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MBC / Group / Blog / SEO & Traffic
SEO & Traffic 11 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.
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 How to read one of these lists in five minutes 10 Method, and what this does not prove 11 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.
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.
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. Four 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?
Q Why do the different HVAC agency rankings name completely different companies?
Q How do I actually choose an HVAC marketing agency?
Q How much does HVAC marketing cost per month?
Q Is organic search still worth it for HVAC companies, or is Google too crowded?
Q Does The MBC Group appear on any of these lists?
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