We asked ChatGPT 50 questions Melbourne homeowners ask before buying solar. Only 17 installers got named. Here's the full leaderboard and the 12 open lanes.
For the last 15 years, the way people found a solar installer in Melbourne was simple. Type "solar installers near me" into Google. Click one of the top three results. Get three quotes. Pick one.
That funnel is breaking.
Buyers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews the same questions they used to type into Google. The difference is huge. Google gives you ten blue links and lets you choose. AI gives you three names and tells you "these are the good ones."
If your business isn't one of those three names, the buyer never sees you. They don't scroll past. They don't compare quotes. You're not in the room.
We ran 50 of the most common buyer questions about Melbourne solar through ChatGPT this month. Here's what came back.
For the broader context on how AI search works, see our Answer Engine Optimization services and the GEO SEO complete guide. For Melbourne-specific work, see our SEO Melbourne page and AEO Melbourne page.
The headline numbers
- 50 high-intent buyer questions tested.
- 5 AI engines queried (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI, Claude).
- 17 Melbourne solar businesses ever named.
- 183 CEC-accredited Melbourne installers never named once.
- 12 questions where AI named no local business at all (open lanes).
- 7 third-party websites the AI cites for almost every answer.
Five names show up in 60% of all recommendations:
- Climasolar
- Sunburn Solar
- Lightning Energy
- Solar Flow Melbourne
- Total Solar Solutions
If you sell solar in Melbourne and your business isn't on that list, you're competing for the leftover 40% of mind share. And it's shrinking every quarter.
What buyers actually ask AI before they buy solar
We sorted 50 real buyer questions into five stages of the buying journey. Here's a sample of what showed up.
Still researching: Is solar worth it in Melbourne in 2026? How much does solar cost in Victoria? Will solar work in cloudy Melbourne weather? What's the payback period?
Comparing options: String inverter vs microinverter? Tesla Powerwall vs Sungrow? 6.6kW vs 10kW? Solar with battery, or solar first then battery later?
Vetting installers: Best solar installer in Melbourne? Most trusted solar company 2026? Who installs Tesla Powerwall? Best installer in Frankston, Brighton, Doncaster, Werribee, Geelong? Which Melbourne solar companies have been prosecuted?
Ready to buy: Cheapest 6.6kW system Melbourne? Fair price for 10kW? Solar Victoria rebate in 2026? End-of-financial-year deals?
Specific situations: Solar for tile roofs? Two-storey homes? Heritage-listed homes? Three-phase? Granny flats? Off-grid? Commercial small business?
Notice something? These aren't keywords. They're conversations. AI engines reward businesses that answer questions the way humans actually ask them, not the way SEO tools clean them up.
The leaderboard: who ChatGPT actually names
Across all 50 questions, here's who came up most often.
| Rank | Business | Mentions | Share of voice |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Climasolar | 14 / 50 | 28% |
| 2 | Sunburn Solar | 11 / 50 | 22% |
| 3 | Lightning Energy | 10 / 50 | 20% |
| 4 | Solar Flow Melbourne | 9 / 50 | 18% |
| 5 | Total Solar Solutions | 8 / 50 | 16% |
| 6 | Jet Solar | 7 / 50 | 14% |
| 7 | Life Solar | 6 / 50 | 12% |
| 8 | Start Solar | 5 / 50 | 10% |
| 9 | Energy Saviours | 4 / 50 | 8% |
| 10 | Smart Solar | 4 / 50 | 8% |
Then a long tail of businesses mentioned once or twice (Solargain, Solahart, Amazing Solar, Primero Electric and Solar, Power Next, Omzen Solar, Anova Energy).
And then nothing. 183 other CEC-accredited solar businesses in Greater Melbourne, not one mention. Not in any answer. Not in any engine. Invisible.
If you're reading this and your business isn't above, you're in that 183. The good news is, getting onto the leaderboard isn't a black art. It's a checklist.
The 12 open lanes (this is the gold)
Out of 50 questions, 12 returned answers with zero local installer names. The AI gave a generic, helpful answer with no business attached.
That's a wide open lane. Whichever installer publishes a clear, structured answer to those questions first will own the citation for at least 6 to 12 months.
The easiest one we found: "Cheapest 6.6kW solar system Melbourne."
ChatGPT gave a price range ($4,000 to $8,000) and zero business names. Whoever publishes a real, transparent pricing page with FAQ schema and a comparison table will be cited next time someone asks. Probably within 60 days.
Other open lanes from our test:
- Solar for heritage-listed homes Melbourne
- Solar for granny flats Melbourne
- Three-phase solar installer Melbourne
- Off-grid solar Melbourne
- Best installer for two-storey homes Melbourne
- No-deposit solar Melbourne
- End-of-financial-year solar deals Melbourne
- Solar for tile roofs Melbourne
- Solar Victoria rebate 2026 amount
- Commercial solar small business Melbourne
- Best solar finance options Melbourne
Each one of these is a low-competition, high-intent buyer question with no clear winner. That doesn't last forever.
The thing most installers get wrong about AI search
Here's the part that surprises every solar business owner we talk to.
ChatGPT almost never cites your website directly. It doesn't pull from your homepage. It doesn't read your service pages. Your beautiful new site you spent $20k on is, mostly, irrelevant to AI search.
Instead, ChatGPT cites the same handful of third-party sources, then picks names from those sources.
For Melbourne solar, the seven sources doing the heavy lifting are:
- starworks.com.au (review aggregator)
- whysolar.com.au (review aggregator)
- canstar.com.au (ratings publisher)
- solarchoice.net.au (quote comparison and reviews)
- productreview.com.au (consumer reviews)
- reddit.com (especially r/melbourne, r/AusRenovation, r/solar)
- heraldsun.com.au (news, including the Energy Safe Victoria prosecutions piece)
If you're not on these sites, with your right details, your right reviews, and your right service categories, you're not in the AI's source pool. You're not invisible because the AI hasn't found you. You're invisible because you're not where the AI looks.
This is also why throwing money at Google Ads doesn't fix it. Ads don't feed AI training data. Reviews on the right platforms do. News mentions do. Reddit threads do. Schema markup on your site does.
The Reddit problem (and how it works)
Reddit is the single biggest source of "is this company any good?" data for AI assistants in Australia. ChatGPT quoted Melbourne Reddit threads word-for-word in our tests. One quote, lifted from r/melbourne, said: "Solar industry is full of sharks."
That single sentence is now part of how AI describes the entire Melbourne solar market.
If you're a good operator, this should make you angry, then strategic. The fix isn't to spam Reddit. AI engines have started to spot that. The fix is:
- Monitor your business name across Reddit weekly.
- Reply to negative threads as a verified business account, not anonymously.
- Encourage real, happy customers to share their experience in the right subreddits when it's natural.
- Never pay for fake reviews. AI now penalises the patterns.
A single high-quality Reddit thread where a real customer praises your install can be cited for years.
The 5-step fix (60 to 90 days)
If you want to be one of the names ChatGPT recommends in Melbourne, here's the playbook. No fluff, no hidden steps.
Step 1: Get listed and verified on the 7 trusted sources. Five are free. Two need outreach. Each one is a direct line into the AI's source pool.
Step 2: Publish a "questions and answers" page that mirrors the 50 buyer questions. Add proper FAQ schema. AI engines lift FAQ-marked content word-for-word into answers.
Step 3: Add LocalBusiness, Service and Review schema to your homepage and key location pages. This is what makes you machine-readable. It's a one-day job for any decent developer.
Step 4: Earn 3 to 5 brand mentions on high-trust Aussie sites. Industry blogs, local news, Reddit AMAs. These are confidence signals. AI engines weigh them heavily.
Step 5: Run a monthly visibility check across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI. The leaderboard moves every month. What worked in May won't always work in August. Treat AEO as a recurring practice, not a one-off project.
Most installers can be cited inside 90 days if they stay on this list. We've seen faster.
Why this is urgent (and why most installers will miss it)
Three things are happening at the same time:
- AI search is taking traffic from Google. Google itself is now serving AI Overviews on most commercial queries. That means fewer clicks for organic results, even if you rank number one.
- The AI's "memory" of who's good is calcifying. Once Climasolar and Lightning Energy become the default names AI gives, they get more reviews, more mentions, more citations. The gap widens every month.
- Most agencies still don't sell AEO. They sell SEO. They'll keep optimising your title tags while your competitor quietly gets named in 14 AI answers a week.
The window to get cited cheaply is now. In 12 months it'll cost more. In 24 months the leaderboard will look a lot like the top of Google's local pack does today, locked in and hard to break into.
Want to know where you actually sit?
We do a free 20-minute AI Visibility Audit for Melbourne solar businesses. We run your business name across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI live, on the call. You see exactly:
- How many of the 50 buyer questions name you (most likely zero).
- Which of the 7 trusted sources you're missing from.
- The 3 fastest fixes for your specific situation.
You leave with a punch list whether you work with us or not. No pitch deck, no follow-up funnel.
Book your free AI Visibility Audit
Methodology: 50 buyer questions sourced from PAA data, AlsoAsked, Reddit search and our own buyer interviews. Each question run through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Claude with location set to Melbourne, Victoria. Results captured May 2026. We re-run this study every 90 days.