Describe what you're after - a street, a council, a type of work, a date range. Plota reads it and runs a real search across 388 councils.
Prefer to search by postcode, town, or street? Use standard search →
A postcode, town, city, county, region, or nation.
Say on a road for that street, or around it for a radius.
Extensions, new homes, change of use, listed buildings, trees, solar.
Basement, dormer, HMO, swimming pool, drive-thru, a brand name.
This year, last 3 months, since March - approved, refused, or pending.
Smart search is a natural-language way to search UK planning applications. It uses a large language model to read your query in plain English and translate the messy, free-form way people describe things into Plota's structured planning data - councils, categories, dates, status, road names, and keywords. The model handles the interpretation; everything after that is Plota's own search running against real applications.
It's closely related. Rather than relying on exact keyword matching, smart search interprets the meaning of your query - the natural-language, semantic-search idea of understanding intent, not just matching words. So "homes turned into flats in Bristol" and "change of use to residential, Bristol" land on the same structured filters. You can always see exactly how your plain-English query was understood, and adjust it.
Yes. Every filter it picks up shows as a chip at the top of your results - council, category, dates, keywords, status, road. If anything reads wrong, or you want to widen or narrow it, each chip is editable and removable. Nothing happens behind your back.
Places (postcode, town, city, county, region, or nation), councils by name, roads (on a street for that road, or around it for a radius), types of work, specific features like a basement or an HMO, date ranges, status, and reference numbers - all in one natural-language sentence. A few examples of what you can type:
Yes. Smart search covers both live and historical applications. Ask for a specific year or a date range, for example "extensions in Hackney in 2019", and Plota searches the archive back to 2016.
Yes. Every results page has a Get alerts button, so any search you like can become a daily, weekly, or fortnightly email when new matching applications appear.