The Lift and Escalator Industry Is Growing, But Can Buyers Find The Right Manufacturers?

It’s not just train stations. 

Lifts and escalators support access across office blocks, shopping centres, medical centres and residential buildings. New constructions create demand for installations, while older buildings need their equipment to be maintained, upgraded or replaced. 

The key drivers for the UK lifts and escalators market include rapid urbanisation, investments into residential and commercial construction projects, and the modernisation of ageing buildings, with a projection of the market to reach $6.55 billion by 2034, growing at a CAGR of 7.85% between now and then. This reflects what’s going on over in the US, too, with sustained annual growth at a CAGR of 4.47%.

A growing market creates more opportunities for brands to be considered. But being visible for ‘lifts’ alone doesn’t tell a buyer much about whether you can help with their specific building, project, or operational problem. 

For marketing teams, the challenge is understanding the different decisions buyers are making, and assuring the right expertise is visible for each building type and concern.

There are over 300,000 lifts and escalators in the UK, which covers the lifts taking someone up their block of flats, the ones serving several businesses in an office building, and the ones carrying shoppers between different stores in busy centres. 

The US paints a similar picture, with the region expanding its CAGR at 4.47%, significantly outperforming the global average growth rate, due to public infrastructure spending, and major modernisations across commercial sites, due to new commercial office spaces, healthcare complexes and high-rise buildings.

All in all, more people need buildings that work for them, but this shows up in different ways.

Both brands and buyers are having to work within changing sets of rules and expectations. 

In the UK, building safety has changed since the Building Safety Act 2022, and the changes to the Government Approved Document B, which now states that there needs to be more than one common stair for blocks of flats over 18 metres or more, and building design provisions to support the safe use of evacuation lifts in residential buildings, effective of September 2026. This means, fire safety and evacuation procedures are crucial in how taller commercial and residential buildings are specified. 

Accessibility standards are also improving for existing buildings through the BS EN 81-80 framework, which assesses and improves safety features in older lifts, feeding into modernisation decisions. 

In the US, residential access equipment is governed by codes such as ASME A18.1, which covers platform lifts and stairway chairlifts, alongside ASME A17.1 for lifts. These standards came up in AI answers to buyer questions through our LLMLens analysis, which shows how often buyers are checking compliance before the shortlist their suppliers.

Technology is having an impact on what buyers expect not just from their installation, but after it too. 

Connected maintenance platforms have shifted from reactive, scheduled servicing to proactive management driven by data. With IoT sensors now available within lift infrastructures, manufacturers can capture operational data to predict faults before they cause a breakdown.

From the perspective of a facilities manager of a housing provider, that changes the questions from ‘how fast can you fix it?’ to ‘can you stop it breaking down in the first place?’

Escalators have advanced too, with smart and sensor-based controls that can adjust the speeds based on passenger traffic density and even slowing down or entering standby mode when empty to reduce power consumption.

A range of uses means a wide range of buyers, each with different things to consider.

A buyer won’t always begin their research with a specific manufacturer. Often, they start by trying to understand what’s possible with their building, budget, and access requirements: whether a lift will fit in an awkward space, what it will cost to own over a decade, or who will support once it’s in. 

More and more of that research now happens in AI tools. Recent research from Semrush found that 55% of US consumers use AI to research products and services, and 77% use it alongside traditional search rather than instead of it. For business buyers the figure is higher still, with 73% of B2B buyers now using AI tools in their purchase research. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, along with assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, are often answering a buyer’s first questions before they ever reach a website.

To see how this plays out, we used our AI visibility tool, LLMLens, to track how leading AI platforms answer buyer-style questions about home access lifts, across ten manufacturers in the US market, although the patterns are useful for any lift manufacturer trying to get found. We also recorded every other company that AI chose to name instead. 

Our LLMLens analysis focused on the US home access market, covering stairlifts, home lifts and through-floor lifts for private homes, spanning questions from homeowners and families, and dealers and installers who sell and fit these products. It didn’t cover commercial passenger lifts or escalators, but the buyer behaviour it shows is a useful guide. 

We used the kinds of questions homeowners, families, dealers and installers actually ask, using synthetic personas. Question examples include:

• Which stairlift brands are most reliable and cheapest to maintain over 10+ years?
• What’s the best standing stairlift for a staircase under 28 inches wide?
• Who really has the best warranty after year five, and what’s the fine print of service calls?
• Home lift or stairlift for a two-storey house: what are the real pros and cons?
• Can a home lift be retrofitted without major structural work?
• Which manufacturers are taking on new deals, and what training and parts support do they offer?

Many of these questions barely register in traditional keyword tools. In the US, ‘stairlift dealer’ is searched around 40 times a month, and ‘become a stairlift dealer’ doesn’t register at all. Yet dealers are asking AI tools exactly these questions, in detail, and describing their business, their region, and the brands they already carry. A manufacturer’s dealer network might only be a few dozen to a few hundred businesses, but each one is a multi-year decision. Low search volume doesn’t mean low value. It just means the conversation has moved somewhere keyword tools can’t see.

When it comes to purchasing, many prompts describe a specific problem first. For example: staircases under 28 inches, curved runs with landings, steep or outdoor installations. Buyers want to know what’s possible with their space and who provides it before they start comparing brands. 

Almost half of the prompts we looked at came from the trade side. Dealers and installers asked about technical training, getting parts within days, territory protection, and whether a manufacturer’s direct-to-consumer sales would undercut them.

In our research, one of the best-known names in home access was missing from 84% of those answers. The same brand appeared in 90% when the question was about stairlifts. It’s the same business, the same reputation, but a buyer wording their questions slightly differently would never have come across it. 

That’s a risk for every lift brand, where visibility changes with every question, audience, and AI platform.

We grouped the questions into three types:

• Product comparisons (what to buy)
• Trade questions from dealers and installers (who to partner with)
• Questions about home lifts and through-floor lifts (neighbouring products)

Across 290 answers, we have mapped how often the ten manufacturers appeared. 

Some questions named specific brands, which naturally lifts their scores. So rather than ranking individual brands, we’ve focused on the patterns that hold up regardless of how a question was worded. 

One of the clearest is how differently each AI model answered the same questions, asked on the same day.

Product comparison questions named a brand 60% of the time, compared with 16% for home lift questions. Where buyers hadn’t named a brand, visibility roughly halved, and AI named almost twice as many other companies and organisations. Open questions are currently where the playing field is the least settled.

None of the home lift questions named a stairlift brand, and most named no brand at all. In those answers, the three leading stairlift brands appeared in just 14% of answers on average. 

Different LLMs put a different brand at the top, and one brand that appeared 29 times on one platform didn’t appear at all on another. Checking on only one AI model doesn’t automatically give you everything you need to know about the rest. 

If you aren’t in these guides, AI has a lot less to say about you. 

The brands that get found are the ones that make sure they answer the questions their buyers are actually asking, at every stage and for every stakeholder. Make sure you understand your user and how they navigate search to reach their final decision. 

People must understand your product, of course, but a lot of questions are way more complex than the specifications. Cover the typical lifespan of your products, the total cost of ownership, including ongoing maintenance options, and what the warranty terms cover in a way that makes it easy to understand. 

Because people have different situations, you could create guidance that speaks to these customers, such as narrow and curved staircases, occupied residential blocks, listed buildings, modernisation, and commercial buildings. 

Using semantic SEO to build cluster content that speaks to these pillars will help your brand become the definitive, authoritative entity on an entire subject. 

8 in 10 top AI visibility factors relate to brand or backlink profiles, which shows the importance of third-party mentions to brand associations. LLMs rely on independent buying guides, review platforms, dealers, and trade bodies to form their results, so making sure you have a digital PR strategy that associates you with key topics can really help to build your online presence. 

This could be through commentary from your experts related to trending industry topics, discussion around new regulations, announcements of your business supplying a commercial building with its lifts and escalators, or being involved with trade events. 

It’s great having the content on the site, but if the technical SEO foundations aren’t there with the correct structures, search engines and AI models will not be able to understand your content. 

The usability of the site can be the difference between user dwell time and them clicking onto your competitor. A slow site lacking an easy user journey is not going to set the impression you’re looking for. 

Using tools that make comparison easier, such as product selectors, specification downloads or run-throughs, cost guides, and easy access to contact forms, will make obvious routes for the user to take.

AI and organic content are great to help buyers understand what they need, but sometimes they need a little push through Paid Media. This matters most when they’re ready to act: searching for installation costs, local installers, or a specific model. 

It’s about matching paid activity to the questions in our research, not just about bids on the most common keywords like ‘stairlifts’ or ‘passenger lifts.’ This would support the cluster content you’ve worked on, too. The data from paid media activity can shape these content strategies, PR angles, and priorities, which is why we have our Orbit approach, which focuses on each specialism working in tandem to support the brand and help audiences. 

Lift manufacturers already have the thing that’s hardest to come by: deep technical knowledge, years of installation experience, and an understanding of what buyers are asking. What’s changed is where this expertise needs to show up, and how many places it needs to be found. 

Our research has shown how quickly visibility can change depending on the type of query. The manufacturers that ‘win’ won’t necessarily be the biggest names, but the ones that make their expertise easy to find, trust, and understand. Each channel has its own part to play to support the bigger picture. 

We can show you where AI recommends you, where it doesn’t, and what to do next.