The state of Australian trade business data

An ABN is free, public, and takes a minute to look up. Around one trade business in 5 publishes one anywhere a customer can find it. That is not evidence of anything improper — most sole traders simply never put it on their website — but it does mean the single easiest identity check available to a consumer is unavailable for 80.5% of the businesses they are choosing between.

This one figure is a share of all 66,104 businesses rather than of the ones we managed to check, and deliberately so: a missing ABN is not a failed lookup, so read it as a floor. At least this many publish one that confirms.

It varies more by trade than you would expect: 25.1% of electricians against 5.7% of car washes — a two-and-a-half-fold gap between two trades doing similar work for similar customers.

This is the one that matters most, and it is small precisely because it is specific. The denominator is the 31,654 businesses whose listed number we actually compared with the number on their own site — not businesses with no phone number, and not ones the comparison never ran for. Within that, 2,152 give one number publicly and a different one on their own site.

Sometimes that is a stale listing nobody updated. Sometimes it is a lead-reselling service sitting between the customer and the person who does the work — you ring, someone else answers, and your job is sold on. Either way it is worth knowing before you call, which is why every listing here shows whether this check passed, failed, or never ran.

Garage Door Specialists are worst at 10.7%.

Half of Australian trade businesses have fewer than 40 Google reviews. The spread between trades is enormous — a median of 129 for car washes against 14 for builders — and it says more about how often people hire that trade than about quality.

Which is the argument against ranking on star rating alone. A 5.0 from four reviews and a 4.6 from three hundred are not comparable numbers, and treating them as one is how directories end up recommending whoever asked their cousins.

Included because publishing only the alarming numbers would be its own kind of dishonesty. Of the 45,403 businesses this check covers, 79.8% are described consistently by at least two sources that do not depend on each other — a reasonable baseline that the business exists and does what it says.

Read it as a floor rather than a verdict. The cross-source matcher runs on its own schedule and the businesses added most recently reach it last, so part of the remainder is pending rather than unmatched — 8,546 businesses joined this directory in the ten days before the current snapshot and only a tenth of them had been through it.

82.6% of the 37,038 websites we fetched responded. The remainder is not a graveyard: some businesses have no website at all, and a further share block automated requests, which tells you about their host rather than about them. Businesses whose website is genuinely dead are excluded from this directory before they reach a page.

The gap between 37,038 and 66,104 is our backlog, not a finding. Every listing says which of its checks have run, and the ranking imputes the directory average for the ones that have not rather than scoring them as failures.