Solar Lead Generation Companies 2026: 7 Models, Costs, Ownership

When we asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Mode for the best solar installer in 26 US cities on 7 and 8 October 2026, 113 of the 130 answers (86.9%) cited at least one of the six big solar lead platforms, and 106 of them (81.5%) cited EnergySage alone. The lead vendors you are comparing are also the pages that write the AI's shortlist, which changes what you are buying when you buy a lead. This guide compares the seven main ways solar companies pay for leads, with each vendor's own public terms quoted and dated, and then shows what our data says about owning the pipeline instead. A note on who is writing: Orkkid is an SEO and GEO agency that sells services to solar companies, so we have a commercial interest in the "own it" side of this argument. Every vendor fact below comes from that vendor's own page, and every study number comes from our dataset.

TL;DR

• In our October 2026 test of 130 AI answers across 26 US cities, EnergySage was cited in 81.5% of answers, HomeAdvisor in 18.5%, SolarReviews in 7.7%, Angi in 6.2%, Thumbtack in 3.8% and Modernize in 0%.
• Across the 52 Google AI Overviews on 60 homeowner solar searches, EnergySage was cited in 63.5% and SolarReviews in 30.8%, while Angi, HomeAdvisor and Thumbtack were cited in none.
• Only SolarReviews publishes a lead price range on its own site ($25 to $300 per lead, shared up to four ways); EnergySage, Angi, HomeAdvisor and Thumbtack describe a per-lead or per-quote fee without a public dollar figure, and Modernize's installer pages could not be fetched at all.
• The same homeowners are typing "solar companies near me" 14,800 times a month at a $27.67 average cost per click, and Google shows a local pack rather than an AI Overview on that search.
• Installers in Google's map top 20 with 500 or more reviews were named by at least one AI 58.8% of the time, against 4.6% for installers with under 25 reviews; the review count you own predicts AI recommendations better than any listing you rent.

Why the vendor list and the AI's reading list are the same list

Solar lead vendors sell two things that look like one product. The first is the lead itself: a homeowner's name, address and phone number, sold once or several times. The second is a city-level page ("best solar companies in Houston") that ranks installers and feeds the answer engines. When a homeowner asks ChatGPT who to call, the model reads that page rather than your website. In our dataset, 121 of the 129 EnergySage URLs the AIs cited (93.8%) were local "solar companies" pages for the city in the question, and Perplexity's Los Angeles answer put it plainly: "EnergySage lists it first among its top Los Angeles installers, followed by American Array Solar and Roofing, G C Electric Solar, Sunergy, and Evolution Energy." (Perplexity, Los Angeles).

So an installer comparing vendors has two questions: what a lead costs, and whether paying this vendor puts you on a page the AI reads and leaves you with anything once you stop paying. The table below answers the first part from each vendor's own pages, checked on 10 October 2026, and the sections after it answer the second.

1. EnergySage: the page every AI reads, priced behind an application

EnergySage was cited in 106 of 130 AI answers (81.5%), including all 26 Perplexity answers and all 26 Claude answers, and in 33 of 52 Google AI Overviews (63.5%). No other solar lead source came close in either channel. What installers get is described on EnergySage's own installer page, checked 10 October 2026: "Installers that match the customer's needs and location receive an alert through the platform," and "Your team submits quotes online and connects with customers to close the sale." The entry criteria are public too: "Over two years of experience installing solar PV," "Licensed and insured for solar PV," and a "Reputation for excellent customer service and quality solar installations."

The price is not. EnergySage's "how we make money" page says "Installers and other service providers pay us a small fee to join our marketplace, but only after we vet them through our rigorous standards," and that the service is "completely free to use" for shoppers. No dollar figure, per-quote fee or commission rate is published, so treat any number you read elsewhere as hearsay until EnergySage quotes it to you. Shoppers receive quotes from several installers, so every EnergySage lead is shared by design.

What to do: if you qualify, apply, because an EnergySage profile with reviews is the single most-read installer page in AI answers today. We go deeper on the trade-offs in EnergySage for installers and compare the two review marketplaces head to head in EnergySage vs SolarReviews.

2. SolarReviews: the only vendor with a public price range

SolarReviews is the one platform on this list that states its lead pricing on its own site. Its solar leads page, checked 10 October 2026, defines four products: "Exclusive: A lead sold only to you," "Duo: A lead sold to you and one other company," "Trio: A lead sold to you and two other companies" and "Quad: A lead sold to you and three other companies." On price: "On average, solar leads cost between $25 and $300, with prices changing due to factors like where you're located and how many other solar companies the leads are shared with." On quality: "We require consumers to verify that their phone number is correct by having them enter a specific pin sent to their phone to see their online estimate," and the QA team "disqualify over 50% of the raw leads we generate." The registration page adds that "There are no lock-in contracts for SolarReviews leads; you can start or pause buying either product at any time" and that a card "will not be charged unless you set up a lead buying campaign after registration."

In our data SolarReviews is a Google channel more than an AI assistant channel. It was cited in only 10 of 130 AI assistant answers (7.7%), but in 16 of 52 Google AI Overviews (30.8%), second only to EnergySage, and it ranked in the organic top 10 on 18 of the 60 homeowner searches we checked (30%). The pages the AIs cited were state and city lists such as solarreviews.com/solar-companies/texas/houston.

What to do: claim the free profile whether or not you buy leads, because the city list is what Google's AI Overview quotes. If you buy, start with exclusive or duo leads in one service area and compare cost per installed job against your own channels after 90 days.

3. Modernize: pay per lead, pages we could not reach

Modernize sells pay-per-lead programs across home improvement trades, including solar. We tried to fetch its installer pages (modernize.com/pros/solar-leads and modernize.com/contractors) on 10 October 2026 from three different clients and every request returned a 403 error from its CDN, so we cannot quote its terms or confirm its pricing, and we will not guess. Ask for the per-lead price, the sharing rule and the return policy in writing before you fund an account.

What our data shows is where Modernize sits in the answer engines: it was cited in 0 of 130 AI assistant answers and in 1 of 52 solar AI Overviews (1.9%), on the query "solar panel cost." If you buy Modernize leads, you are buying contact data only; there is no second benefit of being on a page the AI reads.

4. Angi Leads and HomeAdvisor: a per-lead fee, shared by design

Angi Leads is the pro-facing side of Angi and HomeAdvisor. Its FAQ page for pros, checked 10 October 2026, describes the model: "Angi Leads provides you with new customer leads that match your requirements and you pay a nominal fee for each lead you match to," and "Different sized jobs have different Lead Fees." Sharing is explicit: the service "uses the completed service profile to connect customers with multiple Angi Leads service professionals that can best complete their project." No dollar amounts for solar lead fees are published on the pages we could reach, and a separate fee article on Angi's pro support site loaded without its body text.

In the answer engines, HomeAdvisor's city pages ("Solar Panels Install or Replace" in Los Angeles, Houston, Orlando and so on) were cited in 24 of 130 answers (18.5%), almost entirely by Perplexity (20 of its 26 answers, 76.9%). Angi was cited in 8 answers (6.2%), and 7 of the 10 Angi URLs were request.angi.com quote-request links that Google AI Mode attached to named installers in 5 of its 26 answers. Neither brand appeared in any of the 52 AI Overviews.

What to do: a free, complete Angi and HomeAdvisor profile with reviews is worth having because Perplexity reads the HomeAdvisor city page. Paying for leads there is a separate decision; the pages say "multiple" pros receive each request, so budget for speed to lead and expect to compete on price.

5. Thumbtack: you set the lead price, the customer picks who to message

Thumbtack publishes its mechanics in detail but no fixed price list. Its help article on paying for leads, checked 10 October 2026, says "Our goal is to make the cost match how valuable the job is," that "Prices will vary since a job's value can change based on things like the type and size of the job, how many pros are available, and your market," and that when you set a lead price, "This is the exact amount you'll pay for each lead." For Opportunities, where the pro reaches out first, "You only pay the price shown if the customer responds to you." A weekly budget caps total spending.

Thumbtack was cited in 5 of 130 AI answers (3.8%), four of them by Google AI Mode linking directly to a pro's profile, and in none of the 52 AI Overviews. It is a small channel for solar in our sample, and the pages cited were individual pro profiles rather than ranked lists, which means a strong profile with reviews can get you cited even though Thumbtack's own pages rarely are.

What to do: if your market has Thumbtack demand for solar, set a low lead price, turn on Opportunities and track response time; otherwise keep the free profile and spend the budget elsewhere.

6. Facebook and Google ads agencies: exclusive leads at auction prices

An ads agency charges a management fee (monthly retainers are typical, and the fee is set by each agency, so there is no single public price) on top of media spend, and in exchange the lead lands on your form and belongs to you. The media cost is public, and our study recorded it for the searches a homeowner uses to pick an installer. "solar companies near me" had 14,800 searches a month at a $27.67 average cost per click, "solar installers near me" had 12,100 at $23.60, and "best solar installers" carried the highest CPC in the set at $31.52. Across the 13 installer-choice queries with Google Ads data, the median CPC was $8.90, and the five commercial "near me" and "best" queries all showed a Google local pack.

That table carries two lessons for anyone buying ads. First, the two "near me" searches add up to 26,900 searches a month and show a local pack rather than an AI Overview, so a well-ranked Google Business Profile competes directly with the ad for the same click, free. Second, informational solar searches ("solar panel cost," "is solar worth it") now show an AI Overview 86.7% of the time, and the sites those Overviews quote are the review platforms above rather than installer landing pages: 21 of the 52 Overviews (40.4%) cited a solar company's own site, and the rest went to third parties.

What to do: run ads on the five commercial queries if the unit economics work, send them to a page that matches your Maps listing, and measure cost per installed job rather than cost per lead. Our guide to how to get more solar leads covers the channel mix in detail.

7. Appointment-setting firms: pay per sit, read the sit definition

Appointment setters call or text homeowner lists and book a time for your rep. Pricing is per set appointment or per completed sit, sometimes with a monthly minimum. We found no appointment-setting firm that publishes a fixed solar price on its own page; the figures that circulate ($200 to $450 per set appointment) appear on competing vendors' comparison pages and attribute the ranges to other firms, so we could not verify them at the source and do not treat them as published prices. Ask each firm what exactly bills: whether a no-show, a reschedule or a two-minute "not interested" counts as a sit.

In our dataset this channel has no footprint at all, which is the point: an appointment setter produces nothing an AI engine can read, so whatever you pay stays with the firm.

What you own when you stop paying

The study gives a clear read on what predicts an AI recommendation, and every one of those signals is something the installer owns outright. Among the 520 Google Maps top-20 installers across the 26 cities, those with 500 or more Google reviews were named by at least one AI 58.8% of the time and those with 250 to 499 reviews 59.5% of the time, against 28.4% for installers with 25 to 99 reviews and 4.6% for installers with fewer than 25. The median AI-named installer had 129 Google reviews; the median installer that was never named had 16. Overall only 24% of the Maps top 20 were named by any AI, and 70.3% of the installers the AIs recommended were not in the Maps top 20 at all, which is why a map position alone is not enough.

The homepage rows come from our audit of 335 reachable installer sites. Reviews are the strongest single signal, and they are also the input every lead platform ranks you by, so review volume compounds: it lifts your Maps position, your EnergySage and SolarReviews rank, and your odds of being named by ChatGPT in the same move. The practical sequence for an installer is:

1. Build review collection into the install process. Send a direct review link after every inspection and every commissioning; our free Google review link generator builds it. The city benchmarks in how many Google reviews a solar company needs tell you the target for your market.
2. Put the trust signals the AIs quote on your own pages. NABCEP certification, license numbers, years in business, battery and financing pages, and the current federal Residential Clean Energy Credit terms. Mark the business up with LocalBusiness structured data so the entity is unambiguous.
3. Claim the free profiles on the pages the AIs read. EnergySage, SolarReviews, HomeAdvisor and Yelp city pages supplied most citations in our sample; the full list is in the sites AI reads before recommending a solar installer. You do not need to buy leads to be listed, and the listing is what the AI sees.
4. Keep your Google Business Profile complete and consistent. Google AI Mode cited Google's own business listings in 80.8% of its answers, and the "near me" searches above resolve to the local pack. Google's own guide to improving your local ranking covers the inputs.

This is the work we do as an agency, and you can read how we approach it for installers on our solar companies page and in our generative engine optimization service overview. If you are deciding between hiring it out and doing it in-house, solar company SEO walks through the full program.

How we got this data

On 7 and 8 October 2026 we asked five AI engines the same question in 26 US cities: "Who is the best solar installer in {City}, {State}? Give me your top picks." ChatGPT (gpt-5.5), Perplexity (sonar-pro), Gemini (gemini-3.8-flash) and Claude (claude-sonnet-5-5) ran with web search on, through the DataForSEO AI Optimization API. Google AI Mode ran through DataForSEO's AI Mode SERP endpoint with the keyword "best solar installer in {City}" and the city as location. That gave 130 answers, 26 per engine, naming 778 recommendations and 411 unique installers.

The cities were Denver, Austin, Phoenix, Charlotte, Seattle, Tampa, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Orlando, Miami, Atlanta, Raleigh, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Tucson, Boston, Newark, Baltimore, Chicago, Minneapolis and Honolulu. We pulled the Google Maps top 20 for "solar installer" in each city (520 listings), matched every named installer against it, and audited the reachable installer websites (335 sites) for 23 trust and conversion signals. Separately we checked 60 homeowner solar searches on Google US desktop on 8 October 2026, recording whether an AI Overview appeared and which URLs it cited, the organic top 10, whether a local pack appeared, and Google Ads search volume and CPC; 52 of the 60 showed an AI Overview.

For this post we counted each lead platform once per answer or per AI Overview, merging subdomains (request.angi.com counts as Angi). Vendor terms were fetched from each vendor's own public pages on 10 October 2026 and quoted verbatim; where a page could not be fetched or published no price, we say so. Limits: one run per prompt and engine is a snapshot, AI answers change from run to run, and shares for the smaller platforms rest on a handful of answers. Orkkid sells SEO and GEO services to solar companies. The parent write-up and per-business data are in the Orkkid AI Recommendation Study.

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FAQ

What do solar leads cost in 2026?

The only major platform that publishes a range on its own site is SolarReviews, which states "between $25 and $300" per lead depending on location and whether the lead is exclusive, duo, trio or quad. EnergySage, Angi Leads, HomeAdvisor and Thumbtack describe per-lead or per-quote fees without a public dollar figure, and Modernize's installer pages were unreachable when we checked on 10 October 2026. Google's own auction is public: "solar companies near me" averaged $27.67 per click in our October 2026 data.

Are solar leads exclusive or shared?

It depends on the vendor and the product. SolarReviews sells both exclusive and shared leads and names how many companies receive each one. EnergySage shoppers receive quotes from several installers by design, and Angi Leads says it connects each request with "multiple" pros. Ads you run yourself and most appointment-setting contracts are exclusive to you.

Which solar lead generation company do AI assistants cite most?

EnergySage, by a wide margin: 81.5% of the 130 AI answers in our October 2026 test cited it, and 63.5% of the 52 Google AI Overviews did. HomeAdvisor (18.5%) and SolarReviews (7.7%) followed in AI assistant answers; SolarReviews was second in AI Overviews at 30.8%. Angi, Thumbtack and Modernize were each cited in under 7% of answers.

Do I have to buy leads to be listed on EnergySage or SolarReviews?

SolarReviews' registration page says a card "will not be charged unless you set up a lead buying campaign after registration," so the profile itself is free. EnergySage says installers "pay us a small fee to join our marketplace" after vetting, so a listing there is tied to joining the marketplace. HomeAdvisor, Angi, Thumbtack and Yelp all offer free profiles.

Is buying solar leads worth it compared with SEO and reviews?

Bought leads produce calls this week and nothing that lasts; reviews, a complete Google Business Profile and a site with the right trust signals compound. In our data, installers with 500 or more Google reviews were named by an AI 58.8% of the time against 4.6% for those under 25, and 99.2% of AI-named installers had a working website. Most installers run both, and the useful comparison is cost per installed job over a quarter rather than cost per lead.

How do I check whether AI engines mention my solar company?

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Mode the question a homeowner would ask ("Who is the best solar installer in {your city}?") and record who they name and which pages they cite. Our free AI Citation Checker tool automates the first pass, and the per-city results from our own run, including every installer the five AIs named, are in the parent study linked above.