27.9% across the 104 HVAC contractor websites we inspected.

HVAC leads the three trades on chat adoption, and the emergency-demand pattern explains it. When the furnace dies at midnight the customer will take any channel that answers, and HVAC operators are the most likely of the three to be running an after-hours answering service that can staff it.

That puts HVAC above the combined figure of 20.3% across all 380 brands , by 7.6 percentage points. Here is the same measurement in the other two trades we inspected.

Trade	Chat widget adoption	Sites
HVAC (this page)	27.9%	104
Roofing	16.9%	130
Remodeling	17.9%	146

Why it costs you work

Chat is the one capture path that works while the phone line is busy and the form feels like too much commitment. It is also the one most likely to be installed, forgotten, and left answering nobody, which is worse than not having it. Adoption is the easy number. Whether anybody is on the other end is the number nobody publishes.

Checking your own HVAC site

Send a message to your own widget at nine on a Saturday night and time the reply. If the answer is Monday, the widget is collecting intent you are not converting, and an honest offline form beats a chat bubble that implies somebody is there.

Everything else we measured on HVAC sites

Measurement	HVAC
Sites people with disabilities cannot use	64.4%
Sites that are hard to use for the disabled	98.1%
How long sites take to load on a phone	6.24s
Quote form field count	29.9%
Multi-step forms	1%
Named customer testimonials	52.9%

What was measured: Share of brands with a vendor-detected chat widget at page load (strict).
How we measured it: We checked whether a real chat bubble loads when the page opens, rather than counting sites that merely mention live chat in their copy.
The technical version, for anyone checking our work: dom_facts vendor-signature detection at page load
Scope: strict vendor signature
Denominator: 104 HVAC brands.
Collection window: 2026-05-10 to 2026-05-16
Who ran it: Fervor Studio, first-party capture. Nobody paid to be included or excluded.

This measurement across every trade: Chat widget adoption. How the capture works: the methodology.

The full report behind the HVAC numbers: State of HVAC. Or see how individual HVAC brands scored on the HVAC leaderboard.