The Google Supplier Unit Now Covers Local Businesses. Most Owners Have Never Heard of It.

The house is cold, the boiler is making a sound it did not make last winter, and somebody in Laois types four words into a phone: boiler service near me.

What loads is a page of middlemen. Two lead-resale sites, a national trades directory, a comparison panel. The engineer who has serviced half the boilers on that estate for eleven years is somewhere below all of it, if he is on the first screen at all. So the householder taps the top result and fills in the form. That enquiry gets sold on. There is a fair chance it reaches the same engineer an hour later as a paid lead, for a customer who lives two miles from his van and was already trying to find him.

That scene is a composite rather than one business, assembled from a pattern we see constantly. The part owners find hardest to accept is not the cost of the lead. It is that the customer was never lost. She was intercepted.

Google has built something for precisely this problem. It has existed in European results since 2024 for hotels and flights, and documentation published this month extended it to local businesses. Almost none of the people it was built for know it is there.

Two units, and you are only in one of them

Two features sit together in European search results, and the distinction between them is the whole story.

The first is the aggregator unit. Google describes it as a multi-provider feature designed for Vertical Search Services, which it lists as online travel agencies, comparison shopping services, metasearch engines and directories. It is available to users in the EEA for queries about hotels, flights, long distance trains or buses, products, and local businesses. Participants get in by supplying data, through direct feed integrations or real-time APIs depending on the vertical.

The second is the supplier unit. Google calls it a dedicated feature for direct providers, and the examples in its documentation are unusually plain: individual hotels or airlines, brick-and-mortar business owners, or providers of services like plumbing. It appears alongside the aggregator unit.

Read those two definitions next to each other and the map of your own market gets clearer. The directory that sold the enquiry is an aggregator. Our boiler engineer is a supplier. They are not competing for the same slot, which is worth knowing before you spend another year trying to outrank a national directory on its own terms. The engineer was never going to win that fight, and he does not have to.

Why a slot for you exists at all

This did not come from generosity. It came from law.

The Digital Markets Act became applicable in May 2023, and among the obligations it places on designated gatekeepers is a prohibition on treating the gatekeeper's own services or products more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties. Google's response in Europe included, in its own description, dedicated units and chips to help users find comparison sites in areas like flights, hotels and shopping.

Now read what Google itself said would follow. In its DMA compliance post, the company noted that the changes may send more traffic to large intermediaries and aggregators, and less traffic to direct suppliers like hotels, airlines, merchants and restaurants.

That is the vendor stating the outcome in advance. A rule written to stop a gatekeeper favouring itself had a predictable side effect: it handed prime result space to the biggest intermediaries. The guesthouse pays commission either way, and we have written before about what the commission actually costs a small accommodation business. And the supplier unit is the counterweight Google built into the same page.

The entry requirement is a website that can be read

Here is the line from Google's supplier unit documentation that changes how I think about the whole feature. A direct provider does not need to provide additional data beyond what is accessible through web crawling.

Sit with that for a second, because the asymmetry is remarkable.

An aggregator earns its place in that result by building a data pipeline. Feed specifications, API integrations, engineering time, ongoing maintenance. A local business earns its place by having a website with readable information on it. No application, no fee, no account manager, no contract.

In operational terms, your production website is the integration. It is the interface between your business and the feature. And that reframes an ordinary maintenance job into something with a direct commercial consequence: the pages describing what you do, where you do it and what it costs are no longer just marketing copy. They are the data Google reads to decide whether there is a supplier here worth showing beside the directories.

What the engineer actually had

Back to the van in Laois. When we look at businesses in that position, the website is rarely missing altogether. It is usually there and usually thin.

A home page with a photo of the van. Then a services page listing four words each: servicing, repairs, installations, upgrades. A contact form. No counties or towns written out anywhere, because everyone local already knows the area he covers. Nothing on price, because it depends. No opening hours, because he answers the phone.

Every one of those decisions is reasonable from inside the business. Together they produce a site with almost nothing for a crawler to extract. When Google assembles a unit of direct providers for a boiler servicing query in that county, there is no substance to draw on. The directory listing, meanwhile, has his trade, his area, his hours and a price band, because the directory made filling those fields a condition of being listed.

That middleman did the homework the owner skipped. Most of the gap sits right there, and it is not a technical one.

I will admit to getting this wrong myself. We reviewed a customer site a while back, confirmed it loaded fine, looked well, and moved on. The service detail was inside an embedded third-party booking widget, so a crawler saw an empty container where the entire offering should have been. Loading correctly in a browser and being readable by a crawler are two different tests, and I now run the second one properly.

What makes a business legible as a supplier

None of this requires a rebuild. It requires the detail in your head to exist as text on indexable pages.

• One page per service, in words. Not a four-item list. A page for boiler servicing, a page for emergency repairs, each describing what is included and who it suits. Text, not an image of text, and not a PDF.
• Write out the area you cover. The towns and the county, in a sentence a person would actually say. Google cannot infer a service radius from a phone number.
• Put hours and contact details in the page itself. In the HTML, not inside a widget that loads afterwards.
• Publish what you can about price. A band, a call-out rate, a starting-from figure. Owners resist this hardest, and it is the field the directories always capture.
• Verify what a crawler sees. Use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console and read the rendered content. If a section is missing there, it does not exist as far as this feature is concerned.

That is an afternoon of writing for most businesses, and it feeds the ordinary local ranking signals too, which we covered in more depth in our guide to how Google decides which local businesses it shows.

The platform underneath has to cooperate, mind. Pages need to be yours to add, at whatever depth the work requires, without a change request and an hourly rate between you and a paragraph of text. A managed WordPress site with everything included for sixty euro a year gives you that, and full access to the content from day one. Whatever you run it on, the test is the same: can you publish a new service page this evening, and can a crawler read it when you do.

What this cannot do for you

One limitation matters more than the rest, and Google states it plainly: the supplier unit only appears if the aggregator unit appears.

So the slot is not yours to summon. It exists on queries where Google has already decided that aggregators belong, which means you cannot plan a month's revenue around it or treat it as a channel you control. Some searches will show it. Others will not show it at all, and no amount of work on your site changes that.

Nor is there a lever to pull. There is no submission form and no verification badge, so you cannot confirm participation the way you can confirm a Business Profile. You improve the odds by being readable, then Google decides.

I would rather say that straight than sell it as a growth tactic. The honest framing is narrower and more useful: this is one more instance of a pattern that keeps repeating, where a platform builds something that only benefits businesses holding a real, crawlable asset of their own. Doing that work pays off across search generally. Supplier unit visibility is a bonus on top, not the reason.

Where the directories genuinely earn it

I am not going to pretend the middlemen are pure friction, because for one situation they are the better option and the honest answer is to say so.

If you are starting from nothing, no trading history, no reviews, no site, no audience, a directory listing puts you in front of people who are ready to buy this week. A new site does not. It needs time to be crawled, time to gather signals, time before Google has any reason to trust it, and in the early months a paid listing on an established platform genuinely outperforms it. For a new tradesperson trying to fill a diary before winter, paying for leads is a rational decision rather than a failure of nerve.

The mistake is not using them. It is being on them five years later with nothing of your own, having funded someone else's asset the whole way and still renting access to customers who were looking for you by name.

Conclusion

The engineer lost nothing to a better competitor. He lost the introduction to a business whose only product is the introduction, and he bought it back at a markup.

What is genuinely different now is that the page where that interception happens has a slot on it reserved for him. Not sold to him, and not guaranteed to him. Reserved for the category he is in, on the condition that there is something at his own address for Google to read.

So the useful question is not how to outrank a national directory. It is narrower and a good deal more answerable: if Google went looking today for a direct provider of your service in your county, would it find enough at your address to show one. Everything you know about your own business already answers that. It just has to be written down somewhere a machine can reach it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Google supplier unit?

It is a search feature Google describes as a dedicated unit for direct providers, giving them visibility alongside the aggregator unit where booking sites, comparison services and directories appear. Google's documentation names individual hotels or airlines, brick-and-mortar business owners, and providers of services such as plumbing. It appears only to users in the EEA, which includes Ireland.

Do I have to pay Google to appear in the supplier unit?

No. There is no fee and no sign-up form. Google's documentation states that a direct provider does not need to supply additional data beyond what is accessible through web crawling. That is the key difference from the aggregator unit, where participants supply data through direct feed integrations or real-time APIs. Your website is the entry mechanism.

Does the supplier unit appear in Ireland?

Yes. Google states the feature is available to users in the EEA, and Ireland is part of the European Economic Area. Google's regional differences documentation lists the aggregator unit, supplier unit, ecosystem carousel and structured data carousels as EEA features, covering hotels, flights, ground transportation, local businesses and products.

Why did Google create a unit for direct providers?

It follows from the Digital Markets Act, which prohibits a gatekeeper from treating its own services more favourably in ranking than comparable third-party ones. Google's response added dedicated units for comparison sites in areas such as flights, hotels and shopping. Google then acknowledged in its own compliance post that the changes may send more traffic to large intermediaries and aggregators and less to direct suppliers like hotels, airlines, merchants and restaurants. The supplier unit is the counterweight.

What does my website need for Google to treat me as a direct provider?

Content a crawler can read without executing an application. Each service on its own indexable page as text rather than an image or a PDF, the areas you cover written out, opening hours and contact details present in the page itself, and pricing where you are willing to publish it. If your services sit inside an embedded booking widget or a third-party frame, a crawler may see an empty container.

Will the supplier unit always show if I qualify?

No, and this is the limitation worth carrying away. Google states that the supplier unit only appears if the aggregator unit appears, so the slot is tied to queries where Google has already decided to show aggregators. It is not a guaranteed placement you can plan revenue around.

Is a Google Business Profile enough on its own?

A Business Profile is necessary and worth keeping accurate, but it is a listing on Google's platform rather than a crawlable site of your own, and it holds a fraction of the detail a set of service pages can. If the only substantial description of what you do lives on somebody else's platform, the pages available to be surfaced belong to them.

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