The Cost Guides AI Reads First
Five months of Google’s new Generative AI report for More Heat More Cool, a family-run HVAC contractor in Monroe, Ohio: AI Overview and AI Mode impressions up 7.6× while total search impressions held flat, and six cost guides that draw 1.6% of the site’s search impressions carrying 35.6% of its AI visibility. Bing Copilot citations, ChatGPT visits, baselines and caveats included.
- Engaged
- January 2026
- Google AI window
- May 18 – Oct 16, 2026
- Bing window
- Apr 18 – Oct 16, 2026
- Verified
- October 18, 2026
AI-answer visibility, read from the search engines’ own reports and measured against every other property we track.
Search Console added a Generative AI report this year, the first count from Google itself of how often a site appears inside AI Overviews and AI Mode[1]. Its history begins May 18, 2026. For More Heat More Cool, the HVAC contractor whose search program we document in a companion case study, the report shows AI-answer impressions rising from 8.6 a day in its first 28 days to 65.4 a day in its last 28, a 7.6× increase, while the site’s total search impressions held flat (0.95×).
That is not Google’s expansion alone. Over the same windows, AI impressions grew 2.64× across our other 16 client sites and 2.49× across every other property in our account. The visibility came from specific pages: six cost and buyer’s guides drew 1.6% of the site’s search impressions and 35.6% of its AI impressions. A third of everything those guides showed in search, they showed inside an AI answer. Bing’s AI Performance report, an independent instrument, points at the same kind of page: of the Copilot citations it ties to a page, 68% went to the site’s guides.
- In the first 28 days of Google’s AI report, 0.5% of the site’s search impressions happened inside an AI answer: 241 in four weeks.
- The pages with the most search visibility, the emergency page and 20 city pages, hold half of all impressions and are the pages AI answers use least (0.4–0.7% of theirs).
- AI answers settle cost questions on the results page, and independent studies find fewer clicks when they appear (cited under Caveats), while across our account the share of search visibility inside AI answers rose from 3.8% to 9.2% in five months.
- Google says AI features need no special optimization or structured data, so the work had to be the content itself, not a markup trick.
- Wrote the answers into the pages that ask the questions: cost and buyer’s guides with real installed-price ranges, repair-or-replace thresholds and plan comparisons[3].
- Added buyer-intent FAQs only where search data showed the gap (27,100, 9,900 and 3,600 searches a month), visible on the page and mirrored in FAQPage JSON-LD.
- Made the business one verifiable entity: founding year, NATE certification, a named owner and technician, complete address and phone in 43 schema blocks, Organization markup on /about.
- Measured every page by AI share, the fraction of its impressions inside AI answers, and read Bing and GA4 beside Google so no single instrument tells the story.
What Moved
Google’s Generative AI report week by week, from its first day of data. The dashed line marks the first full week with the AC guide’s cost FAQs live (they shipped June 21).
AI Overview and AI Mode Impressions by Week
Search Console Generative AI report, full Monday–Sunday weeks, May 18 – Oct 11, 2026. The partial week of Oct 12 is left out rather than extrapolated.
Pages AI Answers Use Most
The eight biggest pages by AI impressions, each with its total search impressions and AI share, May 18 – Oct 16.
| Page | AI impr | All impr | AI share |
|---|---|---|---|
| /blogs/new-ac-cost-ohio-buyers-guide | 1,414 | 3,977 | 35.6% |
| /emergency-services | 662 | 97,053 | 0.7% |
| /blogs/new-furnace-cost-ohio-buyers-guide | 597 | 1,749 | 34.1% |
| Homepage | 535 | 52,635 | 1.0% |
| /blogs/hvac-maintenance-plan-vs-pay-per-visit-ohio | 462 | 2,171 | 21.3% |
| /blogs/spring-ac-maintenance-ohio-guide | 133 | 1,953 | 6.8% |
| /military | 122 | 2,353 | 5.2% |
| /air-conditioning-repair | 117 | 11,377 | 1.0% |
The AC Cost Guide, Month by Month
Page-filtered reports. The guide’s first search impression in the window was June 16; the cost FAQs shipped June 21; its first AI impression came June 30.
| Month | AI impr | All impr | AI share | Clicks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| June | 1 | 47 | 2.1% | 0 |
| July | 168 | 447 | 37.6% | 3 |
| August | 458 | 1,081 | 42.4% | 7 |
| September | 647 | 2,029 | 31.9% | 21 |
| October 1–16 | 140 | 373 | 37.5% | 3 |
Windows: May 18 – Jun 14 vs Sep 19 – Oct 16, 2026 (28 days each), captured October 18, 2026 from Search Console[1][2]. AI impressions 241 → 1,832; standard impressions 52,936 → 50,388; AI share of all search impressions 0.5% → 3.6%. The report has no click data, so the clicks column comes from the standard report for the same page.
A Third of the AI Visibility, From 1.6% of the Search Footprint
- Cost and buyer’s guides6 pages with AI impressionsShare of search impressions: 1.6%Share of AI-answer impressions: 35.6%34.3%AI rate
- Other guides and articles23 pages with AI impressionsShare of search impressions: 1.6%Share of AI-answer impressions: 14.6%14.0%AI rate
- Service pages35 pages with AI impressionsShare of search impressions: 31.9%Share of AI-answer impressions: 22.7%1.1%AI rate
- Emergency service page1 page with AI impressionsShare of search impressions: 27.0%Share of AI-answer impressions: 11.7%0.7%AI rate
- Homepage1 page with AI impressionsShare of search impressions: 14.6%Share of AI-answer impressions: 9.4%1.0%AI rate
- City pages20 pages with AI impressionsShare of search impressions: 23.2%Share of AI-answer impressions: 6.0%0.4%AI rate
Page tables of both reports, May 18 – Oct 16, 2026: 5,674 AI impressions across 88 pages and 359,681 standard impressions. Page totals run above the chart totals because Google aggregates the page table by page and the chart by property[1]. Two image URLs with 2 AI impressions are omitted.
Google Expanded AI Answers. This Site Outran the Expansion.
AI Overviews and AI Mode reached more searches during these five months, so every site we measure gained AI impressions. The honest bar to clear is that expansion, measured on the same 28-day windows.
AI-Impression Growth, First 28 Days vs Last 28
Search Console Generative AI report, May 18 – Jun 14 vs Sep 19 – Oct 16, 2026.
- More Heat More Cool241 → 1,8327.6×
- Our other 16 client sites3,019 → 7,9682.64×
- Every other property in our account (39)13,414 → 33,3892.49×
Share of Search Impressions Inside AI Answers
AI impressions as a share of all search impressions, same windows.
- More Heat More Cool, first 28 days0.5%
- More Heat More Cool, last 28 days3.6%
- All 17 client sites, last 28 days5.3%
The site started from the lowest AI share of any large client in our book and is still below the client average. The growth is real; the ceiling is not reached.
Baselines sum AI impressions across properties with Generative AI data for the whole window: 40 distinct properties, 17 of them client sites. The client sites all receive our work, so this compares the site with the rest of our book, not with an untreated control. The method and the account-wide numbers are published in our research on where AI search visibility comes from.
Three Instruments, One Answer
The report has no clicks, positions or queries yet, and Google counts AI Overviews and AI Mode together.
68.1% of the citations tied to a page went to the site’s guides; the repair-or-replace guide alone drew 221. Grounding queries are Microsoft’s sample.
0.9% of all 12,048 sessions, engaged at 54.4% against a 33.2% site average and staying 2.4× longer. Perplexity sent 2; the others none.
What Copilot Cites, and the Questions Behind It
Bing’s AI Performance report names the grounding queries Copilot used when it cited the site, labels each with an intent, and shows the site’s share of all citations for that query. The cost questions lead, and they point at the same guide that leads Google’s report.
Bing AI Citations by Month
Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance, six-month view (Apr 18 – Oct 16, 2026). April and October are partial months.
Grounding Queries
Microsoft’s sample of the queries Copilot used to retrieve cited content, with its intent label and the site’s citation share. One query naming a competitor’s brand is omitted.
| Grounding query | Intent | Citations | Citation share |
|---|---|---|---|
| new ac unit cost | Commercial | 48 | 20.25% |
| repair or replace aging HVAC system Cincinnati Ohio guidance | Learn and Solve | 24 | 14.63% |
| choose right sized furnace home Cincinnati Ohio | Learn and Solve | 19 | 28.36% |
| repair vs replace aging HVAC system Dayton Ohio | Comparison | 16 | 13.33% |
| hvac tune up cincinnati oh airflow contamination control checklist | Learn and Solve | 15 | 32.61% |
| cost for new ac unit | Commercial | 12 | 24.00% |
| furnace repair replacement signs Cincinnati Ohio | Local | 12 | 11.76% |
| repair vs replace aging HVAC system Cincinnati Ohio | Comparison | 10 | 10.99% |
| ductless zone-controlled HVAC installation Ohio | Learn and Solve | 9 | 19.15% |
| heat pumps pros cons Cincinnati climate | Research | 9 | 6.67% |
| repair vs replace aging hvac system chillicothe ohio | Comparison | 6 | 8.57% |
| cost of new ac unit | Commercial | 6 | 11.32% |
| price of a new ac unit | Commercial | 6 | 24.00% |
| HVAC maintenance plans vs pay-per-service comparison | Comparison | 5 | 31.25% |
| hvac tune up cincinnati airflow contamination control checklist | Learn and Solve | 3 | 11.54% |
Grounding queries are a sample of citation activity by Microsoft’s own description[4], and its intent and topic labels are machine-generated. Citation share is the site’s citations as a share of all citations shown for that query[5]. The four AC-cost phrasings together drew 72 citations at 11–24% share.
Most-Cited Pages
Bing page list, six-month view. Guides took 623 of the 915 citations tied to a page.
- /blogs/hvac-repair-vs-replace-guide-ohio221
- /blogs/new-ac-cost-ohio-buyers-guide167
- /blogs/new-furnace-cost-ohio-buyers-guide82
- Homepage57
- /furnace-installation47
- /air-conditioning-maintenance42
Citations by Intent
The grounding-query sample above, summed by Microsoft’s intent label.
- Commercial (cost and price)72
- Learn and Solve70
- Comparison (repair or replace, plans)37
- Local12
- Research9
Cost questions (Commercial) and how-to questions (Learn and Solve) lead; comparisons such as repair or replace come third.
Every Move Is Dated
The AI-visibility work, straight from the client repository’s git history. Google says AI features need no special optimization or markup[3], and nothing here is aimed at them as a trick. It is the work that makes a page answer a question well, done where the questions are, with structured data that mirrors the visible text.
- Mar 26, 2026
Rebuilt Site Ships With Its Answer Pages
The hand-coded rebuild launches with llms.txt and the two pages that now lead the AI report: the new-AC and new-furnace cost guides for Ohio (commit ac12044).
- Jun 2, 2026
Entity and FAQ Pass
HVACBusiness schema enriched with verifiable facts only (founding year, NATE certification, service expertise, contact point); every city page’s FAQPage rebuilt from its visible FAQ text, zero visible/schema drift (b032d3d).
- Jun 8, 2026
llms-full.txt
A full-text companion to llms.txt published for AI crawlers that read it (0be5e6d).
- Jun 21, 2026
Buyer-Intent Cost FAQs on the AC Guide
Three original questions, visible on the page and in FAQPage JSON-LD, each chosen from recorded search data: central AC installation cost (27,100 searches/mo), AC replacement cost (9,900), AC and furnace replaced together (3,600) (1ced271).
- Jul 6, 2026
Organization Entity on /about
Organization JSON-LD with logo, sameAs profiles and contact point, so the business resolves as one entity (a0b3beb).
- Aug 12, 2026
People and Places, Made Explicit
Owner-confirmed owner and technician named as Person entities, with no invented bios or credentials (22bd329); street address and E.164 phone completed in 43 business blocks and breadcrumbs added to six pages (3e3acf8).
- Sep 4, 2026
The Emergency Page Answers Its Cost Question
The page’s top People Also Ask question, what emergency repair costs, now leads to an after-hours cost explainer, with furnace pricing rows and Offer markup (1478ef3).
The cost guides predate Google’s AI report: they shipped with the March 26 rebuild, so the report holds a trajectory for them, not a before-and-after.
What Could Be Confounding These Numbers
Six things that limit what these figures can say:
- 1Google expanded AI answers mid-window. Every property we measure gained AI impressions (2.58× across the account). The 7.6× here is read against that baseline, and the baseline cannot separate Google’s expansion from everyone else’s optimization.
- 2Impressions are not clicks. The Generative AI report counts appearances only[1]. AI answers can satisfy a searcher without a visit: in Pew’s data people clicked a result in 8% of visits with an AI summary against 15% without[6], and Ahrefs measured a 34.5% lower CTR for the top result[7]. We claim visibility, not traffic.
- 3No queries, two features in one number. Google’s report has no query dimension and combines AI Overviews with AI Mode, so it cannot say which questions triggered an appearance or which feature showed it. Bing’s grounding queries are the closest view, and they are a sample[4].
- 4Seasonality. The window runs from late spring into fall, when AC questions give way to furnace questions. The AC guide’s AI share held between 32% and 42% a month from July through the turn of the season, but five months cannot show a full year.
- 5No before-period. The report starts May 18, 2026, four months into the engagement, so there is no pre-engagement AI baseline for this site: only the trajectory since and the comparison with other properties.
- 6Some numbers are still small. ChatGPT sent 103 sessions in five months, and GA4 undercounts assistants that strip referrers. That is a signal about who visits, not a channel yet.
How We Measure
AI-answer impressions are Google’s count of how many times links to the site were shown to a user inside a generative AI feature on Google Search: AI Overviews and AI Mode, combined[1]. Google counts them inside standard Web impressions as well, so AI share (AI impressions divided by all impressions for the same site or page and dates) is the fraction of search visibility that happened inside an AI answer[2].
Growth compares the report’s first 28 days (May 18 – Jun 14) with its last 28 (Sep 19 – Oct 16). Baselines sum the same windows across every property in our Search Console account with data for the whole period. Chart totals aggregate by property and page tables by page, so totals quote the chart and every share quotes the page table.
Bing’s AI Performance report counts citations in Copilot, Bing’s AI summaries and partner experiences[4]. GA4 sessions are those whose source contains an assistant’s name; assistants that strip referrers are undercounted, so these are floors.
| Source | What it provides | Window |
|---|---|---|
| Search Console: Generative AI | AI Overview and AI Mode impressions by page, day, country and device | May 18 – Oct 16, 2026 |
| Search Console: Performance | Standard Web impressions and clicks for the same site, pages and dates | May 18 – Oct 16, 2026 |
| Bing AI Performance | Citations, cited pages, grounding queries (sample), intent, citation share | Apr 18 – Oct 16, 2026 |
| Google Analytics 4 | Sessions by source / medium from AI assistants, with engagement | May 18 – Oct 16, 2026 |
| Client repository | Dated commits for every change in the timeline | Continuous |
What We’re Going After Next
- Furnace season. The furnace cost guide drew 597 AI impressions at a 34% AI rate heading into the heating season. Furnace questions are the next cluster to answer as fully as the AC side.
- The pages AI skips. The emergency page and the 20 city pages hold half of all search impressions and AI rates under 1%. Each carries questions, such as response time and after-hours cost, it can answer in plain sentences.
- From appearance to visit. AI visibility rose 7.6× while ChatGPT sent 103 sessions. The next measure is how many AI-answer appearances become visits, which Google’s report does not yet show.
The Answer Pages
Live captures of the guides Google’s and Bing’s AI reports point to, October 2026. Each puts the question a homeowner asks in its title.
Platform documentation and third-party studies cited above. Client figures come from the instruments in the Methodology table, read with the owner authenticated on October 18, 2026.
- 1.
Generative AI performance report (Search): AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions; rolled out to all sites as of August 31, 2026. Google Search Console Help · accessed Oct 2026
- 2.
Performance report metric definitions (impressions, clicks, average position, CTR). Google Search Console Help · accessed Oct 2026
- 3.
“There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary”; no special structured data is required. Google Search Central, AI features and your website · accessed Oct 2026
- 4.
AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (public preview, Feb 10, 2026): total citations, cited pages, grounding queries (a sample) across Copilot, Bing AI summaries and partners. Bing Webmaster Blog · accessed Oct 2026
- 5.
June 2026 AI Performance update: intent and topic labels per grounding query, and citation share (your citations as a share of all citations shown for that query). Practical Ecommerce · accessed Oct 2026
- 6.
Users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits with an AI summary vs 15% without; links inside the summary were clicked in 1% of visits (68,879 searches, March 2025). Pew Research Center, July 22, 2025 · accessed Oct 2026
- 7.
An AI Overview correlated with a 34.5% lower average CTR for the top-ranking page (300,000 keywords, March 2024 vs March 2025). Ahrefs, April 17, 2025 · accessed Oct 2026
Want to know where your own AI-search visibility comes from? We read Search Console, Bing and GA4 the same way, on your site.
Vorenza Rentals: AI Search
