AI search for dental practices: what is known, what is not, and what you control
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AI search is the set of tools that answer a question with written text rather than a list of links: Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT search and Perplexity among them. Patients use them to ask which practice to choose or what a treatment costs, and a dental practice's visibility in ChatGPT and the rest depends on what these tools can find and trust about it.
I have kept this short on purpose. The topic is crowded with confident claims. What follows separates what the platforms have documented from what is guesswork, as of 1 October 2026.
What is known
These points come from the platforms' own documentation.
| Platform | What its documentation says | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | No additional requirements and no special optimisation needed to appear. A page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet | Google1 |
| Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | No special schema, AI text files or new markup is needed | Google1 |
| Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | They may issue several related searches across subtopics, a technique Google calls query fan-out, and show a wider set of links | Google1 |
| Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | Traffic from them is counted in Search Console's Performance report under the Web search type | Google1 |
| Normal snippet controls such as nosnippet and noindex limit what is shown | Google1 | |
| ChatGPT search | OAI-SearchBot is the crawler used to surface sites in ChatGPT's search features. Sites that block it are not shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links | OpenAI2 |
| Perplexity | PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's results and is not used to train AI models | Perplexity3 |
Two conclusions follow. First, for Google, the foundations of ordinary SEO are the foundations for AI answers; there's no separate channel to optimise. Second, if your site's robots file blocks the search crawlers of ChatGPT or Perplexity, those tools can't cite your pages in their answers.
What is not
Much of what is sold as "GEO" (generative engine optimisation) or "AEO" (answer engine optimisation) goes beyond what anyone can show. Here is what isn't known, or not public.
- How sources are chosen. None of the three platforms publishes how it picks which pages to cite for a given answer.
- How often you're cited. Google counts AI feature traffic inside Search Console's Web figures1, but I have not found a Google report that separates it out. ChatGPT and Perplexity don't give practices a citation report.
- Whether any "AI visibility score" means anything. Third-party tools sample a set of prompts and count mentions. Answers vary by user, wording, location and time, so a sample is a snapshot, not a ranking. I do not sell a score, and I would treat any tool's score as indicative at best.
- Whether llms.txt files do anything. Google says no new AI text files are needed for its features1. I have not found OpenAI or Perplexity documentation committing to use such a file either.
- How stable any of this is. These products are new and still changing. Anything specific enough to sound like a formula is likely to be out of date soon.
Nobody can promise that ChatGPT will recommend your practice. Anyone who does is guessing.
What you control
What you can influence is the material these tools read. For a practice, that comes down to five things.
| What you control | Why it matters | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Crawler access | A blocked crawler means no citation from that tool23 | Check your robots.txt allows the search crawlers you want, including OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot |
| Consistent facts | AI answers summarise what they find. Conflicting facts produce muddled answers | Same practice name, address, phone, hours, prices and clinicians on the site, Google Business Profile and directories |
| Clear, specific pages | A page that answers one question directly is easier to quote | Treatment pages that state who, what, cost and next step early |
| Coverage | Query fan-out searches across subtopics1, so a site covering the whole treatment has more chances to be retrieved | Build a planned set of pages per treatment. See how topical coverage is built |
| Real-world reputation | Reviews, local press and professional listings are what these tools find when asked who is good | Earn them honestly; they matter for ordinary search too |
Entity consistency is the idea underneath most of that table. An entity is a distinct, identifiable thing, such as your practice or your implant dentist. The more consistently every source describes it, the easier it is for any system, AI or not, to be confident about it.
None of this is separate from search visibility for practices in general. It's the same work, checked from one more angle. The whole method is in the complete guide to SEO for dental practices.
AI tools draw on the same depth of coverage that topical authority builds, so that is the next page to read. To find out what AI tools say about your practice, email [email protected]; the first look is free.
Sources
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Google Search Central: AI features and your website, accessed 1 October 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8
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OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers, accessed 1 October 2026. ↩ ↩2
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Perplexity: Perplexity crawlers, accessed 1 October 2026. ↩ ↩2