Answerank Research · August 2026

The State of AI Visibility in Residential HVAC

Homeowners have started asking ChatGPT, Google's AI and Perplexity who to call instead of scrolling Google results. So we measured what those assistants actually say. Between July 26 and August 1, 2026, we scanned 42 independent HVAC companies across Dallas–Fort Worth, Tucson, Boise, Greenville, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Colorado Springs, Oklahoma City and Spokane–Coeur d'Alene — asking all three engines the same 8 questions a homeowner would type, 1,008 answers in total.

42
independent HVAC companies scanned across 9 metro markets in 10 states.
1,008
AI answers analyzed — 8 real homeowner prompts × 3 engines per company.
31%
were never named by ChatGPT, Google's AI or Perplexity. Not once, in any answer.
17%

1. The average contractor appears in 1 of every 6 AI answers

Across 1,008 engine responses, the average company was named in just 17% of the answers to questions like “who should I call for AC repair near me?”. The winners are concentrated: in most metros, one or two companies soak up the majority of AI recommendations while everyone else splits the scraps.

74%

2. Three in four score under 40/100 on AI visibility

Our 0–100 score combines how often the engines name a company (62.5%) with a 10-point technical audit of whether AI systems can read and verify its website (37.5%). Median score across all 42 companies: 27. These are established businesses with trucks on the road — and near-zero presence in the channel homeowners are switching to.

95%

3. Almost nobody describes their services in a language AI can verify

40 of 42 companies have no Service structured data (JSON-LD) on their site, and 93% have no FAQ schema — the single content type AI assistants quote most readily. When an engine can't verify what you do and where, it recommends the company it can verify.

57%

4. More than half have no llms.txt

llms.txt is a plain-language summary written for AI models. It takes an afternoon to create. 24 of 42 companies don't have one — and 4 companies (10%) go further in the wrong direction: their robots.txt actively blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot from reading their site at all.

METHODOLOGY
Each company was scanned with the same 8 prompt variants (e.g. “best HVAC company in [city]”, “who should I call for emergency AC repair in [city]”) against ChatGPT, Google's AI (Gemini) and Perplexity — 24 live answers per company, recorded verbatim. Mentions are matched with fuzzy name matching to catch abbreviations. The technical audit checks 10 machine-readability factors: HTTPS, LocalBusiness/Service/FAQ structured data, llms.txt, AI-crawler access in robots.txt, NAP consistency and more. No synthetic or estimated data — every number above comes from a stored engine response.

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