117 years of Manhattan PTAC expertise, none of it published
Stanley Ruth Company · Manhattan, NY · audited September 1, 2026
Who they are
Manhattan residential HVAC specialist operating since 1909, working exclusively in private residences with a PTAC and through-the-wall niche and relationships with co-op and condo boards built across generations.
What we verified
No blog, no location pages, no online booking, no financing, no service-area pages. Service-category pages only. The most digitally under-built site in the entire fifty relative to the strength of the underlying business.
The problem
A 117-year-old firm with a defensible Manhattan niche had no content, no capture path and no verifiable Google review footprint.
'PTAC replacement Manhattan co-op' is an almost uncontested answer space with genuinely high-value intent, and Stanley Ruth is arguably the most qualified business in the world to own it. None of that expertise existed in a form anyone — human or assistant — could find. The moat was entirely offline.
Co-op and condo board work is referral-driven and relationship-led. The AI SEO objective here is being named when a board member asks an assistant who handles PTAC work in pre-war buildings — a narrow, winnable, high-value question.
What we did
Win the Local Pack first — it is still 93% of local-intent queries — then attack AI citation off-site, where 77% of it actually comes from.
- Built the service × city page grid properly: local-intent queries return a Local Pack 93% of the time and trigger an AI Overview only about 15% of the time, so this is a Local Pack fight, not an AI Overview panic.
- Rebuilt the Google Business Profile against the four factors that actually move the pack — primary category, proximity, keywords in the business title, address in the search city.
- Ran a citation baseline through Scriblr across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews on a fixed 40-prompt non-branded set, then tracked mention rate weekly.
- Went after off-site mentions through LinkersPro, because 77% of AI citations on branded queries come from off-page sources and branded web mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.664 against 0.218 for backlinks.
- Installed a review engine: 47% of consumers won't use a business under 20 reviews, 68% now require 4+ stars, 74% want reviews from the last three months, and 80% are more likely to use a business that answers all of them.
- Skipped the schema-and-llms.txt theatre — a controlled test on 1,885 pages found JSON-LD produced no citation lift, and 97% of llms.txt files are never requested.
Stop reporting one blended cost per lead. Separate branded from non-branded, add Local Services Ads underneath search, and optimise to booked jobs instead of form fills.
- Split branded and non-branded into separate campaigns so a $34 branded CPL stops flattering the $149 non-branded number.
- Rebuilt the negative keyword list from a search-terms audit — 25% of Google Ads accounts have never added a single negative, and accounts that use them convert at 13.0% against 4.6%.
- Stood up Local Services Ads alongside paid search, where HVAC leads run $51 against $149 non-branded and book at 44.0% on a $2,110 average ticket.
- Rebuilt ad scheduling and geo bids around dual-peak seasonality — 'AC repair' runs +266% in July and 'furnace repair' +137% in January, so one flat annual bid overpays in shoulder months and under-buys the peak.
- Installed call tracking with recording and a missed-call text-back: home services answers 52% of inbound calls and 55% of businesses never ask the caller to book.
- Moved reporting to cost per booked job and revenue per job, because the average repair ticket is now $1,205 and lead count does not pay for anything.
How it was sequenced
Citation baseline across four assistants, GBP rebuild, page architecture and entity cleanup.
Service × city page grid shipped, review engine live, first off-site mention wave.
Mention velocity sustained, citation rate compounds, freshness cycle running on service and city pages.
Audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, negative keyword purge, campaign restructure by intent and line.
Landing pages shipped, Local Services Ads or quote path live, call tracking and missed-call recovery in place.
Budget reallocated on booked-job data rather than lead data; bid strategy set against seasonality.
The numbers
These are not reported results. Stanley Ruth Company's own reporting has not yet been reconciled against these rows — see how we define a target versus a result.
| Metric | Baseline | Target | Change | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI assistant mention rate | 4% | 24% | +20 pts | share of a fixed 40-prompt non-branded set naming the business, across 4 assistants |
| Local Pack top-3 coverage | 11% | 37% | +26 pts | share of service × city grid points in the top 3 |
| Non-branded organic leads | index 100 | index 190 | +90% | indexed to engagement start = 100 |
| Non-branded cost per lead | $270 | $184 | -32% | USD, non-branded paid search |
Where these targets come from
| Published figure | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 28% / 55% | AI mention rate for Local & Home Services: median and top quartile, non-branded prompts | MaxAEO (vendor benchmark) (2026) |
| 93% | Share of local-intent queries still returning a Local Pack; only ~15% trigger an AI Overview | Whitespark (2025) |
| 77% | Share of AI citations on branded queries coming from off-page sources, not the brand's own site | Omniscient Digital (23,000+ citations) (2026) |
| 74% | Consumers who want reviews from the last three months; 32% from the last two weeks | BrightLocal (2026) |
| $149 | HVAC non-branded Google Ads cost per lead (816 contractors, $14.88M spend, 143,008 leads) | SearchLight Digital (2026) |
| 37.6% | HVAC non-branded search lead-to-booked-job rate (vs 55.3% branded) | SearchLight Digital (2026) |
Objections this answers
- “Is AI search actually sending anyone? Nobody has proved it.”
- “We already run Google Ads and the leads are expensive.”
The proof behind every figure
These are the raw exports Stanley Ruth Company receives, and the ones any number on this page reconciles against. Ask any agency for the equivalent.
- Scriblr prompt-set baseline and current export
- Local grid rank screenshots
- GBP insights export
- Review velocity chart
- Third-party mention log with live URLs
- Google Ads change history export
- Search terms report, before and after
- LSA lead log with dispute credits
- Call recordings with booking outcome tagging
- CRM booked-job export matched to click ID
Systems used
- Scriblr for AI citation tracking across ChatGPT / Gemini / Perplexity / AI Overviews
- LinkersPro for mention and authority acquisition
- M.A.R.S. for call routing, lead attribution and booking capture
Questions about this engagement
A 117-year-old firm with a defensible Manhattan niche had no content, no capture path and no verifiable Google review footprint. 'PTAC replacement Manhattan co-op' is an almost uncontested answer space with genuinely high-value intent, and Stanley Ruth is arguably the most qualified business in the world to own it. None of that expertise existed in a form anyone — human or assistant — could find. The moat was entirely offline.
Audited September 2026: No blog, no location pages, no online booking, no financing, no service-area pages. Service-category pages only. The most digitally under-built site in the entire fifty relative to the strength of the underlying business.
Days 0–30: Citation baseline across four assistants, GBP rebuild, page architecture and entity cleanup. Built the service × city page grid properly: local-intent queries return a Local Pack 93% of the time and trigger an AI Overview only about 15% of the time, so this is a Local Pack fight, not an AI Overview panic. Rebuilt the Google Business Profile against the four factors that actually move the pack — primary category, proximity, keywords in the business title, address in the search city.
Days 0–30 — Citation baseline across four assistants, GBP rebuild, page architecture and entity cleanup. Days 31–90 — Service × city page grid shipped, review engine live, first off-site mention wave. Days 91–180 — Mention velocity sustained, citation rate compounds, freshness cycle running on service and city pages. Days 0–14 — Audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, negative keyword purge, campaign restructure by intent and line. Days 15–45 — Landing pages shipped, Local Services Ads or quote path live, call tracking and missed-call recovery in place. Days 46–90 — Budget reallocated on booked-job data rather than lead data; bid strategy set against seasonality.
The programme was run against four targets: AI assistant mention rate from 4% to 24% (+20 pts); Local Pack top-3 coverage from 11% to 37% (+26 pts); Non-branded organic leads from index 100 to index 190 (+90%); Non-branded cost per lead from $270 to $184 (-32%). These are the targets the work was set and measured against, derived from the published category benchmarks cited on this page — not figures reported back from Stanley Ruth Company's systems. Measured results replace them here as reporting is reconciled.
No, and any agency that guarantees a number is selling you something. Every benchmark on this page is published by a named third party with a live source link, and every figure we report is reconcilable against the raw exports listed under proof — the ad platform change history, the call recordings, and the client-side booking or policy export. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is the standard you should hold any agency to.
Stanley Ruth Company runs at the Authority tier — $5,000/mo, covering AI SEO and PPC. Tier is set by the number of markets, the number of service lines and the reporting cadence, not by hours. Scope is agreed before anything is committed.
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