Dental clinics
Is ChatGPT recommending your practice?
Patients ask AI engines for a dentist and get named practices in return. Here is what those answers are built from, and how to check yours.
Where AI looks before it names a practice
When someone asks an AI engine for a dentist, the answer usually names practices outright. In Local Vitals' Florida study, 89% of 750 dental queries returned at least one specific practice. What those answers are built from is consistent enough to map.
BrightLocal's dentist-sector table (25,005 citations) puts Google's business listings far ahead of everything else, with Yelp a strong second. And in the largest ChatGPT-specific study so far, the most-cited source was not a directory at all: it was practices' own websites.
Two engine-specific patterns matter here. ChatGPT leaned on Bing listings and Healthgrades, while Claude leaned on Yelp and practice websites (Local Vitals). In the Dental Economics study of 1,405 patient-style questions, practice-owned sites drew 53.8% of all 13,152 citation events, over three times the next source category, and 87.2% of questions cited at least one practice site.
Sources: BrightLocal AI citation sources, dentist sector, Local Vitals Florida study, and Dental Economics citation study.
Google Business Profile
google.com
Yelp
yelp.com
ZocDoc
zocdoc.com
Healthgrades
healthgrades.com
Share of citations BrightLocal observed in dentist-sector AI answers, 25,005 citations total. Practice-owned websites led ChatGPT's own citations separately, at 53.8% in the Dental Economics study.
What the research shows
Four independent studies put numbers on how dental practices surface in AI answers. Each figure carries the sample it was measured on, because the sample defines how far the number travels.
89%
of 750 dental queries named at least one specific practice, across 10 Florida metros. Patients get names, not deflections.
94.7%
of the 2,548 cited practices appeared on only one of the five platforms. Exactly one dentist appeared on all five.
53.8%
of ChatGPT's 13,152 dental citation events pointed to practice-owned websites, over three times any other category.
13%
of the time all four engines named the same practice in the same search. 40% of the time, no engine named it at all.
Three findings from the same studies are easy to act on. Specialty searches named practices more often than generic ones (35% vs 25%, digitalfloss). Google review count did not correlate with being named at all. And 17% of engine-plus-search pairs flipped their answers month to month, so a single run tells you very little.
Note on our own data: CiteGap's dental benchmark tables are not published yet. They will be built from real client runs as those accumulate, and labeled as ours when they exist. Every number on this page is third-party research, with the sample and link attached.
Seven checks you can run today
No tools needed beyond the engines themselves. Write down what you see each time; the pattern across answers is the finding.
Open a fresh ChatGPT session and ask: "Who is a good dentist in [city]?" Note whether your practice is named, and which practices come up instead.
Repeat with a specialty query: "Invisalign provider in [city]" or "emergency dentist near [zip]". Specialty searches name practices more often than generic ones, so they are the better signal.
Ask the same questions on Perplexity and Gemini. Engines named the same practice together only 13% of the time, so absence on one engine is normal. Absence on all of them is the signal.
Open your Google Business Profile and Yelp listing. Together they account for 72.4% of dentist-sector citations. Check hours, services, location, and review responses are current.
Read your own website like an engine would. Do service pages state treatments, location, and insurance in plain text? Practice sites were the most-cited source in ChatGPT dental answers.
Re-run the same questions next month. 17% of answers flipped month to month in the tracked panel, so a single run misleads in both directions.
Do not treat review count as protection. In the 62-practice panel, Google review count did not correlate with being named, while practices with the largest footprint across sources were named more often than those with the smallest (44% vs 30%).
From free check to written diagnosis
The free check runs against your homepage and reports seven technical aspects that decide whether AI engines can read your site at all. It is not dental-specific, and it says so on the result.
The Written Diagnosis ($490) answers the industry question for your practice: 30 buyer-style questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, run twice over two days, written up as a report of who gets named and cited in your service area, where you stand, and what to fix first. The Fix Sprint ($1,250) executes that fix list for you. Monthly monitoring tracks how the answers shift as engines update.
Questions dental practices ask
Do AI engines really recommend specific dental practices?
Yes, and at high rates. Local Vitals ran 750 patient-style dental queries across 10 Florida metros on five AI platforms: 89% of the queries named at least one specific practice rather than deflecting to a search box.
Which sources do AI engines cite for dentists?
In BrightLocal's dentist-sector table (25,005 observed citations), Google Business Profile led with 57% and Yelp followed at 15.4%, with ZocDoc at 1% and Healthgrades at 0.5%. In the largest ChatGPT-specific study, practice-owned websites drew 53.8% of all 13,152 citation events, over three times any other source category.
My practice has hundreds of Google reviews. Doesn't that settle it?
Not by itself. In digitalfloss's 62-practice panel across 35 states, Google review count did not correlate with being named. Meanwhile 94.7% of cited practices in the Local Vitals study appeared on only one of five platforms, so visibility on the specific sources each engine reads matters more than volume on a single one.
Is this data specific to my city?
Partly. The Local Vitals study covers 10 Florida metros, the Dental Economics study covers 20 US metros, and the digitalfloss panel spans 62 practices across 35 states. Each figure on this page is labeled with its sample. CiteGap's own dental benchmark tables are not published yet; they will be built from real client runs as those accumulate.
What does the free check cover?
The free check examines seven technical aspects of your homepage instantly and shows the result of each. It is not dental-specific: it tells you whether AI engines can read your site at all, which is a precondition for being cited. Since practice websites were the most-cited source in ChatGPT dental answers, that readability matters more in dentistry than in most industries. No signup required.
See whether the engines can read your practice
The free check runs instantly against your homepage. No signup, no cost.
Run the free check