Turn AI Searches Into a Competitive Advantage  

Electrical distributors have an opportunity to become top-of-mind if they start paying attention to how AI recommendations work.

As more customers rely on chatbox to steer them toward “best places” where they can buy products for renovation and remodeling projects, electrical distributors need to make certain their businesses show up in those searches.

A recently released research study examined how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews recommend home improvement retailers, brands, and service providers when consumers ask for advice on projects and purchases.

According to 5W AI Communications’ new Home Services & Improvement AI Visibility Index 2026, the AI recommendations didn’t always mirror market leadership. Some home improvement retailers and service providers appear far more often than competitors when consumers ask AI where to shop or who to hire — and the overall ranking may surprise you.  

Consumers rely more on AI for advice and recommendations on almost everything. For that reason, lighting companies’ and distributors’ visibility across AI platforms is becoming an increasingly important factor.

The research analyzed more than 60 prompts across five major AI platforms to measure which companies appear most often in AI-generated recommendations.

Since electrical distributors, marketplaces, and brands competing for home-improvement dollars are currently researched by consumers via chatbox, 5W’s research ranked the top 25 by how often the AI engines name them in an online search.

US Lighting Trends spoke to 5W AI Communications founder and chairman Ronn Torossian about what he thinks these results could mean for the lighting industry.

“Just like the home improvement sector, people are turning to AI chatbots to ask questions. Lighting wasn’t a category we broke out on its own in this particular index, but the patterns we found in categories – such as paint – tell you almost exactly what’s happening in lighting right now, because the underlying behavior is the same,” he said.

“In paint, we found that Sherwin-Williams and Behr aren’t competing with every other retailer for a generic ‘best paint’ answer. They each claimed a specific lane and AI treats that ownership as fact,” Torossian explained.

“Lighting works the same way. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews ‘what’s the best lighting for a kitchen remodel’ or ‘how do I choose smart lighting for my home,’ the AI isn’t inventing an opinion. It’s retrieving whatever brand, retailer, or piece of editorial content has most clearly claimed that specific question and category,” he stated. “If a lighting brand hasn’t built content that directly answers the questions consumers are actually typing, that brand is simply not part of the conversation — no matter how good the product is on a showroom floor. A brand that has identified itself for kitchen lighting is coming up when people ask for ‘best kitchen lighting,’” he continued.

“Someone does not walk into a store already knowing they want a specific brand of recessed lighting or a particular smart bulb ecosystem. They ask an AI engine what they should be considering, and by the time they’re standing in a store or clicking ‘buy,’ a lot of that decision and thoughts have already been shaped by whatever the AI told them 30 minutes earlier. We saw this exact dynamic across the home improvement categories we measured. The project increasingly starts in the chatbox, not in the store.”

Torossian added, “We think the bigger opportunity for lighting brands is around project-based questions rather than product questions. Homeowners aren’t just asking ‘what’s a good smart bulb,’ but are asking ‘how do I light a kitchen island’ or ‘what lighting makes a small room look bigger’ — which are content questions, not just product spec questions. The brands that answer the ‘how do I think about this’ question – and not just the ‘what should I buy’ question – are the ones that are going to own that AI citation over the next few years. That’s true in every category we’ve studied, and lighting will be no exception.”

The findings

In regard to the overall home improvement category, researchers found that U.S. home improvement retail is one of the most concentrated categories in all of retail. Home Depot commands roughly 52% of the sector by revenue; Lowe’s holds about 30%. Together the two chains account for more than 80% of home improvement store sales — a level of concentration not seen elsewhere in retail.

The 5W AI Visibility Index finds that inside the AI engines, the concentration runs tighter still. Asked “where should I buy supplies for a home project” or “best home improvement store,” ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews surface Home Depot and Lowe’s first, second, and often almost exclusively. Researchers concluded that decades of editorial coverage, reviews, and consumer consensus made the two chains the assumed answer.

However, researchers also discovered a split in that “where do I buy it” and “who do I hire” are two different questions — and resulted in two different citation surfaces. The home-services marketplaces (Angi, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit) own the hiring query; the retailers own the buying query —and few brands compete across both.

One more decoupling from the Index’s findings: Lowe’s leads consumer-satisfaction rankings despite Home Depot’s larger share. According to the researchers, this gives Lowe’s a citation edge on “best” queries that raw market share does not. Their analysis is that national scale and a deep content footprint win the answer — and the local operator who never built one is invisible on every surface.

Into the weeds: how rankings were determined

5W analyzed more than 60 common homeowner prompts across six primary sub-categories of the home improvement and home-services market, running each prompt five times per engine in clean sessions. Researchers identified which brands AI models consistently surface, which sources feed those citations, and where the biggest gaps sit between scale and AI visibility.

Below are the companies that were evaluated in each sector:

Big-box home improvement

Home Depot, Lowe’s, Menards

Hardware & specialty retail

Ace Hardware, True Value, Harbor Freight, Tractor Supply, Floor & Decor

Online home retail

Wayfair, Amazon home, Ferguson, online supply retailers.

Home-services marketplaces

Angi, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, HomeAdvisor.

Design & project platforms

Houzz, Pinterest, Yelp home services.

Materials & paint brands

Sherwin-Williams, Behr, Benjamin Moore, and home-materials brands.

What were the query types tracked? Real-world prompts included “best home improvement store,” “Home Depot vs Lowe’s,” “where to buy tools,” “best place to hire a handyman,” “how do I find a contractor,” “best paint brand,” “best site to buy furniture online,” “Angi vs Thumbtack,” and 50+ variations covering retail, hiring, and project-research intent.

Citation sources were also tracked: Retail and consumer editorial (Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, Forbes Home, This Old House, Family Handyman); satisfaction sources (J.D. Power, ACSI); homeowner communities (Reddit r/HomeImprovement, r/DIY); news coverage; and brand-owned content.

Researchers then considered the framing of the queries. The Index measured home improvement retailers, home-services marketplaces, and home brands — the “where do I buy” and “who do I hire” citation surfaces. The index also measured AI citation share for marketing and communications strategy purposes; it did not rate retailers or contractors on price, quality, or reliability.