The State of HVAC Search 2026: Where Leads Come From

What our own two data pulls recorded on 2026-08-17

We ran two first-party captures on a single day, and both record the endpoint, parameters and task identifiers needed to re-run them.

The first was an AI-visibility panel: 66 recorded answers from ChatGPT (gpt-5.5-2026-04-23) and Perplexity (sonar-pro), both with web search enabled, across 12 US metros and two prompt phrasings, captured inside a 5.5-minute window on 2026-08-17. Every one of the 66 answers named at least one specific HVAC company — 334 brand mentions covering 194 distinct brands, of which 125 were named in exactly one run. Multi-market brands took 10 of those 334 mentions. Directory pointers appeared in 7 of 66 answers and never replaced a named contractor. The full ledger, model parameters and 17 recorded limitations live in the 66-run method and raw ledger.

The second capture was Google itself: two live consumer result pages recorded through DataForSEO's SERP API — endpoint serp/google/organic/live/advanced, location United States, language en, desktop, recorded between 19:58 and 19:59 UTC on 2026-08-17 — for ac repair phoenix (task 08171958-1977-0139-0000-389ec5393d80) and furnace repair chicago (task 08171959-1977-0139-0000-bd7a82b9e45b). The licence probe quoted at the top of this page, state hvac license search, ran on the same endpoint and the same parameters (task 08171959-1977-0139-0000-daaadc010e28).

That capture is timestamped to the minute because a result page is a dated snapshot, not a standing fact. We had run the same three queries earlier the same day, at 16:20 UTC (Chicago task 08171620-1977-0139-0000-fd905832c7f8), and both metros returned different organic columns three and a half hours apart. Chicago moved the most: in the earlier run the Reddit thread held organic 1 outright, no City of Chicago page appeared anywhere in the nine organic results, and four of those nine slots were directories or user-generated content rather than three. Everything below describes the 19:58–19:59 UTC capture. A re-run at another hour — let alone another month — will return a different column, and that instability is itself one of the findings.

Both consumer pages put the local pack in the top three absolute positions:

Four observations from those two pages. Directories and user-generated content took three of nine organic slots in Phoenix (Yelp, YouTube, BBB) and three of nine in Chicago (Reddit, Yelp, Facebook), and in this capture a City of Chicago emergency heating assistance page held the top organic slot in Chicago as well — a row that was not on the page three and a half hours earlier. The Chicago result that did hold across both of our runs that day is the one worth acting on: a Reddit thread outranked every contractor website in the metro, in both captures. All four People Also Ask answers were returned as AI Overview elements rather than as page snippets — on both pages, not on one of them. And review counts run high on both surfaces: Four Seasons holds the Chicago pack's top slot with 30,000 ratings, and Parker & Sons, with 29,259, sits at organic position 5 in Phoenix.

Three contractor-owned domains appeared on both surfaces the same day: goettl.com and parkerandsons.com were cited 8 and 6 times in our AI panel and both rank organically for ac repair phoenix; fourseasonsheatingcooling.com was cited 6 times and held both the Chicago pack's top slot and an organic slot in the same capture. One non-contractor domain overlapped as well: reddit.com was the panel's most-cited domain at 66 citations and held a top-two organic slot in Chicago in both of our captures that day. That is overlap observed once, on two queries, on one day — not evidence that either surface causes the other.

What the demand side looks like

Search demand for HVAC service is large, seasonal and expensive. From our own keyword pull — [VENDOR — DataForSEO] Google Ads search volume, United States, pulled 2026-08-17, not a Google-published metric — ac repair returns 368,000 monthly searches at a $42.73 average CPC, ac repair near me 201,000, furnace repair 201,000, and hvac companies near me 110,000. The same pull records ac repair moving from 165,000 searches in December 2025 to 673,000 in July 2026 inside one 12-month window.

Three constraints we hold ourselves to. Google Ads groups close variants and returned identical rows for ac repair and air conditioner repair, so variant volumes must never be summed. A prior cross-check on this project found DataForSEO understating volume by roughly two to four times against Ahrefs for the same terms, so treat each figure as a floor. And DataForSEO's keyword difficulty is its own model — not Ahrefs KD, not a Google metric.

The four numbers everyone repeats, and where they actually come from

The most quoted HVAC marketing statistics on the internet have no sample size. We traced the four that appear most often:

Even a well-sampled figure gets misread. LocaliQ's home-services benchmark publishes $127.74 per lead for Air Conditioning Installation & Repair across 3,211 US campaigns run April 2024 to March 2025, and states that its "averages are technically median figures to account for outliers." That is a median of one reseller's campaigns, not an average contractor's cost.

Five steps turn any HVAC benchmark claim into something you can act on:

1. Find the sample. No n, no date, no dataset means no benchmark. Stop there.
2. Identify whose data it is. An agency's client accounts, a platform's users and a trade association's survey respondents are three different populations.
3. Check whether it is measured or recommended. Software vendors publish target values that get laundered into other articles as observed averages.
4. Check the date and the season. A summer booking rate is HVAC's lowest; a January cost per lead is not a July cost per lead.
5. Follow the citation to its end. If page A cites page B which cites page C which publishes no source, the number is an assertion wearing three coats.

What this page's own data cannot tell you

Our AI panel is a single-day snapshot with one observation per metro-prompt-engine cell in its 48-run main grid. It records what two engines said, never why, so it supports no claim about what earns an AI recommendation. Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot were not tested, and API endpoints are not identical to the consumer apps. Our two SERP captures are two queries at one recorded minute each, at a national location — and our own earlier run of the same queries the same day shows the columns moving inside a single afternoon, so no single row in that table should be read as a standing fact. The organic endpoint also returns no paid or Local Services Ads units — so the absence of ads in that table is a limit of the instrument, not a fact about the page. Any contractor-level conclusion needs that contractor's own booked-job data out of its own CRM, which this page does not have and does not substitute for.

Adoption, measured

BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey found that 45% of consumers used AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% last year — ChatGPT at 31% and Google AI Mode at 23%, making AI the third most-used recommendation source behind Google and Facebook and ahead of Yelp and TripAdvisor. The same survey recorded Google review usage slipping from 83% to 71%. The sample is 1,002 US adults via SurveyMonkey, with the AI-specific cuts drawn from the 455 respondents who used an AI tool for local recommendations, and the scope is local businesses of all categories, not HVAC.

Scorpion's 2026 State of Home Services Marketing Report found that 83% of homeowners start their search online and 22% now use AI tools such as ChatGPT to research or find recommendations. Read those two figures together: AI research usage is real and has not displaced online search. The same report found 80% of home services business leaders unsure how to appear in AI-driven search results. Scorpion surveyed 2,000 US homeowners and 944 operators across HVAC, plumbing, electrical, lawn, pest and roofing in late 2025 via Dynata — and Scorpion sells attribution software, so its operator figures are vendor-interested rather than neutral.

A citation is not a click

Pew Research Center's browsing study is the cleanest measurement of what an AI answer does to clicks. 18% of Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary; users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits where a summary appeared versus 15% of visits where none did; they clicked a link inside the summary on 1% of visits; and they ended the session on 26% of summary pages versus 16% without. Ahrefs, working from aggregated Google Search Console data across 300,000 keywords, found that an AI Overview correlates with a 58% lower average clickthrough rate for the top-ranking page, comparing December 2023 with December 2025. That is a correlation for position 1 on informational keywords, and Ahrefs' own earlier figure for the same measurement was 34.5% — the number moved in one year, which is itself the point.

For an HVAC contractor the operational reading is narrow and specific: presence in an AI answer is worth having because the answer names companies, not because it sends traffic. Our panel recorded 334 brand mentions across 66 answers. A named company in an answer a homeowner reads is a brand impression and often a phone number; it is rarely a session in analytics.

What the engines cite when they name an HVAC company

Across the 66 answers, the two engines returned 767 citation URLs covering 465 unique URLs on 200 domains. The class mix is lopsided:

The two engines differ enough that averaging them misleads: Perplexity returned 19.91 citations per answer against ChatGPT's 3.33, and ChatGPT cited a contractor's own website twice in 33 answers. The top five cited domains were reddit.com (66), consumeraffairs.com (48), expertise.com (39), serviceagent.ai (37) and angi.com (33). Those buckets are analyst-assigned, and a different analyst would move some domains between them.

Volatility is the other half of the picture. SISTRIX measured weekly source replacement of 5% in AI Overviews, 56% in Google AI Mode and 74% in ChatGPT Search across 82,619 prompts over 17 weeks from 17 December 2025 to 8 April 2026. SISTRIX founder Johannes Beus put the consequence plainly: "a single citation placement is not a reproducible result but merely a snapshot," and "GEO is a continuous process, not a one-off optimisation with permanent results." Our own repeat runs agree in direction. Every repeat cell in our panel was recorded inside a window of under five minutes — the three ChatGPT cells span 3 minutes 53 seconds, 4 minutes 7 seconds and 4 minutes 34 seconds, inside the panel's overall 5.5-minute window — and across those four repeats of an identical question, ChatGPT's answers overlapped at a mean pairwise Jaccard of 0.2519, Jaccard here being the share of company names two answers hold in common, where 1.0 is an identical list. Perplexity's repeats held at 0.798, and only one of six repeated cells kept the same first-named company all four times. If you want the phrasing homeowners actually use when they ask these questions, that is covered in how homeowners phrase HVAC questions to AI tools.

What each surface occupied on two live result pages

On both pages we recorded at 19:58–19:59 UTC, the local pack held absolute ranks 1 through 3, and the first contractor-owned organic result appeared at absolute rank 4 in Phoenix and absolute rank 7 in Chicago. The six items above Chicago's first contractor website in that capture were the three local-pack listings, a City of Chicago emergency heating assistance page, a People Also Ask block whose four answers were all AI Overview elements, and a Reddit thread. In our 16:20 UTC capture of the same query the first contractor website also sat at absolute rank 7, but behind a different six: the same three local-pack listings, a Reddit thread, the same People Also Ask block, and a Yelp category page. What sat in the way changed inside one afternoon; how deep the first contractor website sat did not. ACCA's contractor survey ranks Google Business profiles first among lead sources, consistent with that page geometry — and consistency is not proof, since both could reflect the same underlying preference for proximity and reviews.

What the paid lanes cost, with sample sizes attached

Every HVAC cost-per-lead figure in circulation comes from a vendor's own accounts. That does not make them useless; it makes the sample line mandatory:

The single most decision-relevant row is the first. SearchLight Digital's February 2026 benchmark reports HVAC Local Services Ads at $51 per lead with a 44.0% book rate and puts Local Services Ads at $53 per lead against $104 blended Google Ads — "49% less expensive" — with cost per paying customer at $233 versus $472. Treat it as one agency's client book for one month, because that is what it is. The second-most useful row explains itself: 99 Calls records AC installation leads at $353 against AC repair at $289 despite cheaper clicks, and states why — "the higher lead cost isn't driven by click prices. It's driven by lower conversion rates." A fuller channel table with every sample size and close rate sits in the sourced HVAC benchmark tables.

Two Local Services Ads rules that changed under contractors

Most HVAC marketing content on the web still describes a version of Local Services Ads that no longer exists. Google's own documentation records two changes that invalidate the standard advice:

1. One badge, not two. A single Google Verified badge replaces the previous advertiser badging, and Google states that "Local Services Ads ranking won't be affected by this change." Advice to "get Google Guaranteed" describes a retired badge tier.
2. The consumer money-back guarantee is gone. Google is discontinuing the Money Back Guarantee, with reimbursement limited to services booked before December 7, 2025 and requests submitted within 30 days of initial service completion. Selling homeowners on that guarantee sells something Google has withdrawn.

Google also publishes no HVAC lead price for Local Services Ads. Any dollar figure you see is a vendor estimate, and it belongs in a sentence that names the vendor.

The same study records three sales-side patterns that move close rates more than any channel choice: presenting four or more proposal options increases close rates by 10% and shifts premium equipment sales from 26% to 42%; flat-rate pricing on service calls yields average net profits of 7% against 4% for other methods; and offering financing on every job finances 35% of sales versus 17% when offered selectively, with close rates increasing by 11%. Only 28% of contractors lead with monthly payments rather than total price.

Service work is also carrying more of the revenue than it did. Housecall Pro's platform analysis reports repair revenue share rising from 21.6% of full-year revenue in 2021 to 31.3% in 2025, average repair revenue per job rising from $818 to $1,205 — 47% nominally, 24% after inflation — and repairs per organization rising from 103 in 2022 to more than 170 in 2025. That is roughly 11% of HVAC job volume on one platform, about 2 million jobs, and the publisher states outright that the findings "should not be interpreted as representative of all HVAC activity on the platform or as benchmarks for individual businesses."

Two demand-side expectations complete the picture, both from Scorpion's homeowner survey: 87% of homeowners will not hire a business rated below 4 stars, and 56% want 24/7 scheduling or a way to communicate after hours while 66% of businesses call after-hours service their top challenge. The businesses Google placed in both local packs we recorded were open 24 hours and carried between 930 and 30,000 ratings. Speed and reviews are not marketing tactics in this market; they are the qualification to be shown at all.

Prediction 4 is the one already moving. Scorpion announced on July 23, 2026 that it is a technology partner supporting advertising in ChatGPT, able to create and manage ChatGPT ad campaigns for local-business clients. Its own SVP of Advertising, Ashlie Kim, described the demand: "Clients have been asking me about ChatGPT Ads almost every day for months." When a channel gets an ad unit, organic presence in it stops being free real estate.

Three predictions we refuse to make. We will not predict a ranking, because Google states flatly that "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google" and that if an agency "guarantee[s] you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else." We will not predict AI citations for any named company, because SISTRIX's churn measurements and our own repeat runs both show single placements are snapshots. And we will not predict that any file or markup unlocks AI visibility on Google: Google's optimization guide states that "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search," that "There's no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it," and that "seeking inauthentic 'mentions' across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem" — while still recommending structured data for rich-result eligibility.

Entry speed is worth one number. Semrush published 81 test pages and found 29 (36%) cited in Google AI Mode within 24 hours, eight cited by ChatGPT Search in that window, and 21 (26%) still cited in AI Mode by day 30 — on a blog with an Authority Score of 84 that Semrush says was given "the best possible conditions to succeed." A new HVAC site should plan against the shape of that curve, not its values: entry is possible, retention is not automatic.

This page gets re-measured once a year against the same prompt panel and the same probe queries, with the predictions above marked pass or fail in public. That measurement work — what gets sampled, how often, what counts as movement — is what we run for HVAC companies through our GEO measurement service for HVAC contractors, and the standing panel behind it belongs to the HVAC-only agency that publishes this report.