What 5W's Home Services & Improvement AI Visibility Index 2026 tells challengers, regional players, and every brand that isn't Home Depot.

By Ronn Torossian

I've spent twenty-five years teaching brands how to get into the story. Then the story changed. The homeowner doesn't read the article anymore — they ask the machine. And in the home category, the machine already picked.

5W's Home Services & Improvement AI Visibility Index 2026 measured how often brands surface when homeowners ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews the questions that used to start on Google. Home Depot took 16.5% of estimated citation share. Lowe's took 13.5%. Two brands. Thirty cents of every answer.

Here's the number nobody is reading correctly: the other 70% is unclaimed.

The Leaderboard Is a Map of Open Ground

Read the index as a scoreboard and you'll decide the game is over. Read it as a map and you'll see the openings. Ace Hardware sits at 6.5%. Wayfair at 5.5%. Angi at 4.2%. Below that, a long tail of single-digit and sub-1% brands — and beneath them, a category of one: the local operator, at effectively zero. The incumbents own the obvious query. Almost nobody owns the specific one.

The Specific Question Is Where Challengers Win

When the prompt gets narrow, scale stops deciding. Sherwin-Williams (2.3%) owns paint. Floor & Decor (1.5%) owns flooring. Tractor Supply (2.0%) owns rural. None of them is bigger than Home Depot — each of them out-answers it on the question it chose to own. That's the challenger's whole playbook in one line: don't fight for "best hardware store." Win "best specific thing" before the incumbent bothers to.

"Who Do I Hire" Is a Different Door

The buying query belongs to retailers. The hiring query is a separate market — Angi (4.2%), Thumbtack (3.4%), and TaskRabbit (1.8%) surface there, and Home Depot doesn't. Two doors. Most brands are only standing at one.

This Isn't a Home Problem — It's the Pattern

I've now watched this same shape across dozens of 5W indexes. HVAC and plumbing. Home security. Local services. Same story every time: the engines amplify the brands that already had scale and structured content, and erase the ones that ran on foot traffic and a phone number. The vertical changes. The physics don't.

What I'd Do If I Weren't Home Depot

Pick the query you can own — narrow, specific, winnable. Build the earned media the models trust. Structure your owned content so retrieval can actually read it. Measure your Citation Share and move it. That's GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — and it's the whole difference between being in the answer and being invisible inside it.

Build the infrastructure before the crisis — not during it. Two brands own the home answer today. The other seventy percent is still being written — and it's being written right now.

Read the full index: Home Services & Improvement AI Visibility Index 2026, part of the 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.