The air conditioning quit on the hottest afternoon of the year, so they asked the neighbour, typed ac repair near me into their phone, and called the first two companies that looked like they would answer. Whoever picked up won the job.
That search still runs 100,000 times a month in the United States. It is still one of the ways a homeowner finds you.
The second route is the one that changed. They now open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity, or read the AI summary sitting above Google's results, and describe the problem the way they would say it out loud: my AC is running but the air is not cold and it is 98 degrees, what do I do and who should I call. They get back one answer with two or three companies named in it, and those are the ones that get dialled.
Both routes are live and both end in a service call. On the second one, being on page one does not get you very far on its own, because the answer names only a few companies and most people never scroll past it.
Both routes read the same pages. Google's crawler and the AI crawlers fetch the same website and look at the same headings, the same answers and the same evidence that you know what you are doing.
The page that earns you the ranking is usually the page that earns you the recommendation inside AI answers. A clear page explaining why an AC runs without cooling, what a homeowner can check themselves and when to stop and call somebody, is what puts you at position three on Google, and it is the same page an assistant reads before it tells a homeowner to book a service call with you.
Keep focusing on SEO only and you pick up the rankings while missing the questions where an assistant recommends someone else. Run the two together and every page you publish does both jobs at once.
Done properly this gets you three things: rankings on the Google searches that bring service calls, recommendations in AI answers across every major assistant, and booked jobs from both.
Key takeaway: Homeowners now find HVAC companies through two routes, Google results and AI answers, and if you follow this guide the same set of pages will win you both.
R.W. LaPine is a family-owned heating and cooling company in Kalamazoo, Michigan, trading since 1944 and now run by the fourth generation of the same family. No franchise behind them, no private equity owner, no national advertising. They did the work properly instead, and their results in SEO and AI search now match manufacturers operating in every state.
Their Domain Rating is 13. That is about as low as a real business gets, and most agencies would tell you it rules out competitive terms altogether. On the search ac not blowing cold air they sit above Trane at Domain Rating 82 and above Jiffy Lube at 72.
Those searches matter because of when people run them. Somebody typing ac not blowing cold air is standing in a hot house holding a phone, and the call is about ninety seconds away.
| Search | Position and detail |
|---|---|
| ac not blowing cold air | #1 of 20,000 monthly searches, difficulty 5 |
| ac not cooling | #1 of 12,000 monthly searches, difficulty 7 |
| how to clean air conditioner filter | #1 of 12,000 monthly searches, difficulty 10 |
| air conditioner not blowing cold air but running | #1 of 11,000 monthly searches, difficulty 2 |
| central air not cooling | #6 of 3,300 monthly searches, difficulty 4 |
| high humidity in house | #8 of 2,000 monthly searches, difficulty 2 |
| what causes humidity | #13 of 2,000 monthly searches, difficulty 58 |
| hvac preventive maintenance | #1 of 1,300 monthly searches, difficulty 4, and the highest-value term in the set at $5.00 a click |
Three patterns produced that. They own the moment the system breaks rather than the moment somebody shops, because every near-me search in HVAC is locked up by national aggregators and roll-ups, while ac not blowing cold air is 20,000 searches a month at difficulty 5 and nobody was defending it.
One page is doing most of the work. A single URL, their AC checklist for homeowners, holds first place for ac not blowing cold air, ac not cooling, air conditioner not blowing cold air but running and roughly two dozen further phrasings of the same question. Depth on one problem does more than a thin page per keyword.
And they quietly took a commercial term as well. HVAC preventive maintenance at 1,300 searches a month and $5.00 a click is a facilities manager searching, not a homeowner, and their commercial maintenance page holds first place for it.
None of this needed a national brand. Their 872 organic keywords bring 9,584 visits a month, 240 of those keywords sit in the top three, and the traffic is worth $13,758 a month in equivalent paid clicks. They run no paid search at all, so every one of those visits was earned rather than bought.
In the guide below we show you how to do SEO and AEO for HVAC companies the same way, using our five-step framework.
All figures from ContentMonk, US data, August 2026. R.W. LaPine has no affiliation with ContentMonk and is not a customer.
Below we walk through each of the five steps of how to do SEO and AEO for HVAC companies, in order: finding the searches and prompts that bring service calls, working out why other companies are winning them, building better pages, getting mentioned on the sources AI trusts, and keeping the results once you have them. Run all five and you get rankings on Google, recommendations in AI answers, and booked jobs from both.
Everything here is specific to heating and cooling, including the commercial and refrigeration side that most contractor marketing ignores entirely. The examples are real searches homeowners run and the difficulty scores are real.
Start by writing down every search and every question that comes from somebody about to pick up the phone.
A bottom-of-funnel prompt is one where the person has already decided they need a contractor and is choosing which one. Who can come out today to look at my AC is one of those. How does a heat pump work is not, because that person is reading rather than booking. Both are worth having eventually, but only the first one fills the schedule.
| Keyword they type into Google | Prompt they give an AI assistant |
|---|---|
| emergency ac repair near me | My AC died and it is 98 degrees, who can come out today? |
| duct cleaning near me | Is duct cleaning actually worth paying for, and who does it properly near me? |
| ac tune up near me | Summer is coming, who should service my AC and what should it cost? |
| furnace replacement cost | My furnace is twenty years old, what will a new one cost me? |
| ductless mini split installation near me | We are adding a room, who installs mini splits near me and is it cheaper than extending the ducts? |
Plumbing, roofing and construction all leave at least one big near-me search a small company can realistically take. Heating and cooling does not. Furnace repair near me runs 152,000 times a month at difficulty 70. HVAC near me is 117,000 at 65. AC repair near me is 100,000 at 66. Heating and cooling near me is 72,000 at 71. Every one of them is defended by national aggregators and by roll-ups with budgets you are not going to match.
That sounds like bad news for about thirty seconds. Then look at these two.
| Keyword | Monthly searches and difficulty |
|---|---|
| ac repair near me | 100,000 searches a month, difficulty 66 |
| emergency ac repair near me | 18,000 searches a month, difficulty 0 |
One word added, sixty-six difficulty points apart, and the wide-open one is the more urgent search of the two. Somebody typing emergency is not comparing quotes. That is the single most useful thing on this page, and it is why you check each phrasing rather than trusting a rule of thumb.
The same pattern runs all the way down. Duct cleaning near me is 44,000 searches a month at difficulty 0. AC tune up near me is 10,000 at difficulty 0 and $17.00 a click. HVAC maintenance plan, indoor air quality testing near me, thermostat installation near me and ductless mini split installation near me all sit at difficulty 0 or 1.
Commercial HVAC contractors near me sits at difficulty 58 and everybody chases it. Commercial refrigeration repair near me is 2,100 searches a month at difficulty 0, and chiller repair near me is $9.00 a click at difficulty 0. The generic commercial term is contested and the specific equipment terms are not.
If you carry a refrigeration or chiller side at all, those pages are the cheapest wins available to you, and the contracts behind them run for years rather than a single visit.
Work through every service you offer, every piece of equipment you touch, every town you cover and both sides of your business. Use the words homeowners use rather than the trade terms, and check each phrasing separately.
Run a free AI visibility and SEO audit on your domain and see which prompts name you, which name someone else, and where your rankings sit right now. Free. No signup, no card.
Get Your Free SEO/AEO AuditWhoever ranks and gets recommended today did the work to get there. Nobody is going to hand you the method, so you look at what is producing their results and build something better.
For each search on your list, check four things.
Once the research is done, everything starts with your own pages. This is the part you fully control and the part most companies skip, because a list of brands you install and a contact form will not rank for anything competitive.
For a page to rank and get cited, or as we prefer to put it, to influence what AI says about your market, it has to be objectively better than what is already there. Better means more actionable, backed by something only you know, and genuinely more useful to the person reading it.
A company relying only on its own website tends to reach roughly 15 to 20% AI visibility and then stall. Everything above that comes from other websites talking about you.
Backlinks from trusted domains are still one of the strongest ranking factors in Google, and those same domains are the ones AI assistants cite. One relationship pays you twice.
Heating and cooling has a set of third-party listings no other trade has, and homeowners are told directly to go and check them.
Start with the manufacturer dealer programmes: Carrier Factory Authorized Dealer, Trane Comfort Specialist, Lennox Premier Dealer, American Standard Customer Care Dealer, Bryant Factory Authorized Dealer, Rheem Pro Partner, Daikin Comfort Pro and the Mitsubishi Diamond Contractor locator. Each runs a public find-a-dealer page on a domain with far more authority than yours will ever have.
Then the certification directories. NATE publishes a find-a-contractor-with-NATE-certified-technicians locator, ACCA publishes an HVAC contractor locator, and there are AHRI and ENERGY STAR listings behind those.
Then the one almost nobody treats as an SEO action: your utility's approved contractor list. Most electric and gas utilities publish a participating contractor page for heat pump and high-efficiency rebates. Those pages are free, they carry municipal-level trust, and assistants cite them readily when somebody asks about rebates.
After that the general platforms: Google Business Profile, which is free and feeds both the local pack and much of what appears in AI Overviews, then Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Yelp, Nextdoor and Porch. Watch the cost of the paid ones, and note that Better Business Bureau accreditation runs from a few hundred dollars up to about $4,000.
Positions move, competitors publish, and models get retrained and start citing different sources. A page that named you in March can name someone else by August without anything on your site changing.
Four things to check every week: which tracked prompts stopped naming your company, which pages lost positions, which competitor started appearing where you used to, and which pages are collecting impressions without clicks.
When a page slips, improve it rather than replacing it. Put a sharper answer near the top, refresh the price ranges and the rebate details, add what you have learned since you wrote it, and you keep the authority the URL has already earned.
Heating and cooling is a volume business. The individual ticket is smaller than roofing or construction, and the searches behind it are enormous and constant, because every system in the country fails eventually and most of them fail in the same two weeks. Here is the maths for one company in one major city.
These are ten bottom-of-funnel searches in Phoenix, each a different intent.
| Bottom-of-funnel search | Monthly searches |
|---|---|
| ac repair phoenix | 1,800 |
| hvac phoenix | 1,300 |
| furnace repair phoenix | 800 |
| ac installation phoenix | 500 |
| duct cleaning phoenix | 450 |
| ac replacement phoenix | 350 |
| emergency ac repair phoenix | 300 |
| ac tune up phoenix | 200 |
| commercial hvac phoenix | 200 |
| mini split installation phoenix | 200 |
That is 6,100 searches a month in one city, and nine of those ten sit at difficulty 21 or lower. The single hard one, ac repair phoenix at difficulty 43, is also the one every company in the valley is chasing. The nine easier ones are worth more per click on average, with ac installation phoenix and ac tune up phoenix both at $35.00.
Traffic per page varies enormously, so counting articles tells you nothing useful. One page on the right bottom-of-funnel term can carry a thousand visits a month while five others carry fifty between them. What follows is per-plan capacity: how much of the opportunity each plan lets you research, publish against and monitor at the same time.
| How you run it | What you can work at once | Organic visits per month by month 12 | Booked jobs per month by month 12 | Revenue earned in year 1 * |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter, $99/mo | One town, a focused set of services | 1,200 | 3.6 | $44,900 |
| Pro, $199/mo | Cooling, heating and the symptom questions behind both | 2,400 | 7.2 | $89,900 |
| Scale, $449/mo | Multiple towns, residential and commercial, tracked together | 5,000 | 15.0 | $187,300 |
| Done for you, quoted | Our team runs the whole framework for your company | 8,500 | 25.5 | $318,300 |
* These figures are deliberately conservative. The model treats every page as an average performer, and that is not how this works in practice. When the work is done properly, one page on the right bottom-of-funnel term can outperform ten others, so real numbers are likely to be considerably higher.
Custom plans go beyond Scale, so the top self-serve row is a starting point rather than a ceiling.
Done-for-you sits higher on judgement rather than output. Our team picks winnable targets on the first pass, produces content that gets cited sooner, and does the third-party work in step 4 that busy companies postpone, with scope agreed per engagement.
Two things the table does not show. The first is that a maintenance agreement sold on the back of one repair call keeps paying for years, so the real value of a booked job is higher than the $2,500 above. The second is on payback: at $2,500 a job, one booked call covers the Starter plan for about two years.
Illustrative model built on the assumptions listed above. ContentMonk data, US, August 2026. Not a guarantee of results.
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Get a Free Strategy CallAEO, or answer engine optimisation, is the work of getting your company named when a homeowner asks an AI assistant who to call. It covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. In practice it means building pages that answer heating and cooling questions clearly and getting mentioned on the third-party sources those assistants cite.
SEO gets your pages ranking in Google's list of blue links. AEO gets your company named inside an AI-generated answer, where only a few names appear at all. They rely on the same pages and the same third-party mentions, which is why running them together costs little more than running one.
Assistants build answers from pages they trust: your own site, Google Business Profile, your manufacturer dealer listings at Carrier, Trane or Lennox, your NATE and ACCA entries, your utility's approved contractor list, local press, and the r/hvacadvice threads where homeowners ask for a name. Companies that get recommended have accurate listings everywhere, strong pages on the problems they fix, and third-party coverage backing both up.
Start one word to the side. AC repair near me sits at difficulty 66, while emergency ac repair near me sits at 0 and is the more urgent search of the two. Duct cleaning near me is 44,000 searches a month at difficulty 0. The volume in heating and cooling is deep enough that you never need to fight the hardest term first.
Because this fills April and October rather than July. The pages you publish now compound quietly through the shoulder seasons, when the phone is slow and the techs are standing around. It also lets you choose better work in peak season, since a booked replacement is worth more than a diagnostic call you were pushed into taking.
Running it yourself with software starts at $99 a month, and a seven-day free trial needs no card. HVAC agency retainers typically run from around fifteen hundred a month upward depending on how many towns and services you cover. Our done-for-you engagements are quoted per company.
Expect the first movement around month three or four, with results compounding from there. Time it against your seasons: work started in autumn is producing by the following summer, which is when it matters most. The forecast on this page assumes nothing happens at all for the first three months.
Yes. Google still sends the largest share of homeowner traffic, and the assistants read the pages Google ranks. Strong SEO is what makes your site visible to the crawlers that feed AI answers, so dropping it removes the foundation the AI visibility sits on.
Start a free trial to see exactly where your company stands, get the opportunities ranked in order of what is worth your time, and turn both into booked jobs. Or have our team run the five-step framework for you.
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