Which directories actually matter for my trade?

The core set every contractor needs

• Google Business Profile. The map, and the reviews most homeowners read first.
• Apple Business and Bing Places. Apple Maps on every iPhone, and Bing's map and Copilot. Bing Places is ordinary upkeep; it is not a route into ChatGPT.
• Yelp. Homeowners still check it, and since July 2026 Yelp's business data is licensed to OpenAI for ChatGPT. Claim it and keep it accurate.
• Facebook and Nextdoor. Neighbors recommend painters, handymen and yard crews there. A dead page with a four-year-old phone number does more harm than a quiet page with the right one.
• BBB. A listing often exists whether or not you pay for accreditation. Check what it says about you.
• Houzz and BuildZoom. Houzz for trades that sell on photos. Houzz and BuildZoom. Houzz for trades that sell on photos. BuildZoom is worth a look because it carries license and permit records, so check that what it shows about you is current.
• Angi and Thumbtack. Marketplaces with public profiles and reviews. A free profile is enough to keep your details consistent; buying leads there is a separate business decision.

Yelp is handled differently from the rest in one way: never ask customers for Yelp reviews. Yelp's own rules tell businesses not to, and its software filters out reviews it suspects were requested, so asking can bury honest reviews. Claim the listing, keep it right, add job photos and reply to what arrives.

BrightLocal's August 2026 study of the outside sources AI answers cite for local businesses put Google Business Profile and Yelp at the top, and found most cited sites were the businesses' own websites. It is one vendor's snapshot, so we use it as a rough order of priority, not as a promise. A GEO audit dated September 6, 2026 adds a practical rule: citations to review sites arrived almost entirely through those sites' pages that already ranked in search, so a listing on a page Google already shows for your trade and town is worth more than one nobody lands on.

The right license register

The license record is the listing a homeowner, ChatGPT, and a competitor can all check. It has to match the name on everything else.

• Oregon CCB. Every Oregon construction contractor, including plumbers and electricians, who also hold a BCD license.
• Oregon BCD. The second license plumbers and electricians must hold on top of the CCB license. Show both numbers, because a homeowner checking only one has only half the record.
• Oregon LCB. The separate state board for landscaping contractors. A yard construction company showing a CCB number instead of an LCB number is a mismatch worth fixing.
• Washington L&I. Clark County contractors register here. Plumbing and electrical contractors hold their own L&I contractor licenses, separate from general contractor registration.

If you trade under a name that differs from the legal name on the license, say both on your website so the two can be tied together.

Associations and credential programs, trade by trade

Past the core, the right list depends on the work. A membership or program listing is worth having when it is real and a homeowner in your trade would recognize it.

• Roofers. Associated Roofing Contractors of Oregon and SW Washington, the Portland association, and the Western States Roofing Contractors Association for the wider region.
• Plumbers and heating contractors. ORPHCC, the Oregon plumbing, heating and cooling contractors association, whose members show up in the national PHCC contractor search.
• Painters. The Painting Contractors Association's Portland chapter.
• Heating and cooling. The Energy Trust of Oregon Trade Ally network, and the Clark Public Utilities contractor network on the Washington side.
• Landscape companies. OLCA, the Oregon trade association for landscaping contractors. Membership is not a license; the LCB record is.

An association logo on your site with no matching listing on the association's directory is a claim nobody can check. Get the listing first, then show the badge.

Manufacturer locators

Some manufacturers run public find-a-contractor tools for the installers they certify. Roofing has the most: GAF, Owens Corning, CertainTeed, and Malarkey, which is based in Portland. Plumbers who do kitchen and bath work can appear in Kohler's partner network, and installers of Moen's smart water products in Moen's Profinder. Neither one lists a service plumber. Heating contractors hold dealer tiers with the equipment brands they install.

Other trades have little or nothing here. Sherwin-Williams has store locators and contractor resources but no public find-a-painter tool, so a painter told to get listed there is being sold something that does not exist. For painters, Houzz, BuildZoom and the association directory carry more of the load.

A locator listing only helps when it matches you: the same business name, the same phone, a service area that covers where you work.

One identity everywhere, including a hidden address

Every listing should carry the same name, phone, website, license, and service area. A missing listing is often less confusing than a wrong one. A wrong one makes you look like two companies.

Most contractors work from home or a yard they do not want customers driving to. That is fine. Hide the street address where the platform allows it, set the service area, and do the same everywhere. Do not publish the home address on one directory and a different address on another.

When we say not found, we do not mean missing

Several of these platforms block automated checks. Yelp, Angi and Facebook regularly refuse the kind of request a checking tool makes. When a listing cannot be seen that way, the honest report says not found by our methods and marks it unknown, not missing.

Anyone reporting you absent from forty directories should be able to say how they checked each one.

What a listing will not do

• That any one directory is a ranking factor. Listings help Google and ChatGPT confirm who you are. None of them is a switch that turns on rankings.
• That a paid tier moves you. Paying Yelp, Angi, Thumbtack or BBB buys ads, leads or a badge. It does not buy a better place in Google's regular results or in AI answers.
• That ChatGPT reads your Google reviews. Nothing OpenAI has published says so. What it has documented is its own search crawler and, since July 2026, licensed Yelp data.
• That every trade needs the same list. A plumber chasing BuildZoom and a painter chasing a paint brand locator are both spending the afternoon in the wrong place.