UK CARE HOMES
Families ask AI for homes nearby and get two or three names back, long before they book a tour. Those are the ones they ring. Most UK care home sites are not set up for that moment.
What our study found My team and I checked the websites of 6,678 UK care homes. One in five has nothing a family could open. The ones that do answer about six tenths of what a family needs.
330+ clients served 20+ years in search Founder, SEOLeverage
THE MOMENT THAT DECIDES IT
Picture the actual buyer. A daughter, usually. Her father came out of hospital last week and cannot go home. She has a fortnight, a full-time job, and no idea how any of this works. She does not start with a search results page and work through twenty options. She asks, in plain words, which homes near her are any good.
Back comes a paragraph with two or three names in it. Those get the phone calls. The rest of the market may as well not exist.
You are not losing the enquiry at the tour. You are losing it before the shortlist is drawn.
This is why occupancy teams get confused by their own numbers. Traffic looks stable. Enquiries thin out. Nothing on the site broke. What changed is that a layer now sits between the family and your website, and it decides who gets named.
WHAT OUR STUDY FOUND
Every one of them drawn from the four regulators' registers. Not a sample of big brands. The real mix of the sector, weighted to match it.
One in nine has no website we could find. Another one in ten has an address that leads nowhere, so one home in five has nothing a family could open, rising to one in four among small operators. Of the homes that do have a working site, the typical one answers about six tenths of what a family needs and leaves the rest out. That sounds like a damning verdict on the sector. It is closer to a timing problem. These sites were built to reassure a human who had already found them, which was the right brief for a long time.
One gap shows up at every size of operator. Between a third and 43% give a family nothing on fees, funding, visiting, or what admission involves. The national groups with marketing departments are barely better on it, which is good news if you are smaller than them.
The CQC point lands hardest. Operators assume a strong rating carries them. It does not. The rating is real and it matters to families, but it lives on the regulator's website, in the regulator's words. So when an AI engine needs evidence, it cites the regulator. Or a directory. Rarely you.
That is the gap. Your quality is written up somewhere else, by someone else, and they get the credit for it.
Read the full study, including the method and what it does not claim.
WHAT WE DO
Nothing exotic. The sequence matters more than the tactics, because the later work does not pay off until the earlier work is solid.
We map what families actually ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google before they choose a home. Not keywords. Questions, in the words a stressed relative uses at eleven at night. Then we check what the engines answer today for your area, and who gets named.
Directories and regulators get named ahead of care home brands because their pages hand an answer straight over, while yours reads like a brochure. We fix what your pages say, how the facts are labelled behind the scenes, and where your proof sits, so your home becomes the easier one to quote.
Search engines hold pages about health and money to a higher standard, and care is both. So AI does the research and the structure. Your people own fees, funding, and anything about care itself. Nothing goes live without your sign-off.
THE COMPLIANCE LINE
Plenty of agencies will happily point a content generator at your site and publish whatever comes out. In this sector that is a genuinely bad idea, and not only because search engines are getting better at spotting it.
Fees, funding routes, Fair Deal in Ireland, continuing healthcare, what a CQC or HIQA rating does and does not cover, anything about the care you can actually provide: those are statements a family may act on when they are least able to check. They get written or approved by someone who is accountable for them. That is your registered manager, your finance lead, your marketing lead. Not a model.
What AI is genuinely good at here is the other half of the work. Finding the questions people ask. Spotting what your site never explains. Structuring a page so the answer is easy to find. Drafting the parts that carry no risk. Used that way it saves your team real hours without putting a single claim at stake.
WHO THIS IS FOR
The strongest fit is a home or a group with real quality to point at, a website that looks perfectly decent, and an enquiry count that no longer matches the effort going into it. Usually there is also a directory taking a fee for leads that should have come direct.
If you are pre-opening, or you have no CQC or HIQA history yet, the honest answer is that this is early. Come back once there is something for the engines to trust.
QUESTIONS
The shortlist now happens earlier. A daughter looking for a home for her father asks ChatGPT or reads a Google AI answer, gets two or three names, and rings those. If your home is not named, you never enter the consideration set, no matter how good your CQC rating is.
It helps less than you would expect. Your rating lives on the regulator’s website, in the regulator’s words, so AI systems tend to cite the regulator or a directory rather than you. Our study of 6,678 UK care homes found the typical site answers about six tenths of what a family needs, and only 41% have any page about fees or funding. An Outstanding rating does not fill those gaps.
Not with AI, and not without your sign-off. Fees, funding, clinical claims, and anything touching Fair Deal or continuing healthcare go through your people. AI is used for research, structure, and drafting the parts that carry no clinical or financial risk.
Both, though the work looks different. A single home wins on local clarity and proof. A group has the harder job of making each location legible on its own while the brand carries the trust signals.
Twenty minutes. I ask what your enquiry flow looks like today, then show you what the AI engines currently say when someone asks for homes in your area. If there is nothing worth fixing, I will tell you that.
Mostly. Our study covers all four UK nations, drawn from the CQC, Care Inspectorate Scotland, Care Inspectorate Wales and RQIA registers. The same pattern shows up in Ireland, where HIQA and Fair Deal play the role CQC plays in England, and the approach carries over.
NEXT STEP
I will run the questions families in your area are asking and show you the answers they get back, along with who is being named instead of you.
No deck. No pitch. If there is nothing worth fixing, I will say so.