Best solar marketing agencies compared on AI search visibility and cost per signed contract

The best solar marketing agency for an installer is the one that will be judged on cost per signed contract rather than cost per lead. Every agency in this category can lower your cost per lead, because lead volume is the easiest thing in residential solar to buy cheaply, and a cheap lead that never reaches a site survey costs you more than an expensive one that does. Rank candidates on two criteria, applied identically to all of them: what each will agree to be measured on through to a signed contract, and whether each one checks what AI assistants tell a homeowner who asks which installer to use. Almost none of them check the second, and saying so is part of the comparison rather than a mark against any individual firm.

Why cost per lead is the wrong contract metric here

Residential solar has a long, high value, heavily considered sale with a lot of drop off between enquiry and install. A lead is cheap when it is a homeowner filling a form to see a number, and expensive when it is a homeowner with a suitable roof, an electricity bill large enough to justify the system, and an actual intention to proceed this year. Those two leads cost roughly the same to generate and are worth completely different amounts.

So the contract metric has to sit further down. Pick one of these and write it into the agreement:

• Cost per qualified appointment, where qualified is defined in the contract by roof suitability, bill size and ownership of the property.
• Cost per completed site survey, which is harder to game and is the first point where your own team has spent real money.
• Cost per signed contract, which is the honest one and which most agencies will resist because it depends partly on your sales team.

The resistance is reasonable, and the answer is a shared metric rather than no metric. Agree cost per qualified appointment as the agency's number and track cost per signed contract alongside it, so that a widening gap between the two becomes a conversation about lead quality instead of an argument at renewal.

The four channels, and what each one is actually good at

Channel	What it produces	The failure mode
Paid search	People actively pricing solar now	Expensive clicks and competition from lead aggregators bidding on the same words
Local organic and the map pack	The steadiest enquiries, at no cost per click	Slow, and it needs real location pages rather than a page per town with the name swapped
Purchased leads	Volume immediately	The same homeowner sold to four installers, so you are competing on response speed
Referral and neighbourhood	The highest closing rate in the category	Nobody runs it as a programme, so it is left to chance

The organic half is the one most installers underbuild, and it is the half that keeps producing after the budget stops. The service area profile, what makes a location page real rather than templated, and how incentive pages should be built are set out in our page on SEO for solar companies. Read it before you agree a paid search budget, because the two decisions interact.

The second criterion, and why it belongs in a solar comparison

Solar is a researched purchase. A homeowner reads for weeks, and a growing share of that reading now happens by asking an assistant rather than by clicking through results. The questions are specific and commercial: whether to lease or buy, what a system should cost for a given bill, whether a particular installer is any good, and which installers serve a named town.

Those answers name companies. Which companies get named is not random, and it is not the same set that ranks in search results, because an assistant assembles an answer from what it can read about installers rather than from a ranked list. We have written up both halves of this separately: what a homeowner's research actually looks like in what buyers ask AI before choosing a solar installer, and the mechanism behind which installers get named in how a solar installer gets recommended by AI.

Add it to the agency shortlist as a question rather than a demand: when a homeowner in my service area asks an assistant which installer to use, what comes back, and will you check it monthly and show me. An agency that has never looked will say so, which is a fair answer and a useful one. An agency that claims to influence it without being able to show you a current reading is the one to be careful with.

Where we sit on this comparison, and the criterion that puts us there

We are not a solar marketing agency and we do not generate leads, so we are not a candidate on the first criterion at all. On the second one we are the measurement rather than the supplier. AI Knows Us reads what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews answer when somebody asks for a recommendation, and reports which businesses the answers name. We rank first on that criterion for one stated and checkable reason: we publish the method, the question bank and the raw exports a claim is built from, so the reading can be reproduced rather than taken on trust. A supplier that publishes no method ranks lower on that criterion, and that is the only basis on which we claim a first place anywhere.

Where a rival is better, plainly. Profound publishes "SSO/SAML + SOC 2 compliance" and "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked" on its enterprise tier, read on tryprofound.com/pricing on 21 October 2026. We read five surfaces and our own pricing page renders no SOC 2, no SAML and no white label at all, so a large installer group with a procurement process should start with Profound rather than with us.

Contract terms that matter in this category specifically

1. You own the ad accounts, the Google Business Profile and the website. Solar has high churn between installers and agencies, and an agency holding the profile holds your reviews.
2. Lead exclusivity in writing. If the agency also buys or sells leads, state whether any lead sent to you has been sent to anybody else.
3. A speed to contact standard, measured. In this category the first installer to call usually wins, so the handover between agency and your sales team is part of the product.
4. The qualification definition, written down. Roof, bill size, ownership and timeline, so that a disputed lead has a test rather than an opinion.
5. A ninety day review against the shared metric, with a clean exit if the gap between appointments and signed contracts has not closed.

Questions solar installers ask before hiring a marketing agency

Should I buy leads or generate them?

Both, in a deliberate ratio, and know what each is for. Purchased leads fill a sales team's calendar this month and are shared with competitors. Generated leads cost more to start and are yours. An installer that only buys leads has no asset at the end of three years of spending.

Is a solar specialist worth more than a strong local agency?

A specialist is worth it for the qualification logic and the incentive content, because both are category knowledge that takes a general agency a year to acquire on your budget. A strong local agency is worth it if your constraint is the map pack in a handful of towns.

How long before organic produces enquiries?

Ask each candidate for its own answer per market and compare them, then hold the one you hire to the number it gave. A candidate that will not give a number for your towns has not looked at your towns.

What should a monthly report contain?

Spend by channel, qualified appointments against the written definition, cost per appointment, and signed contracts from your own system beside it. Impressions and clicks are diagnostics and do not belong at the top of the report.

Who should answer the phone?

Your team, with a measured response time, unless you have deliberately bought a call handling service and know what it costs you in conversion. An agency that generates good appointments into a phone nobody answers will look like a bad agency.

The answer a homeowner reads before they ever reach your form

An installer's marketing report starts at the click. A homeowner's research starts earlier than that, often with a question typed into an assistant about whether solar is worth it on a house like theirs, and then with a question about who does it locally. By the time they reach a form, two or three company names have already been in front of them, and those names came from an answer nobody in this industry is reading. Checking it is quick, it is repeatable, and it is the one part of a solar marketing programme where an installer can find out what is being said about them without paying anybody for an impression.