What do public business profiles show about HVAC contractors across 28 US metros?
By HVAC Record · Published June 10, 2026 · Updated June 10, 2026
Across 1,193 public HVAC business profiles checked in 28 US metros, 27 of the 28 metros average 4.7 stars or higher, phone numbers appear on 99.6 percent of profiles while public email addresses appear on almost none, and review counts range from a single review to 35,092 — so review volume, recency, and contact coverage separate contractors far more than star ratings do.
Where these numbers come from
HVAC Record currently publishes AC repair comparison pages for 28 US metros, from Phoenix and Houston to Cleveland and Huntsville. Each page is built from public business profiles sourced through the Google Places API, the compliant interface Google provides for business data, ratings, and review metadata.
For this report we aggregated every checked profile across all 28 published metros on June 10, 2026: 1,193 profiles in total, between 30 and 49 per metro. The underlying source data is refreshed on a bi-weekly cycle, and the most recent refresh completed on June 9, 2026. Every figure below is computed from that snapshot, not estimated.
Star ratings barely separate anyone
The single clearest finding is how compressed public star ratings are. Twenty-seven of the 28 metros have an average rating of 4.7 stars or higher across their checked profiles, and metro averages span only 4.4 to 4.9. Whole-metro averages this high mean a 4.8-star contractor is not meaningfully distinguishable from a 4.7-star one on the rating alone.
That compression is why the comparison pages on this site lead with review volume, latest review date, and source freshness instead of sorting purely by stars. A rating built on a handful of reviews and a rating built on thousands are different signals wearing the same number.
Review volume spans four orders of magnitude
The spread in review counts is enormous. The largest checked profile, in Charlotte, shows 35,092 Google reviews; Phoenix and Tucson each have a profile at 33,820, and Louisville's largest sits at 20,965. At the other end, several metros include checked profiles with a single public review.
Volume is not a quality verdict — a newer company can do excellent work with twelve reviews. But volume changes how much one more five-star review moves the number, and it tells you how much public evidence sits behind a rating. Comparing a 33,000-review profile with a 12-review profile on stars alone is a category error.
Public profiles are phone-first, and email is essentially absent
Contact coverage is strikingly lopsided. Phone numbers appear on 99.6 percent of the 1,193 checked profiles, and websites appear on 87.7 percent. Public email addresses, by contrast, appear on effectively zero profiles — Google business profiles simply do not surface them.
Practically, that means phone calls remain the universal first contact channel for HVAC work, and any email outreach requires visiting the contractor's own website first. It is also why our pages report phone and website coverage as explicit page-evidence fields rather than assuming every business is reachable every way.
The outlier is Laredo, not a big coastal market
Website coverage tells a local-economy story. In 25 of 28 metros, at least 80 percent of checked profiles list a website, and Dallas and San Jose reach 100 percent. Laredo is the clear outlier at 38 percent, with the metro's largest review count at just 283 — both figures far below the network averages.
We read that as a digital-footprint gap, not a quality gap: smaller border-market contractors evidently run on phone calls and word-of-mouth rather than websites and review accumulation. For anyone comparing AC repair options in a market like that, the practical takeaway is that a missing website is normal there and should not by itself disqualify a company.
How to use this when you compare contractors
Treat these aggregates as context, not rankings. They describe what public profile data looks like across markets so you can calibrate: a 4.8 average is ordinary, review volume varies wildly, and contact coverage differs by market. None of it verifies how a specific company will perform on your repair.
Every metro page on this site shows the same underlying signals for its own market — checked profile counts, rating context, latest review date, and source refresh date — with Google attribution and a public methodology. The numbers in this report will drift as the bi-weekly refresh cycle continues; the publication date above is the computation date.
Questions
- Are these ratings verified or audited?
- No. They are public Google business profile ratings, displayed with attribution and refreshed bi-weekly through the Google Places API. They are context for comparison, not an audit of work quality.
- Why does almost every metro average 4.7 stars or higher?
- Public ratings skew high across local services generally: satisfied customers are heavily prompted to review, and businesses with poor ratings tend to shrink or rebrand. That is exactly why review volume and recency carry more comparative information than the star number itself.
- Will these numbers change?
- Yes. Source data refreshes on a bi-weekly cycle, and this report is a snapshot computed on June 10, 2026 from the June 9, 2026 refresh. Treat the direction of the findings as durable and the exact decimals as dated.