For years, HVAC growth followed a familiar formula: buy more Google Ads, generate more leads, book more calls. Simple math. More spend in, more revenue out.
That formula worked when digital advertising was cheaper, homeowners made faster decisions, and competition for their attention was lighter. A contractor who showed up first in search results usually won the job.
Today, every one of those assumptions has changed.
Speaking on the Beyond the Truck Roll podcast, Eddie Childs, VP of Growth Marketing at Mediagistic, described HVAC marketing as entering a "cost up, complexity up" phase, with more channels, more noise, and more expensive clicks driving customer acquisition costs higher than they've been in years. Roughly 58% of Google searches now end without a single click, and homeowner behavior is shifting toward AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude for the kind of basic research that used to live entirely in a search bar.
The contractors growing fastest right now aren't the ones buying the most leads. They're the ones extracting more value from the leads they already have.
One of the biggest misconceptions in home services is that slow growth automatically means you need more marketing. More ads. More spend. More top-of-funnel activity.
Childs argues that's often not the real issue. As he put it, "a lot of contractors believe they have a lead volume problem and they actually don't." The leads are there. What separates the contractors pulling ahead from the ones falling behind is what happens after the phone rings, including how the lead is priced, handled, and followed through to a real outcome.
Before writing another check to a lead generation platform, every contractor should be asking:
Childs pointed to a specific pattern: paid search volume skews heavily toward reactive, repair-driven searches rather than proactive install searches. The contractors who come out ahead are the ones who are priced right on service, profitable on the call itself, and skilled at turning a repair visit into a full system replacement or a maintenance plan customer, rather than "band-aiding it" and moving on. Those operational habits, he suggested, matter more to the bottom line than an increased ad budget ever will.
Most of the conversation around AI in home services focuses on automation, including chatbots, scheduling tools, and dispatch efficiency. Childs framed the bigger shift as happening further upstream, in how homeowners find contractors at all.
He cited industry research suggesting large language model search could overtake traditional Google search as soon as 2027, with other estimates putting the shift closer to 2030. Either way, the tools work differently than a search engine. They surface fewer providers, deliver answers instead of link lists, and often result in no click at all.
Instead of searching:
"AC repair near me"
Childs described homeowners increasingly asking upstream, need-based questions like:
"Why won't my thermostat cool below 78?"
or
"Why is there a warm spot in my living room?"
That's a meaningfully different moment in the buying journey. It happens before a homeowner has even decided they need a contractor, let alone which one. Childs called this exact behavior, creating consistent, educational content that answers real homeowner questions before they're ready to buy, one of the most underrated moves in the industry right now. Winning that moment means becoming visible earlier with content built around the questions homeowners are actually asking their AI assistant of choice, not just the keywords they used to type into Google.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the conversation is the simplest one: the first service call shouldn't be the finish line. It should be the beginning of a long customer relationship.
Childs put a number on why: acquiring a new customer typically costs somewhere between five and twenty-five times more than retaining an existing one. A homeowner who stays in a contractor's ecosystem for ten or twenty years, through repairs, a replacement or two, IAQ add-ons, and a recurring maintenance plan, is worth many multiples of that first job. As Childs framed it, the real question isn't what a customer is worth on the first ticket. It's what they're worth "per household over time."
He also drew a sharper line than most contractors are used to. A homeowner isn't truly a retained customer just because they've had one repair or one install. They become a real customer, in his view, once they're on a maintenance plan generating recurring revenue because that's the relationship a contractor can actually build on.
As acquisition costs continue to rise, the contractors who maximize:
will consistently outperform the ones focused only on booking the next call.
That's the real shift. Retention isn't just an operational responsibility handed off to a service department after the sale closes. It's becoming a marketing strategy in its own right, one that determines whether a customer acquired once becomes a customer retained for years.
It's about connecting marketing with operations.
The contractors who win over the next few years won't necessarily have the biggest advertising budgets. They'll be the ones who:
Childs described the strongest setups he sees, across contractors, manufacturers, and distributors alike, as ones where every party acts like "one marketing team with three roles," rather than three disconnected budgets telling three disconnected stories. As AI continues to change how homeowners search, ask questions, and make decisions, those fundamentals only become more valuable, not less.
The playbook isn't disappearing. It's just no longer written in ad spend alone.
Insights drawn from the Beyond the Truck Roll podcast, featuring Eddie Childs, VP of Growth Marketing at Mediagistic, in conversation with SmartAC.
Editor's note: SmartAC works with HVAC contractors to add sensor-and-cloud monitoring on top of the systems they already install and maintain. The goal isn't to replace the maintenance visit. It's to make sure the period between visits stops being invisible.
Book a demo or explore the platform to see what it can do for your business.