66% of what UK horse buyers actually search for can't be searched for at all

Ask anyone who has bought a horse what they were really looking for, and height rarely comes up first. They'll talk about whether it loads quietly. Whether it's the right horse for a nervous rider or a confident one. Whether it's had a life that's made it sensible, or a life that's made it complicated.

And none of those are able to be filtered on a horse classifieds site.

To find out how big that gap actually is, Herdspace tracked genuine buyer requirement needs - the 'wanted' posts people write when the search boxes on existing platforms don't get them what they need. Each requirement mentioned was categorised, then checked against the searchable fields offered by the major UK platforms: height, age, colour, gender, discipline, price and location.

The requirements that fell outside existing search fields clustered into a small number of recurring themes:

Temperament and confidence level: 'Quiet, 'sensible,' 'not spooky,' 'safe for a nervous rider' - described constantly, searchable nowhere.

Rider suitability and life stage: Buyers regularly specified things like 'coming back into riding after a break,' 'first horse after a lifetime on ponies,' or 'wants a project, not a finished horse' - context no dropdown captures.

Experience and exposure, not just discipline: 'Been to shows and coped,' 'hacked alone and in company,' 'seen a bit of the world' - a horse's lived experience, as distinct from what discipline it's schooled in.

Handling and everyday behaviour: Loading, catching, standing for the vet and farrier - the practical, not-so-glamorous stuff that determines whether ownership is easy or exhausting, and almost never appears as a searchable attribute.

Compatibility over category: Buyers weren't asking 'what discipline' so much as 'will this suit me' - and this is rarely a filtering question.

Height, age, colour and discipline are still useful. They're just answering a different, smaller question than the one most buyers are actually asking.

It isn't that sellers don't know this information. Most of it lives somewhere in a listing - buried in a paragraph of free text, mentioned in a phone call, or only surfacing once a buyer asks the right question. The problem is structural: classifieds platforms were built around the attributes that are easy to standardise into a form, not the attributes that actually predict whether a horse and rider will suit each other.

That's what pushes buyers off-platform entirely and into social groups, writing 'wanted' posts and hoping someone happens to see them. It's also what makes disclosure - or the lack of it - such a common source of buyer disappointment after a sale. A horse can tick every filter and still be the wrong horse, because the filters were never measuring the right thing.

"When I was searching for a horse for my daughter, all I could actually filter for was height, age, colour and discipline," says Herdspace founder Tracey Jones, whose own search prompted the research. "None of that told me whether he'd be safe for her to lead in from the field on a windy day, or how he'd cope the first time he went somewhere new. I ended up doing what everyone does - scrolling, messaging, guessing. That's not a search problem you can fix by adding one more dropdown. It's the wrong model."

For buyers, it explains a familiar frustration: platforms that return dozens of technically-matching results, few of which are actually right. For sellers, it's a case for describing horses properly rather than reducing them to spec - the buyer who reads past '14.2hh, bay, novice ride' is the one who converts.

Herdspace was built around this finding directly. Instead of narrowing horses down by fixed categories, buyers search in their own words - 'quiet cob, safe for a nervous teenager, good to load' - and the platform matches on what's actually written into the listing, not just what's ticked in a box. It's a different starting model, built for the 66% that height and colour were never going to capture.

Herdspace is a UK marketplace for buying and selling horses, built around natural language search. Browse horses for sale or list a horse at herdspace.co.uk.