Google's AI explains the job. The tradie still gets the call

01 · The headline number

Trades sits right on the national average, and the average lies

At 37.2%, Trades lands tenth of eighteen industries, within a point of the national average. On the surface, an unremarkable middle-of-the-table result.

The average is hiding a 44.6-point spread underneath it, the fourth-widest intent split we measured. Informational queries ("how to", "why is", "what size") trigger AI at 66.3%, while commercial hiring queries ("best plumber", "electrician cost", "hire a builder") sit at 21.7%. Google's AI has become Australia's DIY manual while leaving the hire-a-tradie market largely alone. Whether that DIY researcher becomes your customer when the job goes sideways depends on the plays below.

02 · The intent breakdown

The AI answers "how". Australians still search "who".

We split every trades query into one of four intents and measured each separately. The two that matter to a trade business (commercial and transactional) are the two the AI largely leaves alone.

Informational intent at 66.3% comes on a huge sample (2,237 queries). "How to fix a leaking tap", "what size air conditioner do I need", "can I replace a light switch myself". The queries that used to feed forum threads and trade blogs now meet an AI answer two times in three, and note that "can I do it myself" is precisely the query class where the answer often ends in a licensed-work warning and a handoff to a professional.

Commercial intent at 21.7% (2,407 queries) is the revenue-side story. When Australians compare or price tradies, the AI steps back nearly four times out of five. Transactional queries (26.0% on 814) behave the same way. The searches that produce booked jobs still look like classic Google: map pack, organic, ads.

Navigational at 19.2% is moderate. Brand searches for the big franchises and directories carry some AI, but a local trade brand's own name remains a mostly clean surface.

03 · Mobile vs desktop

Mobile is +5.6pp more AI-exposed than desktop

We split the dataset by device. Trades shows the fourth-largest mobile skew of the eighteen industries, behind only Legal (+7.2pp), Accounting (+7.1pp) and Veterinary (+7.0pp).

That gap makes intuitive sense for this vertical: trades searches happen at the point of the problem. Standing at the switchboard, under the sink, in the roof cavity, phone in hand. Those in-the-moment how-to searches are exactly the query class Google's AI answers most aggressively.

Practical implication: audit your keywords on mobile, because that's where your market actually is and it's the more AI-mediated surface. A desktop-only rank check understates how often an AI answer now sits between a searching homeowner and your listing.

04 · The citation leaderboard

YouTube first. hipages barely features.

Ask a tradie what they fear in search and the answer is usually a directory. The AI citation data says otherwise: hipages takes just 1.5% of the roughly 20,500 citations in our trades sample, while video, community and careers platforms take more than ten times that between them.

YouTube at #1 (5.1%) confirms what the intent data implied: the AI's centre of gravity in trades is the how-to query, and how-to answers cite video. Google's own surfaces (4.7%) and Reddit's renovation and DIY communities (3.8%) round out the top three.

The recruitment cluster is the quiet surprise. Indeed and the two Seek variants combine for 7.5% of all citations, and the presence of buildersacademy.edu.au and jobsandskills.gov.au in the top twelve tells you why: a large share of "electrician" searches are about becoming one, not hiring one. Wage guides, apprenticeship explainers and course pages are getting cited on queries that sit right next to your commercial terms.

The entry bar for citation is among the lowest in the study. In our follow-up citation research, cited trades domains carried a median Authority Score of 39, and a quarter sat at 20 or below, lower than every vertical except Veterinary and Events & Weddings. Australian domains hold 59.4% of citations, above the dataset midpoint. A genuine local trade site with useful, specific content can absolutely get quoted here.

05 · Local intent

Emergency and suburb queries stay human

Adding a location to a trades query halves AI exposure and then some. The insulation effect is the fifth-largest in our dataset.

"Emergency plumber Penrith", "electrician near me", "roof repairs Geelong" trigger AI on fewer than one in five searches, against 42.8% for general queries. When the water is coming through the ceiling, Google gets out of the way and shows the map pack.

That makes the map pack the real battlefield, and it has its own economics: in our Map Pack study, the median pack member nationally holds 109 reviews, and which three businesses you see changes with where you're standing in 98.8% of cases. AI is not the thing standing between a tradie and local visibility. Reviews and proximity are.

Translation for your business: suburb pages, emergency-intent pages and Google Business Profile discipline remain the core of trades SEO. The AI shift changes the top-of-funnel content game, but it barely touches the searches that ring the phone.

06 · Page-type safety map

Blog content is all but absorbed. Homepages are near-immune.

We measured AIO trigger rate by what kind of page ranks #1 in the trades SERP. The spread runs from near-total exposure on blog content to near-immunity on homepages.

When a blog post ranks #1 on a trades query, an AI Overview appears 88.6% of the time, the fourth-highest blog exposure in the entire dataset and higher than B2B (87.2%) or Accounting (82.1%). Every "how to unblock a drain" article on a plumbing site is now feeding the AI more often than it feeds the business.

Homepages at 13.3% are very safe, and directories at 26.2% are quieter than you'd expect given their organic presence. Location pages at 40.0% carry more AI than in most verticals, largely because suburb-level how-to content gets classified here too, but they remain far cleaner than editorial content.

Our view: the 75-point gap between blog and homepage is the strategy. Money pages stay clean, editorial gets absorbed. Trades businesses should write how-to content only when it's built to win the citation (and the warning moment when DIY becomes a licensed job), never as a traffic play on its own.

07 · What to do about it

Five actions we'd take if we ran an Australian trade business

1. Defend the local trench first. Local queries trigger AI at 19.6%, homepages at 13.3%, and the searches that produce booked jobs are the least AI-mediated in the vertical. Reviews velocity, Google Business Profile discipline, and suburb-level service pages remain the highest-ROI work. Nothing about 2026 changes that; it concentrates it.
2. Put your how-to knowledge on YouTube. The #1 cited domain in trades (1,043 citations). A tradie filming honest five-minute fix-it videos earns three things at once: AI citations, trust with DIY researchers, and the call when the viewer gets out of their depth. The licensed-work warning at the end of the video is both responsible and commercially correct.
3. Write the "can I DIY this" pages, structured for citation. Informational queries are 66.3% AI-mediated, and the AI's answers on electrical, gas and plumbing work regularly conclude that the job needs a licensed professional. Content that clearly explains what's legal to DIY in your state and what isn't, with your business named and priced next to the answer, is citation bait aligned exactly with how these queries resolve.
4. Treat hipages as an organic channel, not an AI threat. At 1.5% of citations, the directory is a minor player in AI answers. Its power (and Airtasker's, at 0.8%) remains in classic organic listings and lead-gen. Decide your directory strategy on lead economics, not on AI visibility fears.
5. Don't let careers content eat your brand terms. With Indeed and Seek at a combined 7.5% of citations, queries adjacent to your services are resolving to wage guides and apprenticeship pages. Make your service pages unmistakably about hiring you: "hire", suburbs served, response times, licence numbers and prices. Clear hire-intent signals keep you out of the career-query blur and matched to the searches that pay.