If you’ve ever hired a plumber or called an HVAC company after Googling “AC repair near me,” you’ve already participated in one of the most aggressively contested advertising arenas in tech. And most of the businesses fighting for your click have absolutely no idea whether their ads are actually working. A 2026 study tracking what dominates home services search — across Local Services Ads, Google Ads, and the Local Pack — makes it painfully clear that the plumbing industry is spending real money on digital advertising with the measurement equivalent of a blindfold on.
- Only 3 in 10 contractor websites have proper tracking in place to connect an ad click to a booked job, according to a study of 1,000 home service contractor websites by Contractor Magazine.
- The average blended cost per lead for HVAC companies has risen to $104 on Google Ads in 2026, with non-branded search campaigns averaging $149 per lead.
- Performance Max campaigns — Google’s increasingly dominant ad format — are now being tracked across 8,077 campaigns and $14.9 million in Google Ads spend via the SearchLight benchmark.
- Scorpion’s Home Services Growth Summit on September 1, 2026 brought together OpenAI, TikTok, ServiceTitan, Thumbtack, and Powerhouse Consulting Group in a single virtual event aimed specifically at contractors.
- The study graded 250 each of plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and roofing contractor websites — requiring 1,402 site attempts to produce 1,000 readable results.
Seven Out of Ten Contractors Are Flying Blind
Here is the part that should make any small business owner put down their coffee. According to the Contractor Magazine study, roughly 70 percent of home service contractor websites lack the basic tracking infrastructure — Google Analytics 4, conversion tags, call tracking — to tell whether a dollar spent on Google Ads became a dollar earned from a booked job. That’s not a rounding error. That’s the overwhelming majority of an industry collectively spending tens of millions annually on digital advertising, with receipts turned off.
The study pulled from plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and roofing sites nationwide, deliberately capping franchises at one entry per brand. This is independent shop data. These are the businesses most likely to feel every wasted dollar. And still, only about 30 percent have Google Ads conversion tags installed. The Meta pixel — that other critical signal that tells you which Facebook or Instagram ad drove a phone call — shows up even less frequently.
Ask any of these contractors what a truck roll costs. They’ll tell you fast. Ask what a booked job from Google costs them. The room goes quiet. That gap between operational precision and marketing measurement is the real story here, and it’s a massive one.
Local Services Ads vs. Google Ads vs. the Local Pack: What Actually Wins in 2026
Google’s home services search result page is now a three-layer system, and each layer has its own logic. Local Services Ads sit at the very top — Google-vetted, pay-per-lead, and increasingly favored by contractors who want to skip the complexity of keyword bidding. Below that, traditional Google Ads (search campaigns and now Performance Max) compete on keyword intent and budget. The Local Pack — those three map results that appear organically — rounds things out with a mix of review signals, proximity, and Google Business Profile health.
Performance Max deserves particular attention in 2026. Google has been pushing the format hard, and the SearchLight benchmark tracking $14.9 million in actual HVAC and plumbing ad spend shows it performing below non-branded search campaigns on a per-lead basis. Non-branded search averaged $149 per lead. That number matters because it represents what contractors pay when a homeowner types in a generic term like “water heater replacement” — no brand loyalty, pure intent. Local Services Ads can beat that cost when managed well, but they come with verification friction and category restrictions that frustrate contractors in less-defined trade categories.
Here’s the contrarian position worth stating clearly: Local Services Ads are not the automatic answer everyone in the industry is treating them as. They favor contractors who’ve invested in their Google verification and review count. A newer business without reviews gets crushed, regardless of budget. The playing field in LSAs is already tilting toward incumbents, and smaller shops jumping in expecting a shortcut are often disappointed within the first billing cycle.
AI Is About to Rewrite What “Getting Found” Even Means
The timing of Scorpion’s September summit — pulling in OpenAI alongside TikTok and ServiceTitan — was not accidental. The home services marketing category is staring down a structural shift that makes the Local Pack feel almost quaint. ChatGPT Ads are coming. AI Overviews are already eating the top of organic search results. When a homeowner asks an AI assistant “who should I call for a roof leak in Dallas,” the answer that comes back isn’t necessarily the business with the best Google Ads ROAS. It may be the one whose website data trained its way into relevance.
That’s a problem for an industry where 70 percent of businesses can’t even confirm their current ads work. Contractors who aren’t measuring now are building a data deficit they’ll be paying off later. This connects to a broader labor and automation pressure playing out across local economies — similar to the workforce vulnerability patterns flagged when examining how Phoenix compares for AI automation risk, where 20.7 percent of workers are already exposed. The trades themselves may be durable, but the marketing layer supporting those trades is nowhere near ready for what AI-powered search is about to do to it.
Scorpion’s Chief Revenue Officer Jamie Adams put it plainly at the summit: homeowners don’t search the way they used to. That understates it. And if you want a sense of how fast the broader tech environment is moving while contractors are still debating whether to install Google Tag Manager, the pace of AI platform activity across Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI in just a single September week tells you everything you need to know about the urgency.
The contractors who start treating marketing as a measurement problem — not just a spend problem — before ChatGPT Ads fully mature will be the ones who don’t have to relearn everything from scratch in 2027.
Watch the Breakdown
Sources
- 7 in 10 Contractor Websites Can’t Connect an Ad Click to a Job — www.contractormag.com
- Scorpion Brings Together OpenAI, TikTok, and ServiceTitan to Help Home Services Businesses Get Ahead of the Shift to AI-Powered Search and Advertising — www.prnewswire.com
- TOP 20 HVAC MARKETING STATISTICS 2026 REVEAL MASSIVE HOME SERVICE DEMAND SURGE — www.amraandelma.com
