What the 2026 Home Services & Improvement AI Visibility Index means for every brand that sells to homeowners.
By Ronn Torossian
Ask ChatGPT where to buy a drill. Ask Claude which store to trust for a kitchen remodel. Ask Perplexity who to hire to fix a leaking faucet. The answer is already written — and across most of the home category, it names the same two brands.
5W's Home Services & Improvement AI Visibility Index 2026 measured how often brands appear when homeowners ask the AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — the questions that used to start on Google. Sixty-plus homeowner prompts. Five runs per engine. Clean sessions. Six sub-categories, from big-box retail to paint.
The result: Home Depot owns 16.5% of estimated citation share. Lowe's owns 13.5%. Two brands. Thirty cents of every answer — before a single other retailer, marketplace, or contractor gets named.
"Two companies ring up more than eighty cents of every dollar spent on home improvement in America — and inside the AI engines, the concentration is even tighter."
— Ronn Torossian, Founder & Chairman, 5W AI Communications
That is the headline. Here is what it means.
Winners Win Harder Inside the Answer
The engines don't split attention evenly. They collapse it. Home Depot already commands roughly 52% of the U.S. home-improvement retail sector and about $150B in U.S. revenue — and the model rewards that scale with an even larger share of the answer than it holds in the market. AI amplifies concentration. In search, a long tail survived on page two. In an AI answer, there is no page two. There is a shortlist, and the shortlist is short.
"Where Do I Buy It" and "Who Do I Hire" Are Two Different Markets
Retailers own the buying query. Marketplaces own the hiring query. Angi (4.2%), Thumbtack (3.4%), and TaskRabbit (1.8%) barely register when a homeowner asks where to buy — but they surface when the question becomes who to hire. Home Depot doesn't show up when someone asks who to call for a bathroom install. Two citation surfaces. Two strategies. A brand that wants both has to earn both — separately.
The Model Reads Your Reviews
Lowe's citation lead on "best store" queries runs ahead of its market share. Why? The engines retrieve satisfaction data. Lowe's holds the top J.D. Power score in the category at 680; Ace Hardware sits second at 672. That number becomes a retrieval anchor — the model cites the brand the data says customers prefer, not just the biggest one. Your CSAT is now content.
Own a Category or Disappear Into One
Sherwin-Williams (2.3%) owns paint. Floor & Decor (1.5%) owns flooring. Tractor Supply (2.0%) owns rural and farm supply. None of them out-sizes Home Depot — but each one out-answers it on the narrow question it owns. The model rewards depth. Broad assortment loses to specific authority the moment the prompt gets specific.
The Local Contractor Is Missing From the Answer
The independent hardware store on Main Street. The contractor with 200 five-star reviews. The regional supplier. Nearly invisible. Physical presence does not translate into citation presence. Without a national content footprint the engines can retrieve, the local operator is structurally locked out of the answer a homeowner sees before they ever pick up the phone.
What To Do About It
Citation Share is the new market share — and in the home category it is already consolidating. The brands winning the answer aren't the ones running the most ads. They're the ones the engines can retrieve, verify, and trust: earned media in the outlets the models weight, structured authority across owned properties, and GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — built for how retrieval actually works.
Build the infrastructure before the crisis — not during it. The homeowner's first conversation is no longer with a salesperson or a search bar. It's with an AI engine. If your brand isn't in that answer, you're not in the consideration set.
Read the full index: Home Services & Improvement AI Visibility Index 2026. Explore the full 5W AI Visibility Index series.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.
About 5W AI Communications
5W is the AI Communications Firm, building brand authority across the platforms where decisions now happen — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — alongside earned media, digital, and influencer channels. 5W combines public relations, digital marketing, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and proprietary AI visibility research to help clients measure and grow their presence in AI-driven buyer research. Founded in 2003, 5W is recognized as a Top U.S. PR Agency by O'Dwyer's, named Agency of the Year in the American Business Awards®, honored as a 2026 Top Place to Work in Communications by Ragan, and named to Digiday's WorkLife Employer of the Year list. 5W serves clients across B2C sectors — Beauty & Fashion, Consumer Brands, Entertainment, Food & Beverage, Health & Wellness, Travel & Hospitality, Technology, and Nonprofit — and B2B specialties including Corporate Communications, Reputation Management, Public Affairs, Crisis Communications, and Digital Marketing across Social, Influencer, Paid Media, GEO, and SEO. Learn more at 5wpr.com.
