What two engines told a US solar installer to buy, and how many of those pages still publish a price

This page is about money, not method. If you want the method, our existing page on how a solar installer gets recommended by AI assistants covers what to change on the site. What nobody had written down is what the stack the engines recommend actually costs, so we asked both engines on 21 October 2026, collected every product and agency they named, and opened each one on 22 October 2026. Seven paid names came back. One publishes a figure. Two servers refused us. One agency publishes a rate that is not the rate the engine attached to it, and the marketplaces both engines leaned on would not serve us an installer pricing page at all.

The question, the surfaces and the dates

"How does an energy or solar installer get recommended by AI?" went to the ChatGPT product surface at 22:29 UTC and to Gemini at 22:43 UTC on 21 October 2026, through a data provider, with no company named. Both engines ran a live search. ChatGPT returned 27 citations, which is thin for this set, led by developers.google.cn with five, help.openai.com with two, techradar.com with two and developers.google.com with two, with the rest a tail of contractor marketing sites. Gemini returned three, solargenix.ai, clicktrackmarketing.com and aeoengine.ai, all three of them suppliers it then recommended or cited.

What each engine told an installer to do

• ChatGPT put the free work first and named one paid product at the very end. Google Business Profile with accurate categories, service areas, hours, photos and a steady flow of genuine reviews. Then a page per real service area and offering, residential solar, batteries, commercial installations and financing, stating licensing, NABCEP certification where it applies, warranties, installation experience and service boundaries, with LocalBusiness structured data.
• Then third party credibility. Audit your listings on EnergySage, the BBB and Yelp, pursue local news, trade association mentions and genuine testimonials, and prioritise the sources that actually appear in AI answers for your market rather than buying every directory listing.
• Then measurement. Test ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity with prompts such as best solar installers in your city and solar plus battery installers near your ZIP code, record which companies appear, their cited sources and the reasons given, and repeat monthly. Free Search Console, and Ahrefs Brand Radar paid, with the instruction in its own words to verify the current plan pricing.
• On hiring, it said to establish a baseline first. Hire an SEO agency with local home services experience that can demonstrate improvements in qualified leads, local visibility and AI citations rather than promise rankings.
• Gemini ordered four steps and named seven paid or part paid things. Google Business Profile free and Yext paid, then EnergySage and SolarReviews as trust platforms, then Schema App for JSON-LD, then ClickTrack Marketing, AEO Engine and First Page Sage as agencies and monitoring.
• Both engines independently named the same two marketplaces. EnergySage and, for Gemini, SolarReviews alongside it. For a residential installer those listings are a channel as much as a credibility signal, which is why their pricing matters.

Every paid name, opened on 22 October 2026

• Ahrefs Brand Radar, the only paid product in ChatGPT's answer, and it told us to check the price ourselves. We did. ahrefs.com/brand-radar publishes custom prompt tracking "Starts at $50/mo" and an AI Visibility Index tier at "$199/mo" with 83 prompts a day, 2,500 checks a month and overage at 0.020 dollars a check, plus a line reading "$699/MO FOR ALL MODELS" and a statement that Brand Radar is free on every paid Ahrefs Lite plan and above. The Ahrefs plan ladder itself, on ahrefs.com/pricing, reads Lite 129, Standard 249 and Advanced 449 dollars a month, with Lite including 150 checks on AI prompts.
• Yext, which Gemini priced at around 199 to 999 dollars a year. Not verifiable. yext.com/pricing, yext.com/pricing/ and yext.com/platform/pricing all returned HTTP 404 on 22 October 2026, the first two by redirecting to yext.com/404. A 404 records what the server did on that date and is not evidence about Yext's real rate.
• EnergySage, which Gemini described as a free listing with pay per quote. We could not reach an installer page to check it. energysage.com/p/for-installers/, energysage.com/supplier/ and energysage.com/for-installers/ all returned HTTP 404 on 22 October 2026. Both engines named this marketplace and neither of us can quote its installer terms from its own page today, which is the single most important gap in this answer for a residential installer, because a pay per quote marketplace is a cost of sale and not a software subscription.
• SolarReviews, described as a free basic listing with pay per lead. solarreviews.com returned 200 and renders 515 words with no dollar figure in them. The body is thin enough that the page is probably assembled by script after load, so treat the absence as a reading of our fetch rather than a statement about the product.
• Schema App, which Gemini priced at around 100 to 300 dollars a month and up. schemaapp.com/pricing/ returned 200 and renders 2,159 words with no plan price in them. The only dollar figure is an overage line, 100 dollars per 100,000 external chatbot requests beyond an included 100,000 a month.
• ClickTrack Marketing, which Gemini called custom flat fee. That description is accurate. clicktrackmarketing.com/industries-served/solar-marketing returned 200 and publishes no retainer, but it does publish something more useful than a retainer, its own read of the keyword market, with solar marketing at 880 searches a month and 8.57 dollars average cost per click, solar lead generation at 720 and 17.00 dollars, and solar company marketing at 210 and 9.34 dollars. Those are its figures, dated by our reading, and a national average rather than your metro.
• AEO Engine, which Gemini called custom pricing. aeoengine.ai/industries/solar-seo returned HTTP 403 with a 59 byte body on 22 October 2026. A 403 records what the server did on that date and is not evidence that the claim is false.
• First Page Sage, which Gemini said runs 10,000 dollars a month and up. firstpagesage.com returned 200 and renders 766 words with no dollar figure. firstpagesage.com/seo-blog/seo-pricing/ and firstpagesage.com/seo-blog/seo-pricing-2/ both returned HTTP 404. So the firm's own site, on the URLs we tried, publishes nothing to compare that figure against.

What an installer can actually budget from this

• Zero. Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Search Console, the free Merkle schema generator, and the pages both engines really wanted, which are a service page per offering and a page per city you genuinely install in, with the licence, the NABCEP certification, the warranty terms and the service boundary in text.
• Zero. The monthly prompt test ChatGPT spelled out, run with identical wording, recording the installers named and the URLs cited.
• 50 dollars a month, or nothing if you already pay Ahrefs. Brand Radar custom prompts, free on any paid Ahrefs Lite plan or above.
• 199 dollars a month. The Brand Radar AI Visibility Index tier at 83 prompts a day.
• Ask, and treat it as cost of sale. EnergySage and SolarReviews. Both engines put these marketplaces in the answer and neither marketplace served us an installer pricing page, so the terms are a conversation. A pay per quote or pay per lead arrangement belongs in your cost per signed contract, not in your software line.
• Ask, with no market rate to compare against. Yext, Schema App, ClickTrack, AEO Engine and First Page Sage. Five of the seven paid names publish no figure on the pages we read, so the 10,000 dollars a month in the answer has nothing behind it that we can see.

Why the money question is the whole question in solar

Solar is the vertical in this measurement where the recommended stack is least like software and most like channel spend. Two of the seven paid names are marketplaces that take a cut of a lead, and one supplier page publishes an average cost per click of 17 dollars for solar lead generation. Against that, the entire AI visibility measurement category, including us, is a rounding error on a single signed contract. That is worth stating plainly, because it means the decision an installer is actually making is not which dashboard to buy. It is whether the free work, the licence in text, the honest generation figures, the warranty terms and the city pages, has been done well enough that a marketplace lead stops being the only route in.

And it means the figures in an AI answer deserve a fetch before a budget. The Semrush ladder quoted elsewhere in this same audit has been renamed. ziptie.dev now redirects to ziptie.ai. visiblevet.com now serves lesli.com, which we confirmed ourselves on 22 October 2026. A vendor fact belongs to the URL it was read on, never to the brand name in a sentence.

Where AI Knows Us sits, and where a rival is cheaper

We sell AI visibility measurement. We do not sell solar leads, run ad accounts, build city pages or manage marketplace listings, and nothing above is a pitch for any of that. What we do is put the homeowner's and the commercial buyer's own questions, with your company name absent from the question, to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and report which installers were named and which URLs produced the answer. Our ladder, read from aiknowsus.com/llms.txt on 22 October 2026, is SEO Start at 149 dollars a month in the US and UK or 99 elsewhere, which watches 0 buyer questions on 0 engines, Growth at 299 in the US and UK or 199 elsewhere for 100 questions on all five surfaces weekly, and Scale at 599 and 399 for 300 questions. Growth is the cheapest plan of ours that reads all five surfaces, so 149 is not an AI visibility starting price.

Where a rival beats us, by name and with the figure. Ahrefs beats us on entry price for exactly this job and the engine that named it was right. Brand Radar custom prompt tracking starts at 50 dollars a month on ahrefs.com/brand-radar, and that page states it is free on every paid Ahrefs Lite plan and above, so an installer whose agency already pays 129 dollars a month for Ahrefs Lite can run prompt tracking at no extra cost. Nothing we sell competes with free. For a single location installer watching one metro, BrightLocal is also the better first purchase, publishing a one location Track plan at 41 dollars a month billed monthly or 369 billed annually, shown on brightlocal.com/pricing as 31 a month, with a Local AI Visibility Tracker inside the plan. Profound publishes single sign on, SAML, SOC 2 compliance and up to nine answer engines on its enterprise tier, and publishes no dollar price at all, with tryprofound.com/pricing rendering 1,302 words and not one dollar figure when we read it on 22 October 2026. A word boundary search of our own pricing page, 119,203 bytes read the same day, returns zero hits for sso, saml, soc 2, iso, dpa and white label. Our page also contradicts itself, rendering "Businesses covered 1 1 1 1 1 1 10 1" above "More than one business No" in all eight columns. Both readings render and we publish both.

What this page establishes. One question per engine on one night, one fetch per URL on 22 October 2026, every figure attached to the page it was read on, and the only price that binds anybody is the one in a written quote.

What solar installers ask about the cost of this work

What is the minimum I can spend and still see something

Nothing, if you run the prompt test yourself monthly with the wording ChatGPT gave. If you want it automated, Ahrefs Brand Radar custom prompts start at 50 dollars a month and are free on a paid Ahrefs Lite plan or above, read on 22 October 2026.

Is a 10,000 dollar a month GEO retainer the market rate for solar

We cannot support that figure from any page we read. The firm it was attached to publishes no price on its home page and the two pricing URLs we tried returned 404. Of seven paid names across both answers, one publishes a figure. There is no observable market rate, which means the proposal in front of you is the only number that exists.

Should I pay for marketplace leads

That is a cost of sale question rather than an AI visibility question, and neither marketplace served us an installer pricing page on 22 October 2026, so we cannot put a number on it. What we can say is that both engines named EnergySage, which makes it a page your prospective customers are reading, so keeping that listing accurate is worth doing whatever you decide about paid leads.

What belongs on the site for an engine to quote

The licence number, the NABCEP certification if you hold it, the warranty terms with their durations, the real service boundary, and honest generation estimates for your own districts with the seasonal range. ChatGPT asked for licensing, certification, warranties, experience and service boundaries by name. Those are all sentences, not software.

How often should I re test

Monthly, which is what the searching engine recommended, with identical prompt wording each time. Record the installers named and the cited URLs, because the URLs are the pages that decided the answer and the ones you can actually act on.