Competitive set definition
Who you are being benchmarked against, and who chose them.
What it means
The list of companies your performance is compared to in reporting. It sounds administrative and it decides what every chart means, because the agency that picks the comparison set picks the story.
A set of four weak competitors produces a report where you are winning. A set including the dominant player in your metro produces one where there is work to do. Both can be drawn from the same month.
Why it matters in HVAC
Local search makes this concrete. Your genuine competitive set is whoever appears in the map pack for your services in your towns, and that varies town by town. A single national comparison list is not measuring your market.
Franchise operators distort it further. A national brand with a local franchise is competing with you on the street and has a domain you will never match, so including it teaches you nothing about what to do next.
How to check it
Ask who is in the set, how they were chosen, and whether the list can change mid-engagement. Then supply your own list, the three or four shops whose vans you actually see, and ask for the same comparison against those.
Choosing your own comparison
The strongest version of this is the one you control. Name the three competitors you would most like to take work from, and ask for monthly visibility against exactly those, in the towns you care about, regardless of what the agency’s default set contains.
It is a reasonable request and a revealing one. An agency with a tooling constraint will say so. An agency that resists because your three are stronger than its four has told you what the default list was for.
This is also why we refuse to score agencies on their own rankings on this site. We compete for the same searches, so any comparison set we chose would be one we benefit from choosing.