Best Electrician in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds & Glasgow: Google vs Gemini, With Screenshots of Every Search

If you're an electrician wondering whether AI assistants actually recommend businesses like yours, this is the piece we built specifically to answer that — trade by trade, city by city, with screenshots instead of guesswork. It's a companion to our wider 20-search study across four UK trades, pulled apart here so electricians can see their own results without wading through plumbers, roofers and carpenters too.

We ran the query "best electrician in [city]" through Google UK and through Gemini's live web app, in a real logged-in browser session, for all five cities: London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow. Every screenshot below was captured live on 8 August 2026 — the same search box, the same phrase, typed by hand, for both platforms. You can run every one of these searches yourself in about fifteen minutes and compare what you get against what we got.

Methodology, briefly

For each city we ran two searches with the identical query text: one on google.com/search with UK region settings forced, capturing the organic top-10 and the local "map pack" businesses with their star ratings and review counts; one on gemini.google.com/app, in a fresh chat, recording every business Gemini named in its answer. We then checked, name by name, whether each business Gemini cited actually appeared anywhere in Google's own results for the identical search — classifying each as a verified match, a partial/directory match, or invisible on Google entirely. Full methodology, including how we define each category, is in the main study.

London: zero overlap

Google's organic results for "best electrician in London" are dominated by directories — Checkatrade, Trust A Trader and Which? Trusted Traders take three of the top five slots — with Aspect Maintenance, London Electricians and Lloyd Hallowell Electrics the only genuine businesses to break through. The local map pack shows Frank Edmund Electrical Services (5.0★, 71 reviews, sponsored), Al-Amin Electrical Contractor (4.9★, 525 reviews), London Electrics Ltd (5.0★, 283 reviews) and Certified Electricians London Ltd (5.0★, 331 reviews).

Gemini's answer to the identical query named Novi Electrics, EC Electrical, BESA Electrical Services LTD, Londoners Electric and Jason Davis – Electrician. None of these five businesses appear anywhere in Google's own organic top-10 or local pack. Not one name overlaps in either direction. Gemini appears to be drawing on a separate business-listing data source entirely, styled like Google Business Profile cards but populated with businesses Google's own search results for the same phrase never surfaced.

Manchester: one verified match

Google's local pack for Manchester shows AH Electrical Services (5.0★, 405 reviews), BLAKE ELECTRICAL (4.9★, 276 reviews) and 24 Hour Electrician Manchester (4.9★, 55 reviews), with Manchester Electrical Contractors and Amara Electrical among the organic results alongside the usual directories.

Gemini cited AK Electrical Services, Payne Electrical Services and Masterelectrician247 limited. The one verifiable match is a subtle one: "Masterelectrician247 limited" is a near-verbatim match to a business listed inside Checkatrade's own Manchester directory page ("Masterelectrician 247 limited … 9.94 (35 reviews)") that ranks organically on Google — not a match to the business's own website, but to its listing inside someone else's directory. AK Electrical Services and Payne Electrical Services don't appear in Google's results at all. Zero overlap with Google's local pack.

Birmingham: zero overlap

Birmingham's local pack shows MKUK Electrical LTD (5.0★, 156 reviews), Emergency Electrician RMSG MEP (5.0★, 135 reviews) and Emergency Electrician 247 (4.9★, 99 reviews). Organic results include AB Electrical Birmingham, Q Khan Electrical Contractors, Lynch Electrical Services and A Bathe Electrics alongside Trust A Trader, Checkatrade, NICEIC and Which?.

Gemini's answer named A M Electrical Installations Ltd, Ubitec Electrical Contractors Ltd, O & M Electrical Solutions and DAR Electrical Services. Zero overlap — none of these four names appear anywhere in Google's own organic or local-pack results for the identical query. Worth flagging: we re-ran this exact query later in the same day on a fresh chat and got a completely different set of businesses, some of which did overlap with Google's results. Gemini's answers are not fixed — the specific businesses it names can change meaningfully between one run and the next, even for the same prompt on the same day. The zero-overlap finding you see here is what live in that specific run; a different run might do better or worse. Non-determinism is itself a finding worth taking seriously if you're trying to reason about "will I get cited."

Leeds: two verified matches

Leeds' local pack shows SmartWired Electrical Contractor (5.0★, 154 reviews, listed first), MPS Electrical Contractors Ltd (4.9★, 91 reviews) and Lee Electrical Services (5.0★, 67 reviews). Organic results include Martin Day Electricians, GD Electrical Leeds, SS Electrical Leeds and Fletcher Electric, plus a third-party ranking site, topratedelectricians.co.uk, styled "54 Top Rated Electricians in Leeds for 2026."

Gemini split its answer into "Residential/Emergency" and "Commercial/Compliance" segments, citing Flora Electrical Services, Fletcher Electric, SmartWired Electrical Contractor, Volta Compliance and G & R Electrical Leeds Ltd. Two of the five are verifiable: Fletcher Electric matches Google's organic result verbatim ("Fletcher Electric | North Leeds electrician near you," fletcherelectric.co.uk), and SmartWired Electrical Contractor matches Google's own local pack exactly, 5.0★ on both platforms. Flora Electrical Services, Volta Compliance and G & R Electrical Leeds Ltd don't appear in Google's results for the identical search.

Glasgow: the strongest result in the whole test

Glasgow's local pack shows PWS Electrical Services & Solar Installation (5.0★, 571 reviews, listed first), Bains Electrical (5.0★, 154 reviews) and Home Rewire Glasgow Electricians (4.9★, 648 reviews). This is also the city where a real Reddit user, in a thread ranking organically for this exact query, wrote: "i don't really trust check a trade anymore, can anyone recommend any electricians?"

Gemini's answer named PWS Electrical Services & Solar Installation, Bains Electrical, Home Rewire Glasgow Electricians, Inspire Electrics and Mearns Electrical Ltd. Four of the five are independently verifiable on Google: PWS matches both Google's organic results and its local pack; Bains Electrical matches organic ("Bains Electrical Contractors") and the local pack; Home Rewire Glasgow Electricians matches the local pack exactly; Inspire Electrics matches Google's organic results. Only Mearns Electrical Ltd is unverified. This is the strongest Google/Gemini overlap of any city-and-trade combination in either this article or the wider four-trade study — proof that when a city's genuinely top-reviewed businesses are also well-structured and consistently named across platforms, Gemini and Google can converge almost completely.

The electrician scoreboard, all five cities

City	Gemini citations	Verified on Google	Result
London	5	0	Zero overlap
Manchester	3	1	Partial — directory-page name match only
Birmingham	4	0	Zero overlap
Leeds	5	2	Strong
Glasgow	5	4	Strongest result in the test

Across all five cities, Gemini named 22 electrician businesses, of which 7 (32%) were independently verifiable on Google's own organic or local-pack results for the identical query. The other 15 — 68% — do not appear anywhere on Google's first page for "best electrician in [city]," despite Gemini presenting them as recommendations.

What this means if you're an electrician

Two cities in this test — London and Birmingham, 40% of everywhere we checked — showed zero overlap at all between Google's own top results and what Gemini told users. If your electrical business ranks well on Google in one of those markets, that visibility currently buys you nothing with Gemini; it's answering from a different, only partially overlapping set of signals. Glasgow shows the opposite: when your Google Business Profile is strong, consistently named, and well-reviewed, Gemini's answer tends to converge with Google's rather than diverge from it. The lesson isn't "AI citation is random" — it's that being legible to Google and being legible to an AI answer engine are related but separate problems, and right now most electricians have only solved one of them.

If you want to check where your own business currently stands, run the exact query we ran — "best electrician in [your city]" — on both Google and Gemini yourself, side by side, the same way we did. Our free GEO score tool will also show you specifically what's missing from your site that makes you harder or easier for an AI system to cite confidently, and our guide to schema markup for AI covers the structured-data changes that appear to matter most. If you'd rather have this built properly, electrician website design is one of the trades we specialise in at GeoRankLocal.

For the same test run across plumbers, roofers and carpenters — plus the combined four-trade dataset and headline findings — see the main study.