Air Conditioning Searches Just Hit a UK Record. Only 4.3% of Homes Have It.

Britain has spent this summer doing something it has never really had to do before: thinking seriously about how to cool a house down.

The weather made the case. 2026 became the first year on record to hit 35°C in May, June and July. June was England's warmest on record in a series going back to 1884. By mid-July we had already had more days above 30°C than the whole of the famous 1976 summer, three official heatwaves, and a peak of 38.1°C.

All of which shows up in the search data, as you would expect. What I did not expect was quite how far it went, or what the numbers say when you put Britain next to the rest of Europe.

That is not a bigger spike. That is a different order of magnitude. June 2026 came in two and a half times higher than July 2022, which was the month Britain first recorded 40°C and which everyone in this industry has used as the benchmark ever since. Summer 2025, itself a hot one, peaked at 30 on the same scale. June 2026 hit 100.

The spike is the boring bit

Heatwaves make people search for cooling. That is not an insight, it is a thermostat. The interesting question is what the line does in October, and January, and March, once everyone has stopped sweating.

Historically the answer was: nothing. UK interest collapsed back to its floor within about three weeks of the weather turning. People suffered through August, forgot by half term, and got on with worrying about the heating bill instead.

That has stopped happening.

Look at the winter bars rather than the summer ones. The off-season baseline for "air conditioning installation" has gone from 6 to 13 to 16 over two years. Last winter, in the dark, with the heating on, Britain searched for air conditioning installation more than it did during the whole of summer 2024.

March 2026 is the single number I keep coming back to. A month with no heatwave in it, no news coverage, nothing to prompt anybody. It scored higher than the hottest month of 2024 and higher than the hottest month of 2023.

That is the difference between weather and demand. A spike is weather. A floor that rises and stays risen is a category forming. It means a meaningful number of households have moved cooling out of the "grim week in July" box and into the same mental box as a new boiler or better insulation: a thing you research in the quiet months, get quotes for, and budget around.

Semrush has the same shape in absolute terms. UK searches for "air conditioning installation" averaged 5,400 a month in the year to April 2026, up from 2,400 in the equivalent year to March 2025. That is a 125% rise in trailing annual demand, and it contains none of this summer: Semrush's index runs to April 2026, so everything you have just lived through is still to be counted. Across the whole UK air conditioning keyword cluster we are looking at roughly 178,000 searches a month. "Portable air conditioner" alone runs at 49,500, which tells you how British households are currently solving this. Badly, expensively, and one wheeled plastic box at a time.

Now put us next to Europe

Here is where I had to rewrite my own assumptions.

I went into this expecting the data to show Britain as a sleepy outlier, mildly curious about air conditioning while the continent got on with it. The opposite is true.

A word on method, because cross-country search comparisons are usually done badly and the bad version would have given me the wrong answer. You cannot compare keyword volumes across languages: "airco", "climatiseur" and "air conditioning" carry different query habits and different population sizes behind them. What you can compare is Google's topic-level interest by country, which is language-neutral and already normalised against each country's total search volume. That is what this chart uses.

On that measure Britain sits fourth in Europe, above Spain, Portugal and Poland, and roughly seventeen times higher than Italy.

Italy being at the bottom is the clue to reading this chart properly. It is not that Italians are indifferent to air conditioning. It is that about 60% of them already have it, so there is nothing left to look up. Saturated markets go quiet. What this measure actually captures is active consideration: people working out whether to buy, what to buy, and who to call. On that basis northern Europe, which spent decades assuming it would never need cooling, is now the noisiest part of the continent.

4.3%

And then you look at what Britain actually owns.

Research from the Energy Demand Research Centre and the University of Reading, based on 15,846 households in the English Housing Survey, found that 4.3% of homes in England use air conditioning. About 1.06 million homes out of 25 million.

That is the whole article in one chart. Britain is doing an enormous amount of looking and almost none of the owning, and the gap between our two dots is the widest on the chart. France searches slightly more than we do but has 25% ownership behind it, so it has at least started converting attention into installations. Italy and Greece are the mirror image: heavily equipped, barely searching, because the question has already been settled in most of their homes.

A market where demand has clearly arrived and supply has clearly not is, in commercial terms, about as good as it gets.

One uncomfortable note before the opportunity talk. The same Reading research found the distribution inside that 4.3% is badly skewed. The highest earning households are at 8.2%, the lowest at 2.5%. Homes with someone over 75, the group most at risk from heat, are at 3.0%. Single parent families are at 2.9%. London and the East of England are at 6.5% each, the North East at 1.5%. The people who most need cooling are the least likely to have it. That is a public policy problem rather than a marketing one, but it is worth stating plainly rather than pretending this is a straightforwardly happy growth story.

And a second one, which as a B Corp I would rather put in the middle of the article than bury at the bottom. A country going from one million air-conditioned homes to anything like eighteen million is not an unambiguously good thing. Globally, air conditioners and fans already account for close to a fifth of the electricity used in buildings and roughly a billion tonnes of CO2 a year, and the refrigerants inside the units are greenhouse gases with warming potential thousands of times that of CO2 when they leak. The shape of it is a loop: hotter summers sell air conditioning, and air conditioning, powered badly, helps make summers hotter. It also lands on the same grid we are already asking to absorb electric heating and electric cars.

None of which makes the demand disappear, and it is no help at all to someone currently trying to sleep at 28°C. But it does change what good work in this category looks like. Building regulations already require that shading, ventilation and insulation are optimised before mechanical cooling goes in, and that is the right order. The honest version of this market sells the passive measures first, specifies efficient, properly sized units and low-warming refrigerants second, and treats an air-to-air heat pump replacing a gas boiler as a genuinely better outcome than a portable unit running flat out in an unshaded room. That is also, for what it is worth, the version that survives the next decade of regulation.

What this looks like commercially

Two things are true at once in this market, and the tension between them is where the money is.

The first is that the paid auction is already expensive. Installers are paying between £3 and £5.53 a click on the terms that actually convert. That is real money, and it tells you the people already in this market know exactly what a booked survey is worth.

The second is that the organic side has barely been contested at all.

Difficulty scores on those same terms sit between 8 and 30. "Air conditioning near me" carries a £4.60 cost per click and a difficulty score of 8. In an established category that combination does not exist. It only shows up where demand has arrived faster than anyone has bothered to publish decent content, and it does not last.

So if you sell, install, service or finance cooling in the UK, here is roughly what I would be doing.

Stop planning for a season and start planning for a year. The floor data says your audience is there in January. Most installer websites still read as though nobody thinks about this before May.

Win the boring questions. How much does it cost, does it add value to the house, do I need planning permission, what will it do to my bills, what is the difference between portable and fixed. That is where the decision actually gets made, and right now those pages are cheap to rank. In twelve months they will not be.

Get the local layer right. "Air conditioning installers near me" costs £5.53 a click. If your Google Business Profile, service area pages and reviews are not in order, you are renting traffic that a properly built organic presence would give you for nothing.

Do not spend the whole budget in June. The auction is at its worst exactly when everyone panics. March and October are dramatically cheaper, and the raised floor means the audience is genuinely there now.

Answer the heat pump question honestly. "Air source heat pump" runs at 18,100 searches a month with a £3.17 cost per click, and a modern air-to-air system heats as well as cools. That overlap is large, growing, and mostly served by content that treats these as one decision when the customer is making two.

The wider point

Search demand is a leading indicator. I have made that argument here before about where ad budgets end up, and this is about as clean an example as I have seen.

The searching has happened. Britain now looks, on the numbers, like one of the most air-conditioning-curious countries in Europe. The installed base is at 4.3% and the same research suggests it could reach 18 million homes by 2050. You do not have to believe that specific figure to accept the direction of travel.

Most categories we work in are a fight over an existing pie. This one is a pie that is still being baked, in a country that spent a century assuming it would never need one.

If you are in this market, or one next door to it, and want a proper look at where the demand actually sits, that is what we do all day. Get in touch >>

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Sources:

• Summer 2026 so far: a look at the season at the halfway point (Met Office)
• The most at risk from heat have the least air con (University of Reading)
• Socio-technical drivers of air conditioning adoption and use in UK homes (Energy Demand Research Centre)
• Eight facts about air conditioning amid an overheated global debate (Carbon Brief)
• Space cooling (International Energy Agency)
• Air conditioning causes around 3% of greenhouse gas emissions (Our World in Data)
• Monthly and cross-country search interest: Google Trends, pulled 15 August 2026.
• Search volume, cost per click and keyword difficulty: Semrush UK database, August 2026.