How much of their city do HVAC companies cover on Google Maps?

The question

Ask an HVAC owner where they rank on Google Maps and you usually get one number: “we're first”, or “we're not in the top 3”. That number comes from one search, usually from the office. But the map pack, the three businesses under the map, is picked partly on distance from the person searching. [1] So we measured how much of a city any one company actually holds.

How we measured it

• 10 cities: Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Hamilton, Halifax, Surrey and Kelowna.
• 81 points per city: a 9 × 9 grid, points 2.5 km apart, covering a 20 km square centred on City Hall.
• Two searches at every point: “furnace repair” and “heat pump installation”, 1,620 searches in all.
• The top 20 listings came back from each search, through a search-data provider, set to the location of each point (Google Maps, zoom 14, English).
• “In the top 3” means positions 1 to 3, what a phone shows under the map without scrolling.

1,508 of the 1,620 searches came back with listings. Most of the 112 that came back empty sit over Lake Ontario, Halifax harbour and Okanagan Lake, and they are left out of every number below rather than counted as “nobody ranks here”.

Finding 1: nobody covers the city

In every city we took the one business that was in the top 3 at the most points for “furnace repair”, and filled in the points where it was. This is the best case in each city. Every other business covered less.

Across both searches and all 10 cities, the best single result was 18% of the grid (Halifax, “heat pump installation”). The typical best was about 11%. No business, in any city, was in the top 3 across half the grid. The typical business that made the top 3 at all did so at 1–4% of the points: one or two neighbourhoods.

Finding 2: the top 3 is shared by dozens

The table is for “furnace repair”. “Heat pump installation” gave similar figures: 55–121 businesses per city, best-covered 10–18%.

Even the three best-covered businesses together held only 8–16% of all the top-3 spots in their city. The bigger the metro, the more it was shared: Surrey, Edmonton and Calgary each had more than 100 different businesses in the top 3 somewhere. The smaller markets, Halifax and Kelowna, were more concentrated, but even there the leader held less than a fifth of the grid.

Finding 3: close wins

Of all 4,335 top-3 spots we recorded, 65% went to a business whose Google pin was within 3 km of the point searched. The median distance was 1.7 to 2.9 km depending on the city. That is Google's distance factor showing up in the data: a company is strongest around its own pin and fades within a few kilometres.

Two things follow. A company that serves a whole metro from one location is, for most of that metro, competing against businesses that are closer. And the only way to know where you stand is to look at many points at once, not at one search. Why a geo-grid shows what one search cannot.

What went with the top 3 (not proof of cause)

Businesses that reached the top 3 somewhere had more Google reviews than those that never did: a median of 42–114 reviews by city, against 15–96. Reviews are one of the things Google says it weighs. [1] But this is a correlation in one snapshot. Bigger, older businesses tend to have more reviews and more of everything else, so it does not show that reviews alone moved anyone.

Most of the top-3 spots went to HVAC listings: 74% to “HVAC contractor” and 13% to “Heating contractor” or “Furnace repair service”. Plumbers took 4%, air-conditioning listings 4%, and supply stores, duct cleaners and others the rest.

What it means for an HVAC company

• Your ranking is a neighbourhood, not a city. A single search from the office tells you about the office.
• Every company has room to grow. Even the leaders were missing from the top 3 across 80% or more of their city.
• Distance can't be moved, so the rest matters more. The right primary category, a full services list, a steady flow of reviews, and real pages for the towns you serve are what reach further from the pin. Nobody can promise how far.

Limits

• One snapshot. Each point was searched once, on 13–14 October 2026. Results move day to day.
• A 20 km square is not the city limits. It takes in parts of neighbouring towns (around Surrey, parts of Delta and Langley) and leaves out the edges of the biggest cities.
• A map point, not a person. Real results also depend on the searcher's device, history and exact wording.
• English only. Montreal and Quebec City are not in this study.
• Desktop results at zoom 14, through a search-data provider rather than Google directly.
• No business is named, and none should be judged by this. A business's coverage depends on where its pin sits inside our square.

Journalists and researchers can have the summary table per city and search. Write to info@getmerkat.com. You're welcome to quote and chart these figures with a link to this page.