Most trades websites leak jobs. We scored 464 of them to find the ones wired to book.
Every square is one of those companies, across 25 US metros and 4 trades. Can buyers find them? Can they book? Can the owner tell which ad made the phone ring?
How does your site stack up?
Answer 12 yes-or-no questions about your own website. You'll get a rough score for the two parts you control directly: turning visits into bookings, and tracking where jobs come from.
A quick estimate, not your official Growth Index. The full score also measures search and AI visibility.
Answer the questions to see where you land.
One number for how well your website turns searches into booked jobs.
The Growth Index runs from 0 to 100. It adds up four things that decide whether a homeowner finds you and books a job, worth 25 points each. We measured all of it from the outside: the website, its code and public search data.
How to read a score
The typical site scores 53. That usually means a phone number up top and Google Analytics, a middling search presence, and no online booking. About half have call tracking.
How we sorted companies by size
We don’t have revenue figures, so we used the best public stand-in: how much search traffic each website gets per month. We split the 451 local companies into three equal groups.
Every company here already ranks in Google’s top 20 for its trade in a major metro. “Low-traffic” means low for this group.
High-traffic sites score twice as high, and not only because of traffic.
High-traffic sites average 72. Low-traffic sites average 36. Some of that is built in, since the Found layer rewards traffic. So we took search out and looked only at booking and tracking. High-traffic sites still score 1.8 times higher, and they lead on all 12 of those items.
By trade, HVAC leads with an average of 61. Roofing averages 53, plumbing 50 and electrical 49.
sites scoring 80 or more are high-traffic sites. Nobody reaches the top on a small search footprint alone, but the booking and tracking gaps are fixable at any size.
Which of your ads actually book jobs?
More than 1 in 4 can’t answer that question. Among low-traffic sites it’s nearly 1 in 2.
In the trades, the phone call is the sale. Without call tracking, Google Ads shows you clicks, not booked jobs, so every budget decision is a guess. The gap holds across trades: it’s about size, not whether you’re a plumber or a roofer.
of low-traffic sites offer no way to book online.1 A homeowner with a burst pipe at 9 p.m. has one option: call and hope you pick up.
Can a customer book you at 9 p.m.?
Two in three or more sites can’t take a booking.1 High-traffic sites are 4 times as likely to offer it.
Among high-traffic companies, 24% of roofers offer booking versus 61% of other trades. But across all sizes, 23% of roofers offer an instant price quote instead (versus 8% of other trades). Count both and the gap with other trades is no longer statistically clear. A roof is a quote-first sale.
Almost everyone gets the phone number right: more than 4 in 5 sites put tap-to-call on the first screen. But a phone number only works when someone answers. Online booking catches the buyer who won’t call, or can’t reach you.
AI search rewards scale. The popular shortcuts don’t move it.
Google’s AI Overviews now sit on top of a growing share of searches, including 12 of the 100 trade searches we started from. The typical company appears as a source in 4.5% of the AI Overviews its searches trigger. That rises with size: 2.7% for low-traffic sites, 5.7% for high-traffic ones.
A lot of advice right now says to add an llms.txt file or more schema markup to “get into AI search.” We tested the common ones, with traffic and trade held constant.
The companies that measure everything are first into new ad channels.
24 companies (5%) already run it.
17% of all companies run it.
That’s the payoff of tracking: when a new channel opens, you can test it with real numbers instead of hoping. Fix measurement first, and new channels become an experiment, not a gamble.
What 90+ looks like.
The ten highest scores among the 451 companies we indexed. It’s a ranking within our sample, not a national list. Study their sites: each one makes it easy to find them, book them and track the result.
| # | Company | Metro | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Coolray | Atlanta | 98.1 | |
| 2 | Baker Brothers Plumbing, Air & Electric | Dallas | 95.7 | |
| 3 | Berkeys Plumbing, A/C & Electrical | Dallas | 94.0 | |
| 4 | Reliable Heating & Air | Atlanta | 93.7 | |
| 5 | Abacus Plumbing, Air Conditioning & Electrical | Austin | 93.7 | |
| 6 | Paul Bunyan Plumbing | Minneapolis | 93.3 | |
| 7 | Reliant Plumbing | Austin | 92.5 | |
| 8 | Travis Crawford Heating, Cooling, Plumbing & Electrical | Charlotte | 92.3 | |
| 9 | Precision Plumbing | Las Vegas | 92.2 | |
| 10 | Valley Plumbing, Heating & Cooling | Salt Lake City | 92.1 |
Seven fixes, in the order we’d do them.
Ranked by how big the gap is in our data and how fast you can close it. Effort is our estimate.
| # | Fix | Effort | Who |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Track every call from your ads. Google Ads call conversions plus tracked numbers on the site. | Low | You or ads manager |
| 02 | Add online booking (roofers: an instant quote tool), on the homepage or one click away. | Medium | You and web person |
| 03 | Put tap-to-call and a book or quote button on the first phone screen. | Low | Web person |
| 04 | Install Google Analytics through Tag Manager so every future tag goes in one place. | Low | Web person |
| 05 | Make sure your server lets AI crawlers in. Check firewall and security settings. | Low | Web or hosting person |
| 06 | Mention financing and 24/7 service where buyers can see it, if you offer them. | Low | Web person |
| 07 | Test a new channel like Microsoft Ads, once tracking is in place. | Medium | Ads manager |
Get your full Growth Index score, free.
We’ll score your site on all four layers, compare it with companies in your trade and size group, and send you your top three fixes. You get the findings either way. No deck of fluff, no pressure.
464 companies, found the way a customer finds them.
We didn’t buy a list. We searched Google the way a homeowner would, in every metro and trade, and scored the companies that showed up.
Collection. Each homepage was loaded in a real browser at iPhone size, including a pass that interacts with the page. Tools were identified by their code signatures. Traffic, ranking and AI Overview data come from Semrush. Single snapshot, October 20, 2026.
Accuracy. Detection was checked against sites coded by hand in blind rounds. In the final round of 40 fresh sites, call tracking matched on 38 of 39.
Statistics. Comparisons hold traffic and trade constant where stated, and are corrected for multiple tests. Every difference is an association, not proof of cause.
1 Booking detection can miss some tools, so “no online booking” figures are upper bounds. Tap-to-call figures are lower bounds. Call tracking counts Google Ads call conversions; third-party tools only, 4 in 10 advertisers lack it. Server blocking of AI crawlers is an upper bound. Every company already ranks in the top 20, so these rates likely run above the wider market.
Check our work.
Questions about the data.
What is the Home Services Growth Index?
The Home Services Growth Index is LVL3's scorecard of how 451 local HVAC, plumbing, electrical and roofing companies get found, get booked and measure what works. It's built from a snapshot crawl of 464 operator websites across 25 US metros on October 20, 2026, scored on a 0 to 100 scale. The other 13 sites are national brands, scored on booking and tracking only and left out of the index ranking.
How were operators selected and scored?
We pulled the top search results for one residential search per trade (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing) in each of 25 metros, 100 searches in all, then kept the operator sites. Each site is scored 0 to 25 on four layers (Found, AI-visible, Booked, Measured) for a Growth Index out of 100. Full method is on the methodology page.
What share of home services companies offer online booking?
29.3% of the operators we crawled let a visitor pick an appointment time slot online, on the homepage or one click away. The other 70.7% require a phone call or a request form with no slot picker.
How many home services advertisers track phone calls?
Among the 261 operators running a Google Ads tag, 73.2% track phone calls on their website. The other 26.8% have no call tracking, so calls from those ads aren't counted as conversions. Call tracking here includes Google Ads' own website call conversions, not only third-party dynamic number insertion.
Does an llms.txt file help a business appear in AI Overviews?
In our data, 26.1% of operators published an llms.txt file, and it showed no measurable lift in AI Overview appearance rates. An llms.txt file is not a substitute for content AI Overviews can cite.
How often do AI Overviews cite local home services companies?
The typical local operator appears in Google AI Overviews on 4.49% of the keywords where an AI Overview shows up and the operator ranks organically. That's an appearance rate, not a quote: it counts the operator as a linked source, not that the AI Overview repeated its words.
How can I get a Growth Index score for my business?
Use the free self-check on this page to get an instant estimate out of 50 for booking and tracking. Request the full scorecard and we pull your Found and AI-visible data and send you your top three fixes.
LVL3. (2026). The Home Services Growth Index 2026 (v1.0). Retrieved from https://lvl3.com/insights/home-services-growth-index-2026/