The bar
19
How small a cited site gets. The weakest quartile.
Median cited site
41
What a typical incumbent scores.
Content share
84%
Cited sources that are articles, not vendor sites.
Brand tested
17
samedayairrepair.com
Verdict
Open. A newcomer has a realistic route in.
This niche was run specifically to test the failure in Austin. If a local pack swallows the answer in one city-service market, does it swallow it in all of them? No. HVAC in Phoenix produced a clean, scoreable citation set with a bar of 19 and a median cited site of 41.
The tested company scored 17, two points under the bar, in a market where the gap between the floor and the middle is 22 points. That is a reachable position and a market with a long tail.
The comparison with Austin matters more than the HVAC numbers themselves. It means a local pack is not a structural property of local queries; it is a property of particular queries. Before concluding that a market cannot be measured, the question should be re-asked in a different shape.
At a bar of 19 with 84% content share, local service guides and city-specific explainers are enough. Read the Austin page for what happens when the question is asked the wrong way.
We asked the questions a buyer in this market actually asks, read every domain the engines cited in the answers, and scored each cited domain with the proprietary Peak Answer Link Ranking system. The bar is the score of the weakest quartile of cited sites, which tells you how small a site can be and still get quoted — basically how winnable the niche is for new players entering the space. Measured 09/23/2026. Engines change mentions overtime, so these may drift.
Two honest limits. The sample is the questions we chose, and a different set of questions in the same market would move these numbers. And scores are a model of authority, not a measurement of it: they are the same model the product uses on itself, which is the reason to trust the comparison between niches more than any single figure.
Peak Answer asks your buyers’ questions every week, reads every source the engines cite, and tells you which questions name a competitor instead of you.
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