How Do HVAC Companies Get Recommended by ChatGPT?

ChatGPT recommends an HVAC company when the public record ties that company to the exact job in the question, and the job changes what the record has to say. On the two HVAC replacement questions in the Cheers Market Baseline, 62.4% of ChatGPT's answers quoted a dollar figure and 93.5% mentioned a warranty or guarantee; on the four emergency questions, including "my furnace stopped working, which local company should I call?", 98.8% talked about 24/7 or after-hours service and 3.6% mentioned a warranty. We ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode the same 32 home-services questions every week in 100 US and Canadian metros, nine of them about HVAC, and these numbers cover the three weeks ending September 20, 2026. A branch whose replacement page hides prices and warranty terms, or whose repair page never says when a technician can come, is missing the facts those answers are built from.

Last verified: September 23, 2026.

The chart at the top shows the full split: ChatGPT mentioned financing in 62.2% of its answers on the replacement questions and never (0%) on the emergency ones, and quoted a dollar figure in 2.9% of emergency answers. Its replacement answers mentioned 24/7 service 6.5% of the time. The rest of this page is what the same 9,573 HVAC answers show about sources, reviews, booking links and the pages that get cited. If you run HVAC branches and want the same questions tracked for your own markets, that is what the Cheers HVAC program does, location by location.

Where ChatGPT finds HVAC companies

ChatGPT builds its HVAC answers from third-party lists more than from contractors' own sites. On the nine HVAC questions it cited Expertise.com in 32.1% of its 2,600 answers, Angi or HomeAdvisor in 20.1% and other directories and "best of" lists in 56.7%, while a contractor's own website appeared in 44.0%. Across all 32 questions, 84% of the ChatGPT answers that cited anything cited at least one directory, review platform or ranking list, against 38% for Google AI Mode.

The other engines point somewhere else. Google AI Mode cited Google itself in 96.5% of its 2,600 HVAC answers and a business website in 92.8%; it linked an online booking page in 38.9% and Yelp in 17.0%. In the 1,271 HVAC answers where we captured Gemini's citations, it cited business websites in 91.0%, other directories in 41.5%, Angi or HomeAdvisor in 9.0% and equipment manufacturers in 7.2%. Perplexity cited business websites in 89.3% of its 1,823 HVAC answers, other directories in 82.4%, Expertise.com in 30.7% and the BBB in 20.2%.

Two things in that mix trip up multi-location HVAC brands. The first is the border: Angi and HomeAdvisor effectively disappear from Canadian answers, and HomeStars took their place in 40% of ChatGPT's Canadian answers, so a company with branches in Phoenix and Calgary is managing two directory lists, not one. The second is that ChatGPT's map is not its citation list. Yelp showed up in under 1% of ChatGPT's cited sources across all 32 questions, yet about a third of the rated business cards on ChatGPT's map (34%) linked to Yelp, and Yelp said in August that its content integration puts its reviews, ratings, photos and business details inside ChatGPT. When we matched the same business in the same city, ChatGPT's Yelp-sourced cards averaged 4.3 stars against 4.9 on Google AI Mode. Our ChatGPT card capture for HVAC is thin, mostly two questions over five days, so lean on the all-question figures: a branch with a neglected Yelp listing can look worse on ChatGPT than it does on Google.

None of this matters if ChatGPT cannot read the page. OpenAI's crawler documentation is blunt that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers", so check robots.txt and firewall rules on the branch and service pages before anyone rewrites them.

The job in the question changes the answer

The chart at the top pools four emergency questions across trades, while both replacement questions are HVAC. Split question by question, the HVAC pattern holds. On "my furnace stopped working", 95.3% of ChatGPT's answers mentioned 24/7 or after-hours service and 0.7% mentioned a warranty. On "who offers the best deals on a new furnace or air conditioner installation?", 97.9% quoted a dollar figure and 89.5% mentioned financing. On replacement quotes, 99.7% mentioned a warranty or guarantee, and on ductless mini-split installation 91.3% did. Gemini leaned on price even harder, quoting a dollar figure in 95.1% of its answers to the deals question and mentioning financing in 92.3%.

These counts include general advice such as "ask about the manufacturer warranty", so they describe what the answer is made of rather than why a particular company was picked. They still tell you what each page has to carry. A replacement or installation page needs a price range or starting price, the financing options with their terms, and the warranty written out: manufacturer coverage, labor coverage and how long each one lasts. A repair page needs the hours the branch actually answers, what happens after hours, and the service area, stated as facts rather than a slogan.

Don't publish 24/7 if dispatch can't honor it. A homeowner who calls at midnight and reaches voicemail writes a review about it, and that review becomes one more public source an engine can read.

Google AI Mode sends HVAC searchers to booking pages

Google AI Mode linked straight to an online booking page in 38.9% of its HVAC answers, against 31.2% across all 32 questions. ChatGPT and Gemini linked none in the same window. The links point at scheduling pages hosted on field-service software, and across all questions Housecall Pro pages appeared in 20.5% of Google AI Mode answers and ServiceTitan pages in 10.6%.

The rate moves with the question. We split the HVAC answers by question and Google AI Mode linked a booking page in 55.1% of its answers about same-day AC repair, 54.0% on indoor air quality and ductwork, 46.0% on "my furnace stopped working", 42.7% on furnace or heat pump repair, 36.3% on ductless mini-split installation, 34.0% on new-system deals, 32.3% on replacement quotes, 32.0% on the most reliable AC repair companies and 15.3% on strongest reviews and fair pricing.

Our read, which the data cannot confirm, is that most of these links come from the booking link on each business's Google Business Profile. Google lets a profile carry up to 10 links per booking category and mark one as the business's preferred link. For a multi-location HVAC company the check takes an afternoon: open each branch profile, press the booking button, and confirm it lands on that branch's scheduler with the right service area. A button that opens the corporate scheduler with another branch preselected loses exactly the same-day job this question is about.

HVAC has the highest review bar we measured

The HVAC businesses Google AI Mode named carried more Google reviews than the businesses it named in any other trade in the baseline. The median was 449 reviews, against 226 across all 32 questions, and 30.8% showed 1,000 or more, against 20.5% across all questions. Only 11.6% of HVAC answers named any business with fewer than 20 reviews, half the 23.5% rate across all questions; in electrical answers it was 40.8%. Star ratings barely separated anyone: the median was 4.9, 86.3% sat at 4.8 or higher and 0.6% were under 4.0.

Order follows review count as well. Across all questions, the first business Google AI Mode named had a median of 342 reviews against 195 for the third, and the most-reviewed business came first 36% of the time, where chance would give about 25%. That is a correlation, not a ranking rule, because review count also tracks company size and age. Google's own help page puts the local-search version plainly: "more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking."

The per-question split shows where a smaller shop gets in. The median named business had 297 reviews on ductless mini-split installation, 338 on indoor air quality and ductwork and 354 on new-system deals, against 563 on the most reliable AC repair companies and 530 on furnace or heat pump repair. Specialty installs are where the named businesses had the fewest reviews, so they are the questions where a specific, well-built service page has the most room to work.

At the other end, Sierra Air Conditioning and Plumbing shows what a deep review base looks like when it is built on purpose: its September 7, 2026 Google profile snapshot held 7,782 reviews, 5,301 of them added since it started working with Cheers.

Which HVAC pages get cited

On the HVAC questions, 22,233 citations pointed at contractors' own websites. The homepage took 45.8%, service pages 17.3%, service-plus-city pages 15.4%, location pages 10.5%, booking and offer pages 4.1% and blog posts 2.1%. Much of the homepage share comes from Google AI Mode, which sent 66.9% of its business-site citations across all questions to homepages, probably through the website button on the business profile, though that part is our inference. After the homepage, the pages that earn citations are the ones that name a service, a place, or both.

That is where HVAC content budgets drift. A blog post on five signs your furnace needs replacing is among the page types least likely to be cited in these answers. A furnace replacement page for the Calgary branch, with the price range, financing terms and warranty, is the kind of page that gets cited.

National brands are rare in HVAC answers

National franchise brands appeared in 9.3% of the HVAC answers that named a business and filled 2.5% of the named slots; only roofing was lower. HVAC answers are made of independent and regional companies, so an HVAC operator is mostly up against the other local shops, and a franchised HVAC location gets little lift from the brand name alone. The location-by-location version of that problem is in how franchise brands get recommended by ChatGPT.

What to do this week

Pick three branches and two questions for each: "my furnace stopped working, which local company should I call?" and "who offers the best deals on a new furnace or air conditioner installation?", with the branch's city added to the end. Run both on ChatGPT and Google AI Mode and write down every company named. Check both engines, because when ChatGPT and Google AI Mode answered the same question for the same city in the same week they shared about one business on average (1.04). Then fix what the answers expose, in this order:

• The replacement page for each branch: a price range or starting price, financing terms and warranty terms in plain text a crawler can read.
• The repair page and the profile hours: what the branch answers after hours, written the way dispatch actually works.
• The booking button on each branch's Google Business Profile: it should open that branch's scheduler.
• The Yelp listing for each branch: hours, categories, and the review count sitting next to Google's.

The plumbing version of this analysis, where urgent jobs and national brands play a bigger part, is in how plumbing companies get recommended by ChatGPT. For how ChatGPT picks sources across every trade, read what sources ChatGPT uses.

Methodology

Every week, Cheers asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode the same 32 home-services questions in 100 metro areas across the United States and Canada, and records every business each engine names, with its star rating, review count and map position where the engine shows one, and every source it cites. This analysis covers the three weeks from August 31 to September 20, 2026: 34,742 usable answers (9,434 from ChatGPT, 9,435 from Google AI Mode, 9,364 from Gemini and 6,509 from Perplexity) across 60 US and 40 Canadian metros. We excluded empty or cut-off answers, most of them from a Perplexity collection outage. Each question was asked once per city per week, so week-to-week changes include normal answer-to-answer variation. Business names were extracted automatically; a hand check of 40 answers found the extraction caught about three in four of the businesses a reader would count, so counts are lower bounds. Star ratings and review counts are the figures each engine displayed; for ChatGPT and Gemini we captured them from September 18 and September 14 onward. Findings describe associations in this sample, not how any engine ranks businesses.

The nine HVAC questions, 9,573 answers in total, were: who are the best HVAC companies for same-day AC repair; which HVAC companies are most reliable for air conditioning repair; who are the best HVAC companies for ductless mini-split installation; who are the best HVAC companies for furnace or heat pump repair; who are the best HVAC companies for indoor air quality and ductwork repairs; who offers the best deals on a new furnace or air conditioner installation; who are the best HVAC companies for HVAC system replacement quotes; my furnace stopped working, which local company should I call; and which HVAC companies have the strongest reviews and fair pricing. Mentions of 24/7 service, prices, financing and warranties were counted with text patterns anywhere in an answer. The per-question figures for answer content, booking links and review counts were computed on September 23, 2026 with the same definitions, split by question; their HVAC totals match the baseline figures above. Google AI Mode showed a rating and review count for 9,347 named HVAC business appearances in 2,341 answers, and for 34,017 across all 32 questions. Each HVAC question drew 248 to 300 Google AI Mode answers. Gemini citation shares use the answers where we captured a citation.

Sources

Every external link below was opened and checked on September 23, 2026.

• Cheers Research methodology. Cheers Market Baseline, August 31 to September 20, 2026, 34,742 answers, aggregate only. Source of every HVAC, engine, review, booking and page-type figure on this page.
• Overview of OpenAI crawlers. OpenAI documentation, undated. Source of the quoted consequence of opting out of OAI-SearchBot.
• Yelp brings reservations and waitlist to ChatGPT. Yelp Official Blog, August 10, 2026. Describes the content integration that surfaces Yelp reviews, ratings, photos and business details inside ChatGPT.
• Tips to improve your local ranking on Google. Google Business Profile Help, undated. Source of the quoted line on reviews and positive ratings.
• Manage your local business links. Google Business Profile Help, undated. Source of the booking-link limit and the preferred-link setting.
• Sierra Air Conditioning and Plumbing case study. Cheers, September 7, 2026 snapshot. Source of the 7,782 and 5,301 review figures.

Dylan Allen-Arnegård is the CEO & Co-Founder of Cheers, the local search platform for multi-location service businesses.