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SEO & Traffic 16 min read Aug 29, 2026
Search “hvac marketing agency” and Google hands a contractor four ranked lists of the best agencies to hire. On 29 August 2026 we read the top twenty results and opened every page behind them. All four rankings are published by HVAC marketing agencies, and all four put their own publisher at number one.
Between them the four lists name 33 different agencies. Not one agency appears on all four. Three-quarters of the names appear on exactly one. Only one of the four publishers tells you, anywhere in the article, that it is ranking itself. We then ran the identical check on eight more trades the same day: of the twenty ranking pages those searches returned, nineteen were published by an agency, and seventeen of the nineteen put their own side first.
Matthew Montez
Founder · MBC Group
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00 Key Takeaways 01 What we did 02 Every list ranks itself first 03 Only one of them says so 04 The four lists barely agree 05 What the rankings actually measure 06 Three things that do not add up 07 Almost nobody prints a price 08 What an HVAC lead actually costs 09 The same check, eight more trades 10 One agency published five of the lists 11 Four of the seventeen say so 12 How to read one of these lists in five minutes 13 Method, and what this does not prove 14 Common questions
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If you run a heating and cooling company and you decide to stop doing your own marketing, your first move is almost certainly to search “hvac marketing agency”. Google answers that search with something that looks extremely helpful: four ranked lists of the best HVAC marketing agencies in the country, complete with scores out of 100, published methodologies, and comparison tables.
On 29 August 2026 we read the top twenty organic results for that search and opened every page behind them. We were not grading the agencies. We wanted to know one thing: who wrote the lists, and do they agree?
00 — Key Takeaways
Eighteen of the twenty results are pages published by marketing agencies. The only two that are not are a Reddit thread and one directory listing. No trade association, no contractor, no independent publication appears anywhere on the page.
Six of the twenty results are rankings of the best HVAC marketing agencies: four articles and two YouTube videos. All six were published by HVAC marketing agencies.
All four ranking articles place their own publisher at number one. Thrive ranks Thrive first at 97 out of 100. First Page Sage ranks First Page Sage first. Alpyne Strategy ranks Alpyne Strategy first at 90 out of 100. Built-Right Digital ranks Built-Right Digital first.
Only one of the four discloses it. Alpyne Strategy prints a bold “Full Transparency” note above the ranking saying the list includes the author’s own company. The other three carry no disclosure in the article at all.
The four lists name 33 different agencies across 44 slots. Not one agency appears on all four, and 25 of the 33 appear on exactly one list.
Not one of the four scoring systems makes client results the largest factor. The biggest single criterion on the highest-ranking list is how often AI assistants mention an agency, at 60% of the score.
An HVAC click in Denver cost $62.28 against $45.18 nationally in our 18 August 2026 study — which is why picking the wrong partner here is expensive quickly.
The pattern is not an HVAC quirk. We ran the same read on eight more trades the same day — veterinary, dental, roofing, plumbing, med spa, chiropractic, electrical and personal injury law. Those searches returned 20 pages that rank agencies. 19 were published by an agency or a company sharing its owners, and 17 of the 19 put their own side first.
One agency published five of those twenty lists and ranks itself first on all five. On the five lists written by other agencies, the same agency’s average position is 4.2 and it is never first.
We pulled the first twenty organic results for “hvac marketing agency” on 29 August 2026 and opened all of them. Twenty results, twenty distinct URLs, nineteen distinct websites — youtube.com appears twice, and both videos turn out to belong to the same channel.
Then we sorted the results by who published them, which took about a minute and produced the first surprise:
What the result is
How many of 20
A marketing agency’s own sales page
12
A ranking of “best HVAC marketing agencies”, published by an agency
A Reddit thread
An agency directory
Eighteen of the twenty pages a contractor is offered were written by companies that want the contract. That is not a scandal — it is what happens when the search term names a service, and we have measured the same shape in other categories. What makes this one different is the six results in the middle row. Those pages do not look like sales material. They look like reviews.
Four of the six rankings are articles. Here is who published each one, and who each one puts in first place.
Position
Ranking article
Published by
Ranked number one
12 Best HVAC Marketing Companies in 2026
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency
Thrive, 97 of 100
The Top HVAC Marketing Agencies in 2026
First Page Sage
Best HVAC Marketing Agencies in 2026
Alpyne Strategy
Alpyne Strategy, 90 of 100
Top 8 HVAC Franchise Marketing Agencies in 2026
Built-Right Digital
Four rankings, four publishers, four first places, and the winner of each one is the company that wrote it. The other two rankings on the page are videos — positions seven and nineteen — and both are published on the YouTube channel of Hook Agency, a Minneapolis contractor marketing firm that also sits at number six on Thrive’s list and number ten on Alpyne’s.
We want to be careful about what this does and does not mean. Publishing a ranking you appear in is ordinary content marketing, it is done in the open, and none of these agencies is hiding its name. Several of them are clearly good at what they do. The point is narrower and it is about the reader: a contractor who searches for an impartial comparison is not shown one. Every comparison on that page is written by a competitor in the comparison.
There is one clear exception, and it deserves naming, because it is the difference between advertising and disclosed advertising.
Alpyne Strategy states it twice. Above the ranking, in bold: “Full Transparency: Alpyne Strategy (my company) is included in this ranking. To maintain objectivity, I’ve published our complete scoring methodology and encourage you to evaluate all agencies independently.” Further down, a second line repeats it. A reader cannot miss it, and the scoring criteria really are published in full.
The other three articles contain no such statement anywhere in the body. Thrive’s article closes by inviting the reader to contact Thrive. First Page Sage’s byline reads “FPS Staff”. Built-Right’s only signal is the author biography at the very bottom of a long page, which identifies the writer as its own Business Development Manager. In each case the information is technically there for a reader who goes looking. None of it appears next to the ranking, which is where it would matter.
The line that gives the game away
“Most of the ‘best of’ HVAC marketing lists are written by generalist marketers who’ve never worked in the industry.”
Alpyne Strategy, opening its own best-of HVAC marketing list — which ranks Alpyne Strategy first
If four independent panels rank the same industry, you would expect the strongest firms to keep appearing. We put all four lists side by side. Between them they name 33 different agencies across 44 slots.
How many of the four lists an agency appears on
Number of agencies
All four
Three
Two
Exactly one
25
Twenty-five of the 33 agencies — 76% of them — appear on exactly one list and nowhere else. Not a single agency in the industry appears on all four. The three that manage three appearances are Thrive Internet Marketing Agency, RYNO Strategic Solutions (formerly Blue Corona) and Lemon Seed Marketing, and one of those three is counting its own list.
First Page Sage is the extreme case. Its nine names overlap the other three lists by exactly one — Lemon Seed. The other eight agencies it recommends appear on no other list on the page. Its ranking is not a stricter version of the others; it is a different industry.
This is the finding that matters most for a contractor, because it holds regardless of anyone’s honesty. Four rankings of the same industry produce four different answers, and there is no way to reconcile them. At most one of them can be right, and there is nothing on any of the pages that tells you which.
Three of the four publish a scoring system. Reading them together explains the disagreement completely: they are not measuring the same thing, and none of them is mostly measuring whether the agency’s clients did well.
Look at what tops the list that ranks second on Google. Sixty per cent of Thrive’s score is how often an AI assistant names an agency. That is a real and increasingly important thing to measure — we build answer engine optimization for a living and we would not argue it is worthless. But it measures an agency’s own marketing, not its clients’ results. An agency can score extremely well on it while never having improved a single contractor’s revenue.
Alpyne’s system has the opposite problem and is honest about it. Seventy of its hundred points go to American workforce, regional expertise and family business values. Those may well be things a contractor cares about. They are not measurements of competence, and “Proven Results” being the smallest slice is the most revealing number in this article.
We checked the numbers on the pages against the pages’ own source code. Three of them contradict themselves.
One more number worth noticing on that page: Alpyne gives itself 90 out of 100 and second place 79. That eleven-point gap is nearly three times larger than any other gap in the table, where the remaining nine agencies are separated by one to four points each.
We looked for the number a contractor actually needs. On Alpyne’s comparison table there is a “Starting Price” column, and eight of its ten rows say “Contact for pricing” or “Custom pricing” — including Alpyne’s own row. Two print a figure: KGG Consulting at $3,000 a month and Broadly at $799.
The clearest page on money is the one ranked lowest of the four. Built-Right Digital publishes a complete price list on the same page as its ranking: four plans at $1,199, $2,099, $4,199 and $19,999 a month, with what each includes. Thrive’s enquiry form starts its budget bands at $2,500 to $5,000 a month, which tells you the floor even though no price appears in the article.
We found the same pattern when we read page one for dentist marketing and for personal injury: hundreds of ideas, almost no prices. It is the reason our own pricing is published on the website rather than quoted on a call.
None of the four lists tells a contractor what he is up against in his own market. Two numbers from our own research do.
First, the price of attention. In the 40-industry click study we published on 18 August 2026, an HVAC or AC repair click cost $62.28 in Denver against $45.18 nationally, on 880 local searches a month. Denver HVAC is one of the priciest clicks in the whole set. At that rate a wasted month of advertising is not a rounding error, and choosing your agency off a self-published ranking is a genuinely expensive way to choose.
Second, the encouraging half. When we classified 240 search results across two cities on 27 and 28 August 2026, HVAC turned out to be one of the categories a contractor’s own website can still win. Eight of the ten results for “phoenix hvac repair” were HVAC companies’ own sites, and six of ten in Denver — far better than the categories the directories have taken over. You can read the full two-city page-one study for the method. The practical version: in heating and cooling, the first page is still reachable, so the money spent on local SEO and a properly maintained Google Business Profile is not fighting a lost battle before it starts.
The work itself is unglamorous and we have written it up separately rather than repeat it here: a page for each service and each town you cover, review velocity that does not stall in the shoulder season, and paid search kept off the terms your own listing already wins. Our guide to marketing a home services business covers the sequence.
One search proves nothing about the rest of the internet. So on the same day, 29 August 2026, we ran the identical read on eight more trades — the same consumer categories we classified in our two-city study of 240 search results, with heating and cooling already done above. Veterinary, dental, roofing, plumbing, med spa, chiropractic, electrical and personal injury law. Eighty results, seventy-eight distinct web addresses, and every ranking article opened and read.
Those eight searches produced twenty pages that rank agencies. Nineteen of the twenty were published by a marketing agency, or by a company that shares its owners with one. The single exception is a customer-relationship software company selling to the same buyers.
Seventeen of those nineteen put their own side in first place.
Search
Pages that rank agencies
Published by an agency
Publisher placed first
Veterinary
Dental
Roofing
Plumbing
Med spa
Chiropractic
Electrical
Personal injury
Total
20
19
17
The two agency-published rankings that do not crown their publisher are worth naming, because they show the format can be done straight. Hook Agency’s roofing list ranks Hook Agency seventh out of seven — last — under a heading that reads “Our Own Specialties”, and the entry opens “lastly, we have to mention Hook Agency”. The other is a page titled “Personal Injury Marketing Agencies in San Antonio” that ranks nobody at all: the only agency it names is the publisher, and the rest is a sales page. It is by a wide margin the shortest page in the sample.
One result deserves its own paragraph. The roofing list sitting at position six is published by Owl Roofing — a roofing contractor rather than an agency, which is why it looked at first like the independent voice that page badly needs. It ranks Hook Agency first. Its own opening paragraph explains why: Owl Roofing is “a roofing company built from scratch by the same team behind Hook Agency”. That sentence lands about seven per cent of the way into the page, before the list begins, which is more disclosure than most of this sample manages. The same list ranks Alibaba tenth, for branded merchandise.
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency publishes a “12 best” ranking for veterinary, dental, plumbing, med spa and chiropractic marketing. All five were on page one for their search on 29 August 2026, and all five put Thrive at number one. Counting its HVAC list at position two above, that is six verticals and six first places.
On its own that would be unremarkable, because nearly every list in this sample does the same thing. What makes it checkable is that Thrive also turns up on other publishers’ lists, so the two sets of judgements can be put side by side.
List
Thrive’s position
12 Best Veterinary Marketing Companies
Thrive
1 of 12
11 Best Dental Digital Marketing Agencies
1 of 11
12 Best Plumbing Marketing Companies
12 Best Med Spa Marketing Companies
12 Best Chiropractic Marketing Companies
10 Best Chiropractic Marketing Companies
Go Chiro Pro
2 of 10
Best Digital Marketing Agencies for Roofing
Silverback Strategies
3 of 10
8 Best Electrician Marketing Agencies
4 of 8
The Top 9 Dental Marketing Agencies
Lasso MD
6 of 9
6 Powerful Electrician Marketing Agencies
Hook Agency
6 of 6
On the five lists Thrive writes, Thrive is first every time. On the five lists other agencies write, Thrive’s average position is 4.2 and it is never first. Both sets of scores were produced by people selling the same service to the same buyers. It is the cleanest illustration we found of what a self-published ranking actually measures.
Silverback Strategies does the same thing twice, publishing “ranked and reviewed” lists for roofing and for plumbing and appearing at number one on both. Hook Agency is the only publisher in the sample that ranks itself differently in different places — last on its own roofing list, first on its own electrician list.
Of the seventeen rankings that put their publisher first, four tell the reader somewhere in the body of the page.
One is a borderline case. Built-Right Digital’s electrician list closes with an author biography identifying the writer as the President of Built-Right Digital, which sits first on that list. That is disclosure only if you read to the end, and it is the same bottom-of-page pattern we found in the HVAC sample above. The remaining twelve rankings carry nothing at all.
It is worth being precise about what this does and does not mean. Publishing a list you appear on is ordinary content marketing, not fraud, and those four pages show the whole problem can be solved with one sentence. What the sample says is that the sentence is usually missing — twelve times out of seventeen.
One detail from the Web Tonic page deserves a marketer’s attention whatever you think of its ranking. It was published on 28 August 2026, the day before we looked, and it carries buttons offering to summarise the article in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, alongside a standing invitation headed “make us a preferred source”. Pages like this are increasingly written to be quoted by AI assistants rather than read by people, which is exactly why who wrote them matters more than it used to. That is the same problem our work on AI search optimisation exists to solve, approached from the other side.
You do not need our tooling to do what we did. Four checks, in order of speed.
We read the first twenty organic results for “hvac marketing agency” on 29 August 2026, unlocalised, and opened every page we could reach. Rankings, scores, criteria weights, publication dates and author details were all read from the pages themselves, and the two figures we checked most closely — the review-score mismatch and the score ordering — were confirmed against the raw source code rather than a rendered copy. The eight-trade replication that follows it was run the same day, also unlocalised, over the first ten results of each search rather than twenty; publishers, list positions and disclosure wording were read from each page’s own source. Six limits are worth stating plainly.
If you want this read done on your own market — who is really behind the pages ranking for the services you sell, and what your clicks actually cost — tell us where growth is stuck.
Q Are the “best HVAC marketing agency” lists on Google trustworthy?
A Treat them as advertising unless proven otherwise. On 29 August 2026 all four ranking articles on page one for “hvac marketing agency” were published by HVAC marketing agencies, and all four placed their own publisher at number one. Only one of the four disclosed it in the article. That does not make the agencies dishonest — publishing a list you appear on is ordinary content marketing — but it does mean no independent comparison is being offered to you.
Q Why do the different HVAC agency rankings name completely different companies?
A Because they score completely different things. One list gives 60% of its score to how often AI assistants mention an agency; another gives 40% to who its clients are and 30% to leadership backgrounds; a third gives 70 of 100 points to American workforce, regional expertise and family business values. Across the four lists, 33 agencies are named, none appears on all four, and 25 appear on only one.
Q How do I actually choose an HVAC marketing agency?
A Ignore the score out of 100 and do four things. Check whether the list you are reading sits on an agency’s own website. Read the methodology and find out what share of the score is client results. Cross-check the names against a second list and take the agencies that appear on both more seriously. Then ask for a contractor in your trade and your climate zone, and call them about cost per booked job.
Q How much does HVAC marketing cost per month?
A Very few pages will tell you. Of the ten agencies in one comparison table we read, eight said “contact for pricing”. The published figures we did find on page one ranged from $799 a month for review management to $19,999 a month for a top-tier multi-location package, with mid-range plans around $2,000 to $4,000. One large agency’s enquiry form starts its budget bands at $2,500 to $5,000 a month.
Q Is organic search still worth it for HVAC companies, or is Google too crowded?
A It is still worth it, and heating and cooling is one of the better categories for it. In our two-city study of 240 search results in August 2026, eight of ten results for “phoenix hvac repair” and six of ten in Denver were HVAC companies’ own websites rather than directories. Paid search is where it gets expensive: an HVAC click cost $62.28 in Denver against $45.18 nationally in our 18 August 2026 study.
Q Does the self-ranking pattern hold outside HVAC?
A Yes, in every trade we checked. On 29 August 2026 we ran the same read on eight more categories — veterinary, dental, roofing, plumbing, med spa, chiropractic, electrical and personal injury law. Those searches returned twenty pages that rank agencies. Nineteen were published by a marketing agency or by a company sharing its owners, and seventeen of the nineteen put their own side in first place. Four disclosed it. Only two did not rank themselves first: one agency placed itself last on its own list, and one page titled as a list of agencies ranked nobody except the publisher.
Q Which of these lists is the most honest?
A On the pages we read, the veterinary list published by Sprout Sage Solutions. It states in the body that the author’s own agency is ranked first, it limits that claim to a named use case, it includes a section on why to be sceptical of its own ranking, and its headline advertises a finding rather than a winner — that only two of the five agencies publish any pricing. We have no view on whether that agency is good at its job. We are describing the disclosure, which was the best of twenty.
Q Does The MBC Group appear on any of these lists?
A No. We appear on none of the four rankings and nowhere in the top twenty results for “hvac marketing agency”. We also did not publish a competing ranking, for the reason this article describes. We are a Denver AI marketing agency and we sell the services discussed here, which is stated in the method section as well.
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