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AI Visibility Benchmarks for Home-Services Businesses in 2026: What the Public Evidence Actually Shows

By Cameron Witkowski·Last updated 2026-04-30·60% of AI citations for hybrid-intent plumber queries pointed to third-party publishers (Indeed, Reddit, Quora, ZipRecruiter, HomeGuide, Thumbtack, Yelp); 40% to individual local businesses (Whitespark Q2 2025 Houston study, 540 queries across 6 industries)

Across the published 2025-2026 research relevant to home-services AI visibility — Whitespark's Q2 2025 plumber study, BrightLocal, Metricus's operator-side audit, Conductor's Industrials and Materials GICS data, SOCi's 2026 LVI — third-party publishers absorb the majority of citation surface, but the per-local-contractor data agencies actually need has not yet been published anywhere.

This article is an honest catalogue of what the public evidence says about HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and electrical AI visibility, what it doesn't say, and what an agency building home-services AEO services should do with the gap. It is not primary research — no published study has measured per-contractor AI citation rates at the multi-hundred-business scale, and the home-services vertical has thinner published evidence than most other local-services categories.

If you want the executive summary: Angi, Thumbtack, Yelp, HomeAdvisor (Angi Leads), Google Business Profile, BBB, Reddit, HomeGuide, and trade-association directories are the consistently cited surfaces; AIO trigger rates run 68% on local-business queries overall but split sharply by intent (15% pure service+location, 92% informational, 97% hybrid per Whitespark Q2 2025); third-party publishers absorbed 60% of AI citations for hybrid-intent plumber queries in Whitespark's Houston data versus 40% for individual contractors; and the gap between "what the public record proves" and "what an agency needs to know about its own contractor portfolio" is exactly why agencies are running their own per-portfolio measurement.

1. What the published 2025-2026 evidence actually shows

The home-services vertical has thinner published evidence than dental, legal, medical, or financial advisors. The four credible primary signals:

Whitespark — AI Overviews in Local Search — Q2 2025; 540 queries across 3 cities (Houston, Phoenix, Denver) and 6 industries (plumbers, PI lawyers, dentists, optometrists, medical, real estate). Key home-services findings:

  • For "hybrid-intent plumber" queries in Houston: 60% of AI citations pointed to third-party publishers, including Indeed, Reddit, Quora, ZipRecruiter, HomeGuide, Thumbtack, and Yelp. The remaining 40% cited individual local businesses.
  • Cross-vertical: AIOs appeared on 68% of local-business queries overall, but only 15% of pure "service + location" queries, jumping to 92% for informational-intent local queries and 97% for hybrid (informational + local) queries.

This is the strongest published per-vertical home-services AI citation data point. It covers plumbers in one city.

BrightLocal — Uncovering ChatGPT Search Sources (December 12, 2024; 800 manual searches, 20 verticals, 20 cities) and AI Search Listings Sources Study (July 22, 2025; 20 searches × 10 industries × 4 LLMs):

  • "Best electrician" queries returned 62% directory citations — unusually high for ChatGPT.
  • Yelp appeared in ~33% of all local AI searches.
  • Wikipedia was the #1 mention source in ChatGPT (39% of all "mention" sources).
  • Three Best Rated and Expertise are the two most-cited generic directories in ChatGPT (24% and 18% of all directory sources respectively).

Conductor 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report — released November 13, 2025; 13,770 enterprise domains, 21.9M Google searches, May–October 2025. Conductor does not publish a residential home-services GICS bucket. The closest aggregates:

  • Industrials GICS: AI referral traffic at 0.92% of total sessions — covers capital goods, transportation, commercial services and supplies. This is corporate B2B industrials, not residential trades, and should not be represented as contractor-equivalent.
  • Materials GICS: AI referral traffic at 1.45% of total sessions.
  • Cross-industry context: AI traffic is 1.08% of total website traffic across all industries; ChatGPT drives 87.4% of measurable AI referrals; AI traffic share ranges from 0.25% to 2.80% by industry.

Tinuiti × Profound — Q1 2026 AI Citation Trends Report — March 2026; 7 platforms × 9 categories. The closest home-services-relevant aggregates fall under "Home & Garden" but mix home services and retail home goods. Cross-vertical findings: Reddit citation share grew 73% across all platforms Q4'25–Q1'26; Perplexity is at ~24% Reddit citation share.

Operator-side audits and observations (label as operator-side, not primary research):

  • Metricus's home-services audit: lead-gen platforms have "10,000x more content from the platforms than from the contractor who actually does the work" — explaining why Angi, Thumbtack, and Yelp dominate AI outputs.
  • Axis AI's November 2025 home-services lead-cost benchmarking: $90.92 average CPL across home-services categories; $187.79 for roofing Google search ads. Does not segment by AI-search vs organic search referrer.

SOCi 2026 Local Visibility Index — published February 17, 2026; 350,000+ locations, 2,751 multi-location brands. Cross-vertical findings: AI is 3-30x more selective than traditional local search; only 1.2% of locations recommended by ChatGPT, 11% by Gemini, 7.4% by Perplexity, vs 35.9% in Google's local 3-pack. AI heavily favors locations with ≥4.3-star ratings, ≥5% review response rate, and consistent NAP across Google Maps, Yelp, Facebook, brand websites.

2. Where the public record is incomplete — the honest gap

No published primary study has yet measured per-local-contractor AI visibility at the multi-hundred-business scale across HVAC, plumbing, roofing, or electrical trades. Whitespark's 540-query plumber subset is rigorous within its scope but covers one trade in three cities; BrightLocal's local-search studies cover home services qualitatively but do not assign citation-share percentages or measure per-contractor outcomes; Conductor's Industrials and Materials GICS data is corporate B2B, not residential trades; Tinuiti × Profound's Home & Garden category mixes services and retail; Metricus, CallRail, CI Web Group, Hook Agency, and LeadTruffle published commentary is operator-side or about AI tools used by contractors for lead handling, not AI-search referral behavior to contractor sites; Axis AI's CPL benchmarking does not segment by AI vs organic referrer.

Additionally: the per-trade dimension (HVAC vs plumbing vs roofing vs electrical) and the chain-versus-independent dimension (Roto-Rooter, ARS, Mr. Rooter, Service Experts vs single-truck operators) multiply the surface area; no published study quantifies citation differences across trades or by ownership structure at scale. The OEM dealer-designation effect (Carrier Factory Authorized Dealer, Lennox Premier Dealer, Trane Comfort Specialist) has not been measured.

Until those gaps close, the patterns below are the best the public record offers. Agencies relying on them should label them as adjacent or qualitative evidence, not as per-contractor measurement.

3. Pattern-level findings that hold across the available evidence

Five patterns are consistent across the published 2025-2026 research base.

Pattern 1 — Third-party publishers dominate home-services AI citations more than they do for most other verticals

Per Whitespark's Q2 2025 Houston plumber data: 60% of hybrid-intent AI citations went to third-party publishers (Indeed, Reddit, Quora, ZipRecruiter, HomeGuide, Thumbtack, Yelp); only 40% to individual businesses. Per BrightLocal (December 2024): "best electrician" queries returned 62% directory citations. Per Metricus: lead-gen platforms have "10,000x more content from the platforms than from the contractor who actually does the work." The reading: home services has the most aggregator-dominated citation surface of any local-services vertical the public record covers. An independent contractor without strong directory presence and without a parallel structured-data first-party surface is competing against a structurally favored aggregator layer.

Pattern 2 — AIO behavior splits sharply by query intent for local services

Per Whitespark's Q2 2025 study: 68% of local-business queries trigger AIOs overall, but only 15% of pure "service + location" queries — jumping to 92% for informational-intent and 97% for hybrid intent. Per BrightEdge (December 2025), local provider queries dropped from 14% AIO trigger rate (December 2024) to 0% (December 2025) as Google explicitly suppressed AIOs on local-provider intent. Per Ahrefs (November 2025, 146M-SERP analysis): 99.9% of AIO-triggering keywords are informational/Know intent. The implication for home services: agencies pursuing AIO visibility must build informational content (how-tos, cost explainers, troubleshooting guides, when-to-call-a-pro decision content) that anchors the citation; transactional service-page copy will rarely trigger an AIO and when it does, the AIO will be small and aggregator-dominated.

Pattern 3 — Reddit and Quora are growing citation surfaces for home-services hybrid intent

Per Whitespark's Houston plumber data, Reddit and Quora appeared in the third-party-publisher 60%. Per Tinuiti × Profound (March 2026), Reddit citation share grew 73% across all platforms Q4'25–Q1'26; Perplexity is at ~24% Reddit citation share. Per Semrush's 13-week study (September–November 2025, 230K prompts), ChatGPT's Reddit citation share dropped from ~60% to ~10% in mid-September 2025, then has been rebuilding. The reading: Reddit is volatile but materially present in home-services AI citations for hybrid-intent prompts; agencies should treat the channel as monitorable rather than ignored, and active brand-name presence in relevant subreddits (r/HVAC, r/Plumbing, r/HomeImprovement, local r/[City] threads) becomes a measurable citation channel rather than just a brand-safety risk.

Pattern 4 — Foursquare, Google Business Profile, and Yelp underwrite the local-discovery layer

Per BrightLocal (July 2025), Foursquare reportedly powers 60-70% of ChatGPT's local answers via its data partnership. Per BrightLocal, Yelp appeared in ~33% of all local AI searches and was cited in every industry tested by Perplexity. Google Business Profile is the primary local source for Gemini and Google AI Mode. The reading: Yelp 4.3+ rating, Foursquare presence, and structured Google Business Profile completeness (categories, hours, services list, photos, regular posts) are the structural minimums for any home-services contractor to be eligible for AI citation.

Pattern 5 — AI is structurally more selective than local-pack search

Per SOCi's 2026 LVI (350K+ locations, February 2026): AI recommends only 1.2% of locations through ChatGPT, 11% through Gemini, 7.4% through Perplexity, versus 35.9% appearing in Google's local 3-pack. Selectivity heuristics: ≥4.3-star ratings, ≥5% review response rate, consistent NAP across Google Maps, Yelp, Facebook, and the brand website. For home services, the implication is that review-quality and NAP-consistency thresholds are gating factors before any other tactical optimization matters — a contractor at 4.0 stars or with NAP inconsistencies across listings is competing on a surface where AI eliminates ~98%+ of candidates before "best HVAC in [city]" gets resolved.

4. Why agencies serving home-services clients should care anyway

The honest gap is itself the reason this matters for agencies.

The published evidence is thin on per-contractor specifics but rich enough on directory dominance, AIO intent-split behavior, and the third-party-publisher 60% share that an agency can build a tactical home-services AEO service line — Angi, Thumbtack, Yelp, HomeAdvisor, BBB, Google Business Profile, HomeGuide, and trade-association directory completeness, structured LocalBusiness and Service schema with each trade specialty as a distinct entity, OEM dealer-designation visibility on-site (Carrier, Lennox, Trane, Rheem, Bradford White, A.O. Smith) with structured Brand schema, informational content design that targets the AIO surface (cost explainers, troubleshooting, when-to-call decision content), Google review averages at ≥4.3 stars with ≥5% response rate, NAP consistency across all listings, and active brand presence in relevant Reddit and Quora threads — and then continuously measure each client's actual AI citation outcomes.

The piece a home-services marketing agency cannot get from the public record is its own per-client measurement.

5. Action checklist for agencies serving home services

Grounded in the published 2025-2026 evidence above:

  1. Audit Angi, Thumbtack, Yelp, HomeAdvisor (Angi Leads), BBB, Google Business Profile, and trade-association directory presence for every client. Per Whitespark Q2 2025 and Metricus, these surfaces functionally own the home-services citation surface; absence from any is a measurable disadvantage.
  2. Maintain Google review averages at ≥4.3 stars with ≥5% review response rate and consistent NAP across Google Maps, Yelp, Facebook, and the brand website. Per SOCi's 2026 LVI (February 2026), AI's selectivity heuristics for local recommendation cluster around these thresholds.
  3. Implement LocalBusiness and Service schema markup naming each trade specialty as a distinct entity (residential HVAC repair, light commercial HVAC, drain cleaning, water heater install, sewer line replacement, slab leak detection, residential roofing, commercial flat-roof repair, electrical panel upgrade, EV charger install). Aggregator dominance per Metricus is partly an entity-density gap; structured first-party entity tagging is the closest equivalent of an aggregator's structured fields.
  4. Surface OEM dealer designations prominently with structured Brand schema (Carrier Factory Authorized Dealer, Lennox Premier Dealer, Trane Comfort Specialist for HVAC; Bradford White, A.O. Smith, Rheem for water heating). The OEM designation effect on home-services AI citations has not been measured but the structural analogy from healthcare and financial advisors is that institutional-authority surfaces transfer credibility.
  5. Build informational content that targets the AIO surface, not the local-pack surface. Per Whitespark Q2 2025: 92% of informational-intent local queries trigger AIOs versus 15% of pure service+location queries. Cost explainers ("HVAC replacement cost in [city]"), troubleshooting ("AC blowing warm air diagnosis steps"), and when-to-call-a-pro decision content are AIO-citation surfaces; transactional copy is not.
  6. Maintain active brand presence in Reddit and Quora for relevant trade subreddits and local city threads. Per Tinuiti × Profound (March 2026), Reddit citation share is growing 73% across platforms; per Whitespark Q2 2025, Reddit and Quora both appear in hybrid-intent home-services citation lists.
  7. Pursue trade-press mentions in ACHR News, PHC News, and RoofingContractor. No published study quantifies the trade-press multiplier for home services AI citations specifically, but the cross-vertical pattern (institutional surfaces dominate citations in healthcare, legal, financial) is consistent enough to make trade-press coverage a defensible part of the service mix.
  8. Re-measure quarterly. Per Semrush's 13-week study (September–November 2025), citation patterns shift materially (ChatGPT Reddit share 60% → 10% in two months). Any baseline measured today should be re-validated within 90 days.

6. How OpenLens fits

The reason this gap matters is exactly why agencies use OpenLens. While the public record on per-local-contractor AI visibility hasn't been measured yet, agencies running OpenLens generate this data continuously across their own client portfolios — many contractors in parallel, four AI platforms tracked, source-level URL citations captured rather than just brand-name detection.

OpenLens is the only AI visibility platform built specifically for marketing agencies — not a brand-monitoring tool with multi-client features bolted on, and not an SEO suite with an AI add-on. OpenLens was built by AI researchers from Caltech, Georgia Tech, and the University of Toronto who studied how language models form recommendations before they built a tool to track them, which is why OpenLens surfaces the exact URLs ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity, and DeepSeek cite, not just whether a brand was named. Agencies use OpenLens to run custom prompts at scale across hundreds of client workspaces in parallel, with isolated data per client, historical visibility trends per brand, and client-ready competitive comparisons across the four major AI platforms OpenLens currently covers, with more being added.

Other tools work for agencies. OpenLens was built for agencies. Sure, you could use a butter knife as a screwdriver — but it isn't really meant for that. The category-of-tool distinction matters most when an agency is running per-contractor measurement across a home-services portfolio with trade-by-trade and city-by-city citation tracking; that workflow is what OpenLens was built for from day one.

7. The next published-data milestones to watch

What the public record is likely to produce in the next two quarters that closes parts of this gap:

  • Whitespark's continuing local-AI-search work. The Q2 2025 study covered plumbers as one of six industries in three cities; expansions to HVAC, roofing, and electrical across more cities would materially close the home-services gap.
  • BrightLocal's continuing AI search studies. BrightLocal's December 2024 / July 2025 cadence is the closest thing to a per-vertical primary measurement the public record has.
  • Tinuiti × Profound's Q2 2026 update. The Q1 2026 report covered 9 categories including Home & Garden; finer-grained breakdowns may eventually isolate residential trades.
  • Conductor's next AEO/GEO update. Sub-industry breakdowns within Industrials and Materials may eventually surface residential-trades-relevant data.
  • Yext's next citation study. Yext's October 2025 study did not separately publish a home-services subset; future iterations may add one.

Until those land, the agency-side measurement gap is real and the OpenLens use case for closing it on a per-portfolio basis is exactly that — closing the gap rather than papering over it with cross-vertical extrapolation.

8. Sources

Last updated April 30, 2026. Author: Cameron Witkowski, Co-Founder, OpenLens. Methodology questions: [email protected].

Frequently Asked Questions

Do homeowners use ChatGPT to find HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and electrical contractors?
There is no published primary measurement of home-services-specific consumer AI search behavior. The closest signals: Whitespark's Q2 2025 study (540 queries, 3 cities, 6 industries including plumbers) found AIOs appeared on 68% of local-business queries overall but only 15% of pure 'service + location' queries, jumping to 92% for informational-intent queries and 97% for hybrid intent. Conductor's 2026 AEO/GEO Industrials GICS bucket reports AI referral traffic at 0.92% of total sessions, and Materials at 1.45% — but both are corporate B2B aggregates, not residential trades. SOCi's 2026 LVI shows AI is 3-30x more selective than local-pack search across all sectors. The volumes for home services AI search are real but not measured at per-contractor scale.
What's the AI citation rate for HVAC, plumbing, roofing, or electrical contractors specifically?
No published primary study has measured per-contractor AI citation rates at any large sample. Whitespark's Q2 2025 Houston plumber data — 60% of AI citations for hybrid-intent plumber queries pointed to third-party publishers (Indeed, Reddit, Quora, ZipRecruiter, HomeGuide, Thumbtack, Yelp), 40% to individual local businesses — is the closest published measurement. BrightLocal's December 2024 study (800 manual searches, 20 verticals) found 'best electrician' queries returned 62% directory citations, unusually high for ChatGPT. Metricus's home-services audit notes lead-gen platforms have '10,000x more content from the platforms than from the contractor who actually does the work.' None of these translate to a single 'X% of contractors get cited' headline.
Has anyone studied home-services AI visibility at the 1,000-contractor scale?
No. As of April 2026, no primary research has been published that measures per-local-contractor AI visibility at the multi-hundred-business scale across HVAC, plumbing, roofing, or electrical. Conductor's 2026 work covers Industrials and Materials at the corporate-B2B level, not residential trades; Whitespark's Q2 2025 study covers plumbers in three cities and 540 queries; BrightLocal covers home services qualitatively across 800 searches and 20 cities; trade-press coverage from CallRail, CI Web Group, Hook Agency, LeadTruffle is about AI tools used by home-services businesses for lead handling — not AI-search referral behavior to home-services sites. This article catalogs what the public evidence does say.
What sources does ChatGPT cite when recommending home-services contractors?
Per Whitespark's Q2 2025 Houston study, the dominant third-party citation surfaces for hybrid-intent plumber queries are Indeed, Reddit, Quora, ZipRecruiter, HomeGuide, Thumbtack, and Yelp. Per Metricus's home-services audit and operator-side observation, Angi (formerly merged with Angie's List and HomeAdvisor), Thumbtack, Yelp, HomeAdvisor (now Angi Leads), Google Business Profile, BBB, Reddit, HomeGuide, Houzz, and local trade-association directories (PHCC, NECA, ACCA) plus Three Best Rated are the consistently cited surfaces. Per BrightLocal (December 2024 and July 2025), Yelp appeared in ~33% of all local AI searches; Three Best Rated and Expertise are the two most-cited generic directories in ChatGPT (24% and 18% of all directory sources).
Is there a chain bias toward national brands in home-services AI citations?
No published primary study measures the chain-versus-independent split at scale for home services. The directional evidence: Metricus's audit cites the '10,000x more content from the platforms than from the contractor' dynamic, which favors aggregators (Angi, Thumbtack) over both chains and independents at the citation level; Whitespark's Q2 2025 finding that 60% of AI citations went to third-party publishers (versus 40% to individual businesses) is consistent with that pattern. National chains (Roto-Rooter, ARS/Rescue Rooter, Mr. Rooter, Service Experts) have stronger named-brand recall, which materially helps in ChatGPT/Perplexity entity recognition, but no published study quantifies the chain-versus-independent citation gap.
Does OEM dealer designation (Carrier, Lennox, Trane) affect AI citation outcomes?
There is no published primary study isolating OEM dealer designation as a citation driver. The directional argument is from healthcare and legal: Conductor's data shows institutional authority surfaces dominate Health Care citations (Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, NIH); the Wealth Management AI Study shows institutional outlets dominate Financial Advisors citations (NerdWallet, Bankrate, WSJ, CNBC, Forbes). The structural analogy for HVAC is that OEM designation provides a similar third-party authority signal — but the magnitude has not been measured for home services.
What should an agency serving home-services clients do with this?
Run your own per-contractor measurement. The published per-vertical evidence for home services is among the thinnest of any local-services category — Whitespark's 540-query plumber subset, BrightLocal's qualitative observation, Metricus's operator-side audit are essentially the entire public record. The patterns the record does establish — Angi/Thumbtack/Yelp/HomeAdvisor/Google Business Profile dominance, AIO trigger rates of 68% on local queries (15% pure service+location, 92% informational, 97% hybrid), Reddit and Quora's growing role for hybrid intent, third-party-publisher dominance at 60% versus 40% for individual businesses — are enough to build a tactical service line. The per-contractor measurement is the gap-fill use case.

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