Most home service categories still have no AI visibility leader, and that is exactly the shift we track every week on Search and Destroy. Kevin Indig’s July 2026 analysis for Search Engine Land found that 89.3% of AI-search demand sits in categories nobody has claimed, with only 15.2% showing a settled winner. Once a business builds a real lead in AI visibility, it holds the top spot about 90% of the time. The window to claim your category is open now, and it will not stay open for long.
There is a quiet land grab happening in AI search, and almost nobody in home services has noticed. The map just got published, and it is better news for you than you would guess. Nearly all the demand is sitting in categories that no business has claimed yet.
The territory is wide open
The data is striking. Researcher Kevin Indig pulled a large Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit dataset covering 1,094 US categories, five prompts each, all run through ChatGPT in the United States. Treat it as the best window we have, not the whole house. In June 2026, only 15.2% of categories had a clear owner. The rest is open ground, and more than half were wide-open fields with nobody in charge.
Here is the part that flips the story. The top group of categories holds 98% of all the demand, yet has the lowest ownership rate at 11.3%, against 19.0% in the smallest group. Stack it up and 89.3% of AI-search demand sits in categories nobody has claimed. That is not a closed market. It is one that has barely started.
Why this beats your ranking
This shift matters more than your Google ranking. For twenty years, showing up meant fighting to be one of the blue links or one of the three map results. That game is changing fast. When someone asks an AI tool for a recommendation, 74% of people go with the very first business it names. They do not build a list or compare five options.
So you are no longer competing for a click. You are competing to be the name. When we are the brand an AI keeps naming in a category and a market, the homeowner asks, the AI answers with our name, and the phone rings. That is AI visibility: not where you rank, but whether the AI names you at all.
The 4% homepage twist
One finding catches a lot of operators off guard. The study looked at which pages an AI pulls from before it names a business:
- Homepages were cited just 4% of the time
- Deep service pages carried far more weight
- When a page matched a real place and a real need, it did the work
- Thin, brochure-style pages got passed over
If your money has gone into a pretty homepage, you have been decorating a room an AI does not walk into. The pages that win are the specific ones that answer exactly what a homeowner asked.
Grab it before it is gone
The message is to move now. Ownership compounds. A clear owner held on to first place in 90.4% of month-to-month checks. The catch is that the lock-in only holds when the lead is big; leaders with a slim 1.3-point edge got knocked off, while those with a 2.9-point lead held firm. Get in early, build a real lead, and turn your category into a fortress. The four-move playbook is simple:
- Pick a handful of services that make you money, not all twenty
- Deep service and location pages for each thing that matters
- Answer the exact question a homeowner asks, with named services and areas
- Early movers win, so make your move and then defend the lead
Marketers now call this work generative engine optimization or answer engine optimization, but it comes down to the four moves above. This is what we build at Lizard Marketing with Smart Sites 2.0: deep service pages a machine can read, not a homepage nobody cites. Narrow beats broad, and specific beats vague, every time.
Watch the episode and subscribe
Want the full breakdown from Mat? Here are the parts worth jumping to:
- 1:30: the data behind 89.3% of demand sitting in unclaimed categories
- 3:03: why the named answer beats your Google ranking
- 4:18: the 4% homepage twist and the pages that actually win
- 4:46: the four-move playbook to claim your category
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