Why AI assistants recommend a directory instead of your dental practice

On a place-bound question — 'dentist near me', 'best dentist in Austin for nervous patients' — assistants overwhelmingly answer with a booking platform or a review aggregator rather than a practice's own website. That is a different problem from being outranked by the practice down the road, and it has a different fix: the listing is a page you can claim, correct and keep current, and almost nobody does. It is ordinary agency work, and on this report it was the fix that answers the most questions.

On each profile you claim, write the name, address, phone and website exactly as the site has them.

• Zocdoc

  Claim it

  Cited on 17 of the 30 questions — by Perplexity and Gemini for “best dentist for new patients in Austin, TX”.

  1. Open the Zocdoc practice sign-up and search for the practice to see whether a profile already exists.
  2. Claim it or create one, then add every provider, specialty, insurance accepted and the services buyers ask about.
  Claim it on Zocdoc

• Healthgrades

  Claim it

  Cited on 13 of the 30 questions — by ChatGPT for “best dentist for new patients in Austin, TX”.

  1. Search Healthgrades for each provider by name and claim the profiles that already exist.
  2. Fill in specialties, conditions treated, procedures and office details; add a photo.
  Claim it on Healthgrades

• Google Business Profile

  Claim it

  Cited by ChatGPT for “who is the best dentist for kids in Austin, TX”.

  1. Sign in at Google Business Profile and verify ownership of the listing.
  2. Set the primary category, secondary categories, hours, service area and services offered.
  Claim it on Google Business Profile

• Yelp

  Claim it

  Cited by Perplexity for “who is the best dentist for kids in Austin, TX”.

  1. Sign in at Yelp for Business and claim the page for this location.
  2. Set categories, hours, service area and the specialties buyers search for; add photos.
  Claim it on Yelp

• Better Business Bureau

  Claim it

  Cited on 5 of the 30 questions in the run above.

  1. Request or claim the BBB business profile.
  2. Complete the profile: categories, years in business, contact details.
  Claim it on Better Business Bureau

• Reddit

  Community

  Cited on 20 of the 30 questions — by Gemini for “most recommended dentist in Austin, TX”.

  Threads are quoted as word of mouth. Nothing to claim: answer as yourself, and say who you are.

Is this different from local SEO?

It overlaps and it is not the same. Local SEO is about the map pack and the ranked list. This is about what a single assistant says when someone asks it one question and gets one answer — there is no page two, and no ten blue links to be sixth in.

We rank well on Google. Why does that not carry over?

Because the assistant is not reading your ranking, it is reading pages. A practice can rank on page one for its city and still appear in no assistant answer, because the pages that rank are service pages and the questions being asked are comparative.

Does this need patient data or access to our systems?

No. The report reads public pages only, the same as any visitor. We never touch a practice management system and there is no PHI anywhere in this.

How long until an answer changes?

Nobody can promise a number, and anyone who does is guessing. What you can do is ask again once the changes are live: a week after a page goes live, the prompts it was written for are asked again and set beside the answers before it, so you see what moved and what did not.

What if we have more than one location?

Set each location up as its own brand. The prompts are place-bound, so the answers differ by city, and one report averaged across locations would hide exactly the difference you needed.

What does the first report cost?

Nothing: a free account gets 10 credits — one report, 10 prompts on three engines — with no card.