Weeks of asking, comparing and reading, usually late at night once the children are asleep. That research increasingly starts with an assistant — and it answers with two or three names, in a sentence, with no page two.
A parent choosing childcare is doing the most cautious piece of consumer research they will ever do. They read the Ofsted report. They ask the local Facebook group. They visit three. And before any of that, they ask a question to find out who to look at in the first place. That first question is the one moving online fastest, because it is asked at half past ten at night by somebody who does not want to bother anyone. Being one of the names it returns is not the whole decision. It is the ticket to being considered at all.
Ages taken, opening hours, funded hours, wraparound, holiday cover, school pick-ups, whether you take under-twos. These are the filters a parent applies first and they are frequently nowhere in readable text.
A rating and a date, written in words on your own page, is one of the most citable things a setting can publish. A link to a PDF is not.
"Wraparound care for Neston Primary", "childminder who does the school run to Woodfall" — school-plus-service is how parents actually search, and it is almost never written down.
"GCSE maths, AQA", "A-level chemistry", "11+ CEM", "SEN and dyslexia support". A tutor page that says "all subjects, all levels" is a page that matches no search.
You cannot take a call in a room full of two-year-olds, and the parent ringing round for a September place will simply try the next setting on the list.
Your fee per year, your conversion, your numbers.
Roughly a year of part-time nursery. ⭐ And a place is not a transaction — a child usually stays years and a sibling usually follows, so one filled place is frequently a decade of fees. A tutor should change this to a term and a driving instructor to a course of lessons; the shape of the argument is the same.
We ask the four assistants the question your customers ask and send you their answers word for word. One report, no charge, no account. You cannot fix a thing you have not measured.
A UK number for the business, live in minutes, that is not the phone your family rings. And when you are ready, Optiman Answered picks it up when you cannot — takes the child’s age, the days needed and a number to ring back, and tells you straight away.
One answer is a coin toss; they vary by day, wording and location. So we ask the SAME questions again every 7, 14 or 28 days and show you the line. That is the difference between a curiosity and evidence.
We are not promising to put you top of anything, and we are careful here for an obvious reason: this is children, and no claim about a setting should ever come from us. We report what the assistants said, verbatim, and nothing more. We do not touch your Ofsted report, Childcare.co.uk or the council’s family information directory. ⚠ And the finding to brace for is the same one that makes this worth doing: assistants sometimes describe a setting inaccurately, or name one that has closed. Seeing what yours says about your town is often the more useful half of the report.
September is not January, and a waiting list is a snapshot. The settings that struggle are the ones that only become findable once a room has emptied — by which point the parents doing their research have already shortlisted somebody else.
They decide on those. They SHORTLIST on whatever comes back when they ask who is good locally — and increasingly they ask an assistant, which cannot read your Ofsted PDF unless somebody has written the rating out in words.
Often better, because those answers are emptier. "Childminder in Parkgate with a space" and "GCSE maths tutor near Chester" are asked constantly and hardly anyone has written a findable page.
It is a fair question and worth answering plainly. Nothing here writes copy about children or makes any claim about a setting. It tells you what four assistants already say about you, which parents are reading whether you look at it or not.
Nothing, and no account. Your setting name and your town is enough.
A number of your own that takes the age, the days and the number while you are with the children.
How a number worksTell us your business name, your town and what you do. We put the question your parents actually ask to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, send you what each one said word for word, and tell you what it would take to change it.