The San Diego Contractor Trust Report

The problem you can’t solve with a search bar

When your AC dies in August, you do what everyone does. You search. You read some reviews. You call two or three companies that look legit and pick the one that feels right.

Here’s what that search doesn’t tell you: the state of California knows things about every licensed contractor that never show up on Google. Whether their license is active. Whether they’re bonded, and for how much. Whether they carry workers comp, which decides who’s liable if a tech gets hurt on your property.

We connected those two worlds. We took 860 licensed San Diego contractors, about three-quarters of them HVAC, and matched every state license record against what a homeowner can actually find online: their Google listing, their website, their Yelp page, their BBB record. Then we verified the matches by hand where it mattered.

This report is what we found.

Finding 1: Most licensed HVAC contractors are invisible online

65% of licensed, active San Diego HVAC contractors could not be verified to a confirmed online identity. That’s 423 of 648 HVAC license holders in our directory.

Sit with that for a second. When you search for an AC company, you are not choosing from the market. You’re choosing from the minority of it that you can see.

And the gap is not a gray area. Every one of the 541 contractors we couldn’t verify holds a clear, active CSLB license. And every single one of them, 100%, has no website and no confirmed Google Business listing. They’re real companies. The state can find them. You can’t.

It gets starker: 113 of them have nothing findable online at all. No website, no Google listing, no Yelp page, no BBB record. A licensed business and a phone number, and that’s it.

What this means for you: it does not mean these are bad contractors. Plenty of them are healthy businesses that run on referrals and never needed a website. What it means is that you have no way to check their story. No reviews to read. No track record to confirm. No way to know the license on the business card matches the truck in your driveway. You can’t trust what you can’t verify, and for most of the licensed market, you can’t verify anything.

That’s the gap this report exists to close.

Finding 2: The contractors you CAN verify are more solid than you’d guess

Here’s the good news. We graded the 319 contractors whose identity we could confirm, and the verified slice of this market is in strong shape:

• 100% hold a clear, active license. (That’s the baseline, but it’s worth saying: every graded contractor checks out with the state.)
• 99.7% have an active contractor’s bond. A bond means if the job goes wrong, you have a path to recourse.
• 100% have workers comp handled correctly. 92.5% carry an active policy; the rest are legitimately exempt, like sole owners with no employees. Why you care: if a tech is injured on your property and the company has no comp, that problem can become yours.
• The median graded contractor has been licensed for 13.7 years. A third have held their license for more than 20 years. These are not fly-by-night operations.

Across the full 860, the median is 11.1 years licensed. San Diego’s contractor base is more established than its online footprint suggests.

Finding 3: The tools homeowners are told to use don’t work very well

The BBB barely registers here. Only 3.5% of graded contractors with a BBB record are accredited. And among contractors who have a BBB letter grade at all, 88% have an A+. When nearly everyone gets the same grade, the grade can’t help you choose. The BBB tells you almost nothing about which San Diego contractor to hire.

Review platforms don’t always agree with each other. Among graded contractors rated on both Google and Yelp, about a third show a rating gap bigger than half a star between the two platforms. Same company, different story, depending on where you look.

Review depth varies wildly. The median graded contractor has 22 Google reviews. Only 28% have more than 100. A 4.8-star rating means something different on 12 reviews than on 400.

Finding 4: What a contractor’s website says is not the same as what they have

Among graded contractors with a website we could check (264 of them):

• Only 23% mention insurance anywhere on their site.
• 30% mention NATE certification. 4% mention EPA certification. 9% mention a manufacturer authorization.

Read those numbers carefully, because they cut both ways. A contractor whose site never mentions insurance may be fully covered and just never thought to say so. And a site that says “licensed and insured” is making a claim, not showing proof. Words on a homepage are free.

This is why we don’t score contractors on what their websites say. We used to include website claims in the TradeScore. We removed them, because a grade built partly on marketing copy isn’t a grade you should trust. Every point in a TradeScore now traces to data we can verify: state records, confirmed listings, real reviews, measured website performance.

What to actually do before you hire

Five minutes of checking beats five hours of regret:

1. 1
   Look up the license yourself.

   Go to cslb.ca.gov, click Check a License, and enter the number. Confirm the business name matches who you’re talking to, the status says active, and the bond and workers comp lines are current. The license page also shows any disciplinary history, citations or suspensions, which never shows up in a Google search. It’s free and takes two minutes.

2. 2
   Ask for a Certificate of Insurance.

   Not “are you insured?”, ask for the COI. It’s a standard one-page document their insurance carrier issues. Any covered contractor can send it in minutes. This is the difference between a claim and proof.

3. 3
   Get the license number on the quote.

   A legitimate contractor puts it there without being asked twice.

4. 4
   Ask who pulls the permit.

   For replacements and major work, the answer should be them, not you, and definitely not “we don’t need one.”

5. 5
   Read the reviews on more than one platform.

   If Google and Yelp tell very different stories, that’s worth a question.

We’ve done the first part of this work for every contractor in our directory. Every graded contractor on Trades Advisory has a verified identity, a confirmed state record, and a score built only on what we could check.