Map Search, Trade Portal, or Vetted Directory: What Each One Is Actually Good For

There are three ways most people find a tradesperson in Europe: a map search, a national trade portal, or a vetted directory. They look interchangeable and they are not. Each is built on a different business model, and the business model determines what the results are optimised for, which in turn determines what each one is genuinely good at and where each one will let you down. Knowing which tool you are holding is most of the skill.

Map search: unmatched coverage, no filter for competence

A map search is the default because it is superb at one thing: knowing that a business exists, where it is, and roughly what people thought of it. Coverage is close to total, it is free, and the reviews are volunteered by real customers rather than solicited by the business.

What it cannot do is tell you whether the business is legally allowed to do the work. A map listing carries no verification of trade registration, no check of liability insurance, and no confirmation that the electrician is authorised to touch your consumer unit. A five-star average across forty reviews for a plumber says people were pleased with the visits. It does not say the firm is on the register, and in most of Europe those are separate questions with separate answers.

There is also a structural problem with the ratings themselves. Ranking by star average concentrates everything into a narrow band near the top, where a 4.8 from twelve reviews and a 4.6 from four hundred appear almost equivalent and are not remotely comparable as evidence. The averages compress, so the signal you most want, consistency at volume, is precisely the thing the display flattens.

National trade portals: real matching, paid placement

Most European countries have at least one established trade portal, and in their home markets they work: Werkspot in the Netherlands, MyBuilder and Checkatrade in the UK, Travaux.com in France, ProntoPro in Italy, Ofertia and similar in Spain, Houzz across several markets for design-led work.

Their strength is the job-matching mechanic. You post a job, several relevant tradespeople respond, and you get competing quotes from people who have already said they are available and interested. For a defined piece of work that is genuinely efficient, and the better portals do carry out some registration and insurance checks on the firms they admit.

Their weakness is the revenue model. Most charge tradespeople either for membership or per lead, which has two consequences. Businesses that decline to pay do not appear, and some of the best-established local firms with full order books have no reason to pay for leads. And where placement or prominence can be bought, the ranking is partly an advertising auction rather than purely a quality signal. That is not dishonest, it is simply what a lead-generation business is, and it is worth knowing when you read the order of the results.

Vetted directories: verification first, coverage second

A vetted directory inverts the trade-off. Instead of listing everyone and letting you sort it out, it applies checks and publishes a shorter list. The honest description of the trade-off is that you gain confidence and lose breadth, and in a thin market that loss is real.

The useful question to ask any directory calling itself vetted is what specifically has been verified, because the word is doing a lot of unearned work across the industry. Registration on a public register, insurance currently in force, review history examined rather than merely averaged, and complaint records are four different checks, and a service that has done one of them should not imply it has done all four.

What each one is actually for

Where Veted sits, and what it does not do

It would be tiresome to write this comparison without being straight about our own position. Veted reads the full public review history for each business rather than taking the star average, uses a language model to summarise what customers actually and repeatedly said, scores each business across five dimensions including price against the local market, and ranks the strongest in each city. Ranking is not for sale, and there are no lead fees in either direction.

What we do not yet claim is complete credential verification. Checking licences against national registers is rolling out rather than finished, and until it is done for a given market the honest statement is that we have aggregated and analysed the public record, not that we have independently verified every registration. Coverage is also uneven: strong in the larger cities across the twenty-four countries we cover, thinner in small towns, and we would rather say so than pad a page with businesses we know little about.

The approach that works

Use the tools for what each is good at, and do the one check none of them substitutes for.

• Start with a vetted directory or a portal to produce a shortlist of three, because starting on a map means starting with whoever bought the most visibility.
• Cross-check each shortlisted name on the map search, where the unsolicited reviews live, and read the one-star and three-star ones rather than the average.
• Verify the registration yourself on the national register. It takes five minutes, no directory removes the need for it, and it is the only check that is genuinely definitive.
• Ask for the insurance certificate with the policy dates, and confirm the company name matches the register and the quote.
• Get three written quotes for the identical scope, because the spread between them tells you more about the local market than any rating.

No directory, ours included, is a substitute for those last three steps. What a good one does is get you to a defensible shortlist quickly, so the effort you spend on verification goes into three plausible firms rather than thirty. That is the honest claim for the category, and any service promising more than that is describing something the current state of European trade data does not support.