How Many HVAC Websites AI Assistants Can't Actually Read

We looked at 4,715 HVAC company websites from across 51 states and found that 61% of them have no llms.txt file at all, and 18% are missing schema markup, the structured info search engines and assistants read to understand what a business actually does. Put those two gaps together and 14% of the sites checked are missing both, which means they're effectively invisible to the tools more and more people use to find a contractor.

This isn't a story about bad websites. Plenty of these sites look fine to a person. The gap is in what's readable by machines, not what's visible to a human clicking around. Those are two different things now, and the sample here shows most HVAC businesses haven't caught up to that yet.

Methodology

This study aggregates 4,715 local service businesses across 51 U.S. states, surfaced between August 2026 and November 2026. Businesses were identified through Google Maps results and Google’s business listings data for their trade and metro area, the same way a customer searching would find them. Each website was fetched and read directly: its title tag, meta description, structured data (schema.org markup), and platform fingerprints were recorded at the time of reading. Results are reported as anonymized aggregates only; no individual business is named or identifiable. Percentages are of the businesses for which each check could be completed, so denominators vary slightly by statistic.