Who Google actually cites on an HVAC question
We captured one AI Overview in full and counted every source it used. Contractors came last, behind a forum thread older than most of their websites.
Captured 12 September 2026 · Austin TX, desktop, logged out
The capture
Query: how long does a furnace last
. Austin, Texas, desktop,
12 September 2026. Google returned an AI Overview above the first organic result, citing eleven
sources across nine domains. Counted by what kind of publisher they are:
| Publisher type | References | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Forum | 1 | Reddit, cited first. The thread is five years old. |
| Manufacturers | 4 | American Standard, Carrier, Trane, Lennox |
| Parts retailer | 3 | Filterbuy, three separate pages from one site |
| Contractors | 3 | Rolls Mechanical, Premier Air Colorado, Standard Heating |
What a contractor should take from that
You are not competing with the heating company across town for this. You are competing with Carrier, Trane, Lennox, American Standard, a filter retailer with three pages on the subject, and a five-year-old Reddit thread. On the single question every contractor in the country has written a blog post about, contractors took three of eleven slots and were the last group in.
The forum result is the one worth sitting with. A conversation between homeowners, half a decade old, was cited ahead of four manufacturers and every professional. If your plan for this question is another article explaining that furnaces last fifteen to twenty years, that is the field you are entering, and the incumbents are enormous.
The contractors who did get in are not national names. Two are ordinary regional firms. Whatever earned them a place, it was not size, which is the only genuinely encouraging thing on this page.
The limit on all of that
One observation · one query, one market, one device, one day
This is a single capture. One query, one market, one device, one day. It shows what happened on that search and nothing about commercial queries, about mobile, about other towns, or about how often any of it repeats. Treat it as a prompt to run the same check on your own questions rather than as a description of your market.
Why there is no percentage on this page
Because the study is unfinished, and the reason is worth reporting rather than hiding. Our first instrument could not see AI Overviews at all, and we only found that out by running a control.
Six HVAC queries through a widely used live-SERP service returned no AI Overview on any of them, including this one. Six for six looked like a finding. So we ran a control: a question that produces an AI Overview for almost anyone. It came back empty too, which meant the instrument was generating the zeros. A second source returned this AI Overview for the same query on the same day, in full.
Had we published the rate we were minutes from computing, it would have read
AI Overviews do not appear on HVAC queries
, which is the opposite of what is true.
The full account is on the measurement page, because it is a
better argument for controls than any abstract warning.