Industries › HVAC contractors
AI visibility for HVAC contractors
A heating and cooling contractor sits in our twelve-site cohort with the joint-lowest score in it: asked by name, no model could produce its website.
Client names are withheld. Not publishing client names without written permission is a declared gap on our own fact sheet, and these pages are not an exception to it. Every number below is from MARKETING_NOTES_AGENT_VISIBILITY.md, with its note number.
what we found
What agents got wrong in this trade
Zero of six, at almost zero confidence
Asked by name with no tools, 0 of 6 models produced the correct website, at mean confidence 0.05 (Note 27). The models were not wrong about this contractor. They had simply never heard of it, and said so.
What a trade contractor’s real audit moved
On a live trade contractor’s site we ran the same script before and after installing a fact block. “How long have you been in business” went from 1/5 to 5/5, and “do you do free estimates” from 0/5 to 4/5. Three other facts were already at ceiling and did not move (Note 30).
The gaps stayed shut, which is the useful part
Price and lead time were deliberately left out of that block, because the business had never published them. Both stayed unrecovered after the install, with no halo effect (Note 30). A partial fix produced a partial result — which is how you can tell the measurement is not flattering the intervention.
Emergency work is a discovery question
The failure that sits upstream of everything is the agent never reaching you at all (Note 14). For a trade with urgent demand, that is the whole enquiry.
the questions
The questions a buyer in this trade asks an assistant
These are the answers that belong in the bytes of your homepage, because an agent reads one page and answers from it — 57 of 64 cold visits across twelve sites read a single page and stopped (Note 27). Whatever is not on that page does not exist, however good the page four clicks down is.
- Do you charge for a call-out or an estimate, and how much?
- Are you licensed, and what is the licence number?
- Do you cover emergencies, at what hours, and what is the response time you will stand behind?
- Which brands and systems do you service, and which do you refuse?
- What does a maintenance plan include and what does it cost per year?
- How long have you been trading, and who is insured for what?
Licence numbers and hours are the two facts this trade already has written down somewhere and rarely puts where a machine reads. They are free wins: no new commitment, no new copy, just placement.
what we do about it
The fix, and what it is measured to do
You answer those questions once, in a profile a named person signs off. Eight surfaces are generated from that one file — the homepage fact block, a where-to-go index, a machine-readable fact sheet, an identity card, robots.txt pointers, structured data, and a tamper-evident version history — so no two surfaces can contradict each other. Three of five audited sites contradicted themselves before we started (Notes 28, 33).
Measured, on a controlled run: 78% of fact checks recovered with the block in place against 30% without it, and agents stopped after 1.1 pages on average (Note 41). On a live client site, two facts that had been unrecoverable went to full recovery and the two we deliberately left out stayed unrecovered, with no halo effect (Note 30).
Sources: MARKETING_NOTES_AGENT_VISIBILITY.md, Notes 27, 28, 30, 33, 41. Your site is not one of these sites: if the facts you are missing turn out to be already recovered at ceiling, we will tell you that and you should not buy the package.
other trades
Where else we have measured
Three pages, because three is how many of these trades sit in our own measurement cohort. When we have measured another, there will be a fourth page.
free audit
See what AI sees on your site
Your trade's version of this is a measurement, not an opinion. The free tier runs one model against your homepage and tells you what it could not find.
One model fetches your homepage and answers buyer questions from it. You get the recovery score and the specific answers it could not find. That is the whole free tier: it shows you the problem, and the fix package is not included.