What Is a Shared Lead?

A shared lead is an inquiry a marketplace sells to more than one contractor. One homeowner fills in one form, several companies are charged for it, and all of them call. This is not a rumor and it is not a grievance: it is the disclosed business model, written down in Angi’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The model, in the seller’s own words

Angi reports two numbers every quarter, and the gap between them is the whole subject. A Service Request is one homeowner asking for a contractor. A Lead is one contractor being charged. Angi’s filed definition of a Lead says plainly that “a single Service Request can result in multiple Leads.”

Two things are worth noticing. The first is that the model is admitted in a federal filing, so there is nothing left to argue about. The second is that 1.26 is a good deal lower than the “shared with four or five contractors” figure the marketing blogs repeat. It is an average across the whole book, not a promise about your lead, and a request in a dense trade in a dense market will go to more companies than that — but the honest headline number is smaller than the folklore.

What you are paying for is stated just as plainly. The 10-K for fiscal year 2025 describes the revenue as “fees paid by Pros for consumer matches (regardless of whether the Pro ultimately provides the requested service).” The product is the introduction. The job is your problem.

What a lead actually costs you

A lead price on its own is meaningless, and this is where most contractors stop doing the arithmetic. Divide the price by your close rate.

Angi’s average revenue per US lead in the first quarter of 2026 works out to about $45.78 — $202.5 million of US revenue divided by 4,423,000 leads. That is our division, not a line item Angi reports, though it cross-checks: the same method gives $48.30 a year earlier, a 5.2% decline, and Angi discloses the change as “(5)%”. Call it $46 and run it against a close rate:

Halving your close rate doubles your cost per job. That is the entire economics of the channel, and it is why the number to take into a comparison is the right-hand column and never the left. Work yours out from your own records — count the leads you were charged for last quarter and the jobs you signed from them — before you compare this channel to anything else.

Where the regulator landed, and what it was worth

In January 2023 the FTC ordered HomeAdvisor, an Angi affiliate, to stop deceptively marketing its leads. The finding is worth quoting exactly, because the construction matters: “while HomeAdvisor has represented that service providers only will receive leads matching the types of services they provide and their preferred geographic area, many of them do not.” The order also covered unsubstantiated claims about how often leads turned into jobs. The headline was “up to $7.2 million” — a ceiling, not a payment.

What was actually distributed, in November 2023, was more than $3 million across 110,372 checks. On those figures that is roughly $27 a contractor: about one month’s membership, against what a shop spends on leads in a year.

The practical conclusion is not that marketplaces are lawless. It is that regulatory remedy is not a risk control at this scale, and waiting for one is not a plan. The rule that would have changed the model structurally — the FCC’s one-to-one consent requirement, which would have stopped a single homeowner’s consent being sold to many companies — was vacated by the Eleventh Circuit in Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC on January 24, 2025, three days before it took effect, and the FCC then repealed it.

The one structural difference worth knowing

Local Services Ads are also paid, also competitive, and also expensive. But Google’s advertising policy forbids the advertiser from doing the thing a marketplace exists to do: “You must accurately represent yourself to customers and cannot sell or pass leads to other businesses.”

So on LSA the lead is contractually yours. On a marketplace it is inventory. That is the difference to hold on to, and it is more useful than any argument about which one is cheaper this month.

Your Google Business Profile sits underneath both of them, free, producing inquiries shared with nobody. Most contractors end up using paid and free together, and that is fine. The mistake is buying traffic while the free listing sits dormant, which is paying to send a homeowner to a page that looks abandoned.

Making the channel behave

Three habits, in order of how much they are worth:

1. Answer first. On a shared lead the homeowner talks to whoever calls first, so speed to lead does more here than anywhere else in your marketing.
2. Dispute the invalid ones, every time. Every platform has a process, and contractors who use it consistently pay materially less than contractors who absorb the bad ones. Document what happened while you still remember it.
3. Track close rate by source, not in aggregate. A marketplace that works for your neighbor’s trade may be hopeless in yours, and only your own numbers will tell you which.

FAQ

How many contractors get the same Angi lead?

Angi does not publish a per-lead figure. What it publishes is the ratio across its whole book: 4,423,000 paid leads against 3,521,000 US service requests in the first quarter of 2026, or about 1.26 charges per homeowner request. Your own leads may be shared more widely than that in a competitive trade and market.

Is a shared lead the same as a Local Services Ads lead?

No, and the difference is contractual rather than commercial. Google’s Local Services Ads policy prohibits an advertiser from selling or passing leads to other businesses. A marketplace’s entire model is that the same request produces several charges.

Can I get a refund for a bad lead?

Every marketplace runs a dispute process, and using it is part of operating the channel rather than an exception. Note that complaints about stale or mismatched leads are common enough to be visible in public records — contractors have alleged exactly that against several vendors — but an allegation is not a finding. The one formal finding in this space is the FTC’s 2023 order against HomeAdvisor.

What close rate should I expect on shared leads?

Nobody can tell you, and any vendor who quotes you a number for your market is guessing. What you can do is measure it: count the leads you were charged for last quarter and the jobs you signed from them. That figure, divided into the lead price, is the only number that lets you compare this channel to anything else.

The bottom line

Shared leads are a legitimate way to buy work and a poor way to build a business. The seller has told you exactly what it is selling — a match, not a job, and not exclusively to you — in a document filed with the SEC. Use the channel deliberately, judge it on cost per booked job, and do not let it stand in for the listing you already own and are not maintaining.