice they follow, ours included, tells them to check the date on your newest review, look your company up on the public register, and confirm any certification with the body that issued it. They are not being suspicious of you personally. They are being careful with a lot of money, and the good ones run the same checks on everyone.
The second reader is newer. AI assistants are already answering questions about your business. When someone asks one of them to find a reliable plumber nearby, or asks what is known about your firm by name, the assistant goes looking for evidence it can read. Every profile on this site can be read by AI assistants, and the machine version carries the same evidence a homeowner sees, dates and named sources included. An assistant repeats what the record shows, so if the record about you is wrong, the wrong version is what gets repeated.
What the record shows, piece by piece
Start with reviews, because every homeowner does. Across the platforms we monitor we have captured 2,053,417 reviews in full, with their text, and 97.4% of them carry the date they were posted. For the UK, that comes to 1,272,034 dated reviews of 113,126 trade businesses, gathered from fourteen platforms, as of July 2026. On your profile each review keeps its date and names the site it came from, so a reader can see where your reputation lives and how current it is.
Then the company record. We have matched 1,197,361 listed UK trade businesses to an entry on the public company register, and 1,185,270 of those entries are confirmed as active, as of July 2026. Among active matched companies, the median time on the register is six years. Be careful reading that number the way homeowners are told to be careful: it measures time on the register, not how long anyone has been trading. Plenty of established firms incorporated late. And if your business is not on the register at all, that is normal, not a warning sign. Many good sole traders never incorporate, and we tell homeowners exactly that. These figures describe businesses listed here that we could match to the register, not a census of British trades, and matching skews toward incorporated, findable firms.
The rest of the record follows the same rule: everything comes from somewhere, and the somewhere is named. We show a confirmed certification from the register that issues it, so a Gas Safe registration comes from the Gas Safe Register. Where a directory merely lists a licence or membership, the profile says exactly that, a listing, and names the directory. Planning history appears for the trades that leave one, drawn from council records. And anything you publish about your own business sits under a dated 'From the business' label, kept visibly separate, so a reader always knows which facts came from you and which came from the public record.
The date on your newest review does a lot of work
Here is the aggregate picture, and it surprised us. Across those 113,126 UK businesses, 42.9% have a newest dated review posted within the last year. For 41.4%, the newest dated review is more than two years old. Those are counts across the whole population, not a comment on any single firm, and a quiet review timeline usually has an ordinary explanation: a full order book from word of mouth, seasonal work, a business that simply stopped asking, or a directory that publishes totals rather than the reviews themselves.
The trouble is that readers weight the date anyway. Our own checklist tells homeowners to look at the newest review's date before the stars. In BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey, 74% of people said they want to see reviews from the last three months. So if your last written review is from 2023, the work you did last week is invisible to both kinds of reader. The fix costs nothing and takes one sentence: next time a job goes well, ask the customer to write it up on whichever site they already use, while the dust sheets are still folded.
What you can do about it, all of it free
- Read your own profile the way a customer would. Open it on your phone, check the newest review date, the company details and the certifications, and note anything that is wrong or missing.
- If something is factually wrong, tell us. You do not need an account: the trader rights page takes corrections, licence and identity disputes, and removal review requests, and we reply within 48 hours. If the evidence confirms an error, we fix it, free.
- Put your name on the profile. Claiming is free: you verify the email we send you, then we check the contact evidence on your business, which either opens your dashboard or passes the claim to our team for review.
- Once the profile is yours, read your record the way machines read it, correct the details you control, and add facts under the 'From the business' label: opening hours, the year you started, the languages you speak. There is also a free kit for your own website that makes your identity easy for machines to read.
- Ask recent happy customers for a review. It is the one lever that moves what both kinds of reader care about most, and no tool can substitute for it.
The promises nobody can honestly make you
At some point the phone will ring with someone selling reputation. Lately the pitch has an AI flavour: pay us and you will be the business the assistants recommend. Treat a placement promise the way you would treat a stranger who guarantees planning permission. Nobody controls what an AI assistant answers, us included. What anyone can honestly do for you is narrower and more useful: keep the public record about your business complete, current and correct, so that anything reading it, human or machine, gets you right. That part is free, and most of it is in your hands.
It is also worth being clear about what putting your name on your profile does not do. It never moves your position in results and never adds to any score. Your reviews keep their sources: you cannot edit them, and neither can we. Certifications are confirmed only by the issuing register, never by anyone's say so. And you never need to claim anything to get a factual error fixed. We built it that way on purpose, because a directory a business can quietly polish is worthless to the homeowner reading it, and a directory homeowners trust is the only kind worth appearing in.
Questions tradespeople ask us
Why is my business listed on MyTrustedTraders?
Because the public record about your business exists, and we bring it together: reviews already published on established sites, entries on public registers, and other named sources, collected so homeowners and AI assistants can weigh the evidence in one place. Listing is not an endorsement and costs nothing. If something in your listing is wrong, we correct it on evidence, free, and there is a full explanation on our 'why is my business listed' page.
How do I correct or remove my listing?
Through the trader rights page, without creating an account. You can dispute a factual error, flag a licence or identity mix-up, or request a removal review, and we reply within 48 hours. Where the evidence confirms an error we fix it. Accurate information from named public sources stays, which is the same standard we hold for every business.
How do AI assistants know about my business?
The same way a browsing homeowner does, plus a route built for machines. Every profile here can be read by AI assistants, and the machine version carries the same evidence with the same dates and named sources. An assistant repeats what the record shows, which is why the ten minute check of your own record is worth doing.
Does claiming my profile improve my ranking?
No. Claiming never moves your position in results and never adds to any score. What it gives you is control of the facts that are yours to control: correcting details, publishing clearly labelled information of your own, and seeing your record the way machines read it. Position here follows public evidence, and evidence cannot be bought.
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