Google, Trustpilot, Checkatrade and LinkedIn do four different jobs in a British purchase

A British buyer does not start in one place. A purchase here passes through up to four stages, and each major platform owns one of them rather than all of them. Google still owns the first move for almost anything searchable. A trade platform such as Checkatrade owns the sourcing step for domestic trades. Trustpilot and the review platforms own the verification step after a name is already in hand. LinkedIn owns the identity check on a named person or firm in business to business work. Amazon Business sits outside all of that, in repeat purchasing of physical goods. No published survey measures how British buyers split across those platforms, so the honest way to allocate effort is by matching the platform to the stage it decides, which is what this page sets out.

The four stages a British purchase passes through

Write these down before you look at any platform, because the stage decides everything else.

• Framing. The buyer does not yet know what to buy, only what is wrong. Searches look like questions, not product names.
• Sourcing. The buyer wants a list of candidates. This is where directories, platforms and personal referrals do their work.
• Verification. One to three names are in hand and the buyer is checking whether they are real and safe to pay.
• Purchase. The buyer wants a price, a date and someone to answer the phone.

The same business can be invisible at sourcing and excellent at verification, or the reverse. A business that complains it gets no enquiries is almost always failing at one named stage, not at all four.

Google is the baseline, and it is now three products in one box

For almost every service purchase in the United Kingdom, the first move is a search. What has changed is what comes back. One query can return an AI summary at the top, a local map pack with three businesses, and then the organic results, and those three are served by different inputs.

The map pack is driven by your Google Business Profile, your proximity to the searcher and your review count, so it responds to work on the profile itself. The organic results respond to pages. The summary at the top responds to what is written on pages that an engine can read, and it is the one most businesses have never checked.

For a local trade, the Business Profile is the asset that earns the enquiry, and the website supports it. For a national business to business supplier, the profile is almost irrelevant and the pages do the work. Decide which of those two you are before you spend anything.

Trustpilot is a verification tool, not a discovery tool

British buyers do use Trustpilot heavily, and they use it after they have a name. Somebody who has been given your company by a friend or a search result goes to check whether other people were paid up, turned up and treated properly. That makes the review platform a conversion asset rather than an acquisition one.

The practical consequence is that review volume matters less than review recency and your replies. A business with 40 reviews from the last year and a visible owner reply on each complaint reads better than one with 400 reviews that stop two years ago. Ask for the review at the moment the customer is happiest, which is usually the day the work finishes, not a month later.

Checkatrade and the trade platforms sell vetting, so the product is the vetting

For domestic trades, Checkatrade and the platforms beside it hold the sourcing step in a way no other British platform does. The homeowner is not comparing marketing, they are buying a pre-checked list. The platform's product is the check: insurance, identity, qualifications and a complaints route.

Two things follow. First, the fee is only expensive if you treat the platform as advertising rather than as lead supply, so price it against your cost per won job and nothing else. Second, everything the platform verifies is also what a cautious buyer wants on your own website, which is why publishing your company number, your insurance cover and your trade registrations on your own site makes the platform's work compound rather than replace it.

LinkedIn answers a question about people, not companies

In British business to business buying, LinkedIn is where a buyer checks that the person pitching exists, has done this before and still works there. It is an identity and credibility surface. Company pages are routinely ignored while individual profiles are read closely.

So the useful work is on the profiles of the two or three people a client actually deals with, not on a company feed. One founder posting something specific and checkable each week outperforms a company page posting daily, because the buyer is trying to decide about a person.

Amazon Business is a purchasing channel, not a marketing one

Amazon Business in the United Kingdom matters if you sell consumables, parts or equipment into offices, schools and facilities teams, because it sits inside the buyer's existing approved purchasing route and removes a supplier onboarding step. It does almost nothing for a service business. Treating it as a marketing channel is how a services firm wastes a quarter.

What an assistant answers with when a British buyer asks

There is a fifth entry point that none of the platforms above control, and it is now measurable. On 22 October 2026, 192 British buying questions were put to ChatGPT and to Gemini in 32 blind batches each, 64 readings, with the United Kingdom fixed by a line inside every question rather than by a location setting. Counting one host per answer, those readings produced 1,431 host readings across 1,022 distinct hosts, and 92.9 per cent of them went to a page on a vendor's or an agency's own website. Review directories took 0.8 per cent.

Gemini behaved completely differently on the same questions, supplying 88 of those host readings across 86 distinct hosts with no single host appearing more than twice. The counting rule and the wider dataset behind figures like these are set out in the 597 reading benchmark, and the city level version, covering London, Manchester and Birmingham separately, is in the three city British scan.

How to split the effort, in one decision

• Domestic trade. Business Profile first, trade platform second, reviews third, website fourth.
• Local service with an office. Business Profile and reviews together, then pages for the three services you actually want more of.
• Business to business services. Pages and named people. The profile and the trade platforms do very little here.
• Products into businesses. Amazon Business and the buyer's own procurement route, with your own pages carrying the specification.
• Products to consumers. Your own product data, the marketplaces you choose deliberately, then reviews.

Questions British buyers ask about where to be found

Is Google still the most important channel for a British business?

For discovery, yes, and it is better thought of as three surfaces. The map pack answers local intent, the organic results answer researched intent, and the summary at the top of the page answers the question directly. Each one responds to different work.

Should I pay for Checkatrade or spend the same money on Google Ads?

Compare them on cost per won job over a full quarter, not on cost per lead. The platform usually sends fewer, warmer enquiries at a fixed fee, and paid search sends more enquiries with more waste. Run both for a quarter with the source recorded on every job, then drop the one that loses.

How many Trustpilot reviews do we need?

Enough recent ones that the most recent sits inside the last month, with a reply on every critical review. A buyer at the verification stage is reading the newest page of reviews and your responses, not the total.

Does a company LinkedIn page matter in the United Kingdom?

Less than the profiles of the people who will do the work. British buyers use it to confirm a person is real and experienced, so put the effort where that question gets answered.

We sell nationally from one city. Does local work matter at all?

It matters for the city you are in, because those searches convert fastest, and it does nothing for the rest of the country. Keep the profile accurate and put the growth effort into pages that answer the national question.

The entry point with no dashboard

Every platform above reports on itself. You can open Google Business Profile and see calls, open Trustpilot and see reviews, open a trade platform and see leads. The fifth entry point, an assistant answering a buying question with three names in it, reports nothing to anybody, which is why the measurement above had to be run by hand. AI Knows Us exists to run that reading for a named business across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, so that the one stage of a British purchase with no dashboard stops being the one nobody has looked at.