Local Services Ads vs. Google Ads vs. Angi: What a Booked Job Actually Costs
Cost per lead is the wrong number. Here's the cost per booked job for the three ways a roofer buys leads, with 2026 benchmarks and real client accounts.
In June 2026, SparkToro published a study built on Similarweb clickstream data covering January through April. The headline: 68.01% of U.S. Google searches ended without a click to any website, up from 60.45% in 2024. Clicks to every destination, including Google's own properties and paid ads, fell 9.5 points over the same two years.
68%of U.S. Google searches ended without a click, January to April 2026. AI Overviews now appear on more than 20% of searches, and when they do, click-through drops by nearly 60%.
Zero-click does not mean zero intent
A homeowner who searches "roofer near me" and doesn't click has not stopped needing a roofer. They got what they needed from the page itself: a Local Services Ad with a phone number and a Google Verified badge, an AI Overview that named two companies, a map pack with ratings. The decision happened on the results page. The click was never necessary.
That is the shift. For fifteen years, ranking organically meant traffic, and traffic meant leads. Now the organic results sit below three things that answer the question before anyone scrolls: the AI answer, the Local Services Ads, and the sponsored results. If your business isn't in those three places, being #1 organically on a zero-click page is worth a fraction of what it used to be.
Where the decision happens now
- Position #0: Local Services Ads. Business name, star rating, Google Verified badge, phone number. Seventy to eighty percent of LSA calls go to the top three listings, and you pay per lead rather than per click.
- Sponsored results: Google Ads. The specific, urgent searches ("emergency roof leak," "same-day AC repair") with a landing page built for that exact query.
- The AI answer: AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT. A synthesized recommendation drawn from reviews, structured data, and citations. Only 38% of the pages AI Overviews cite rank in the organic top ten, which means you don't have to out-SEO national lead-gen sites to be the answer.
- Map pack and organic. Still where people verify a choice, but no longer where most of them make it.
What to do about it
Own the three positions that answer the question. Get verified for Local Services Ads and build the reviews and response speed that hold a top-three spot. Run Google Ads on the searches where urgency is highest and send them to pages built to convert. And do the structured-data, content, and citation work that gets your business named in the AI answer, because that visibility compounds and it makes your paid clicks cheaper over time.
Then answer the phone. On a zero-click page, the customer calls whoever is on top and picks up first.
Sources: SparkToro / Similarweb zero-click study (June 2026); Cognizo AI Overviews statistics 2026.
