Selling solar after the tax credit: what buyers search for now

On December 31, 2025 the federal residential clean energy credit expired. Every installer felt it within weeks: fewer tire-kickers, more hesitation, and paid lead prices that moved in exactly the wrong direction. What did not disappear was the searching. Homeowners with a broken system, a brutal summer bill, or a new EV in the garage are still typing the same things into Google.

The buyer changed, the search didn’t

The pre-2026 solar buyer was often chasing a deadline: sign before the credit shrinks. That urgency is gone, and what replaced it is a more serious buyer with a longer list of questions. The search data shows the shift: fewer “solar tax credit 2026” searches, steady “solar panels cost” searches, and growing question searches about financing, payback periods, and battery pairing.

That is not a smaller market. It is a market that rewards whoever answers the questions.

Three searches that still book installs

1. “Solar installers near me”

Still the king. The homeowner typing this has finished researching and wants a person. They call one of the three companies in the map pack, which is why profile management is the fastest lever in the trade.

2. “Is solar worth it in [state] without the tax credit”

The defining question of 2026. Most installer websites do not answer it, which means the aggregators do, and they sell the homeowner’s details to five of your competitors. A straight answer with your local utility’s numbers wins that customer before anyone else speaks to them.

3. “Solar battery backup [city]”

Batteries kept their incentives in many markets and grid-outage anxiety is real. Battery-led content is the most underbuilt page type on installer sites today.

What to do about it

Own your map pack, answer the post-credit questions before your competitors do, and measure it in booked jobs. That is the whole playbook, and it is exactly what our solar SEO service exists to run. If you would rather see the demand numbers for your own metro, book a call: fifteen minutes, your market on screen.

What to do this quarter

If you run an installation company, the search data suggests a short, concrete list. First, claim the post-credit question before your competitors do: one honest page on “is solar still worth it here” with your utility’s actual rates will outrank a hundred generic cost calculators, because almost nobody has written it. Second, audit your Google Business Profile against the three companies above you in the map pack; the gap is usually reviews-per-month, not total reviews. Third, add a battery page even if batteries are a minority of your installs, because that is where the incentive money and the anxiety both moved.

The map pack math nobody runs

Here is the arithmetic that makes local rankings the cheapest install you will ever book. Take a metro with a few hundred head-term searches a month, multiply by the long tail (suburb searches, question searches, brand comparisons), and even a conservative share of the map pack produces dozens of calls monthly. At trade-typical close rates on exclusive calls, that is a handful of installs; at post-credit ticket sizes, the revenue against a fixed monthly fee is not a close call. The same math with shared leads collapses, because the denominator, five competitors per lead, never goes away. Renting attention was tolerable when the credit padded margins. It is not anymore.