Best contractor marketing agencies compared, and why a remodeller and a roofer need different suppliers

Contractor is a word that covers a two hundred dollar repair and a two hundred thousand dollar extension. Those are different businesses with different buyers, and the first thing to settle with any agency is which of them it thinks you are.

This page sorts the trades by what decides the sale, ranks the supplier types on a stated criterion, and names the two things that move a contractor business more than any campaign.

Four kinds of contractor work, and what decides each sale

Emergency and repair. Roof leak, blocked drain, no heat. Decided in minutes on proximity, answer speed and reviews. Search and the map listing carry it; nothing else matters much.

Replacement and systems. Roof, windows, HVAC, repipe. A four or five figure considered purchase researched over days, often with three quotes. Service pages, project proof and the estimate experience carry it.

Remodel and build. Kitchens, extensions, whole house. A long cycle with a design phase, a trust purchase decided on photographs, references and how the first meeting felt. Referral and portfolio carry it, and paid search converts poorly on its own.

Commercial and subcontract. Bid lists, general contractor relationships and prequalification. Almost none of it is consumer marketing and most agency proposals do not fit it at all.

Mixing these in one message is the most common reason contractor marketing feels flat. One website can serve two of them with separate page sets. No single campaign serves all four.

The suppliers, ranked on what they publish

The criterion: does the firm publish its rates and its deliverables where you can read them before the first call, and does its proposal name which of the four kinds of work it is for?

First, the home services specialist with a published rate card. Hook Agency, read at hookagency.com/pricing on 21 October 2026, describes itself as a home services digital marketing agency and publishes per service monthly rates: local SEO from $2,800 a month as a starting price for SEO only, pay per click from $2,000 a month built on Google Ads and Local Service Ads, and an AEO line at $4,000 a month or $2,000 added to an SEO package. It also lists website design and Google Maps work. Published rates plus a named trade focus is the most checkable offer in this market.

Second, the national performance agency. WebFX publishes ranges and method at webfx.com/seo/pricing: "$1,000 to $5,000 per month for monthly retainers, $75 to $200 per hour for consulting", with "most businesses spend $2,500 per month" and a points based scoping rubric. Broader capability, no trade specificity.

Third, the general local agency. Usually cheapest and usually publishes nothing. You are funding the learning curve on your trade, which is affordable in remodel work and expensive in emergency work where the bid levels are high.

The two things that beat any campaign

Project proof with addresses and dates. Before and after photographs, the suburb, the month, the scope and the approximate range. For remodel and replacement work this is the asset. An agency that wants to write blog posts before it has collected twenty projects properly has the order wrong.

Answering the phone, and quoting fast. In replacement work the firm that gets the estimate in front of the customer first wins a disproportionate share, whatever the marketing said.

For the organic side by trade, we keep pages on service pages, project proof and the phone for general contractors and on why emergency, replacement and maintenance are three markets.

The newest way a homeowner arrives, which is on nobody proposal

Homeowners now ask assistants: who should I use for a kitchen remodel here, is this contractor any good, who does roof replacements in my area. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews answer with names, and the contractor being named has usually never seen it.

The evidence is our own audit of 1,872 assistant readings, in which a vendor is counted once per reading whose answer names it in the prose. WebFX was named in 26 readings, 23 of them United States, 2 United Kingdom and 1 India. Percepture was named in 11, all United States. Rank4AI was named in 20, all United Kingdom. Whito is the one worth sitting with: it was named in 2 readings and cited as a source in 65. Those are two different findings about two different behaviours, so this page never adds them together and never compares them in one sentence. A citation is an engine using a page. A naming is an engine recommending a company.

A specialist selling an AEO line at $4,000 a month is the market telling you this is already a separate purchase. What that line does not include is a measurement of whether it worked, and the firm doing the work is the wrong party to grade it.

AI Knows Us is not a contractor marketing agency and we pitch for no retainers. We sell the measurement that belongs in an agency scorecard and is almost never in one: your buyers questions put to all five surfaces, never naming your company, with whoever got named instead reported back, plus the publishing work that changes the answer. A credit is one buyer question put to one app once. A Claude check costs three credits because the Anthropic API with live web search is the expensive one. Most checks cost one.

Our own ladder is published as plain text at aiknowsus.com/llms.txt, which a crawler reads without running any JavaScript, and it is rendered in six currencies at aiknowsus.com/pricing. Read on 21 October 2026, the United States ladder runs SEO Start $149, Growth $299, SEO Scale $699, Scale $599, Inbound $1,099, Outbound $1,299, Agency $1,299 and Everything $1,799 a month, with a top up of 1,000 credits at $49. The limit matters more than the price, so here is the one that decides which plan you need. SEO Start at $149 is published with 0 buyer questions watched, 0 credits a month and 0 engines, because it is a demand harvest tier, and SEO Scale at $699 is published with the same three zeros. Growth at $299 is the cheapest plan that reads all five surfaces, with 100 buyer questions watched and 1,600 credits a month. Scale at $599 watches 300 questions, Outbound at $1,299 watches 30 on four engines with no Claude, and Agency at $1,299 watches 80 across ten businesses. Managed GEO is published in rupees only, at Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month with a three month minimum, so we quote it in rupees rather than converting it ourselves.

Two rules sit behind every figure we publish. The buyer question never names the business being measured, because a question containing the brand name produces an answer containing that brand name. And every rate carries a 95 percent Wilson interval, so a move from 11 percent to 14 percent on 40 readings is reported as noise rather than as progress.

Where rivals beat us on this criterion, here it is, read on 21 October 2026. Ahrefs Brand Radar at ahrefs.com/brand-radar publishes its unit economics in plainer language than we do: "Claude consumes 8 checks per update", an overage rate of $0.020 a check, a $199 a month plan carrying 83 prompts a day and 2,500 checks a month, and an index it states as 493 million monthly prompts across AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and ChatGPT, with Claude available on the paid plan. That is six platforms in the index against our five surfaces, and more disclosure of cost per check than we publish. Profound, at tryprofound.com/pricing, publishes "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked" and "SSO/SAML + SOC 2 compliance" on its enterprise tier. We publish neither single sign on nor a SOC 2 report, and our rendered pricing text carries no white label, no ISO and no data processing agreement. Moz, at moz.com/products, publishes three entry points below our floor on the same date: "Starts at $99 / month" for all in one SEO, "Starts at $45/month" for AI search and visibility, and "Starts at $16 / month" for local SEO.

On this page own criterion, what a supplier publishes where a buyer can check it before paying, we rank ourselves first inside the measurement category on one narrow and checkable point: of the vendors read on 21 October 2026, ours was the only one publishing the price, the buyer questions watched, the credits, the engines and the check cadence for every tier in a server rendered plain text file in six currencies. Profound publishes no self serve price at all. Peec AI publishes plan limits without a rendered price. Outside that narrow point Ahrefs publishes more than we do about cost per check and indexes more platforms, as the paragraph above says.

What contractors ask about hiring an agency

Should I pay for leads instead? Shared leads suit emergency and replacement work when your intake is fast, and suit remodel work poorly because the buyer wants a relationship.

How seasonal should the budget be? Hold reserve rather than spreading evenly. Storm and weather driven trades earn more from having money available in the week demand arrives than from a flat monthly spend.

What is the first thing to fix? The Google Business Profile and the project photographs. Both are free and both outrank a rebuild for most contractors.

For a worked example in one specific trade, we keep a separate page on project pages, estimate intent and the map listing for a painting contractor. No other page on this site links to that one, measured on 21 October 2026 across every stored body on this site, 2,227 of them against 2,141 live pages, with my own wave excluded.