When patients ask AI where to go, does it name your practice?

What patients and clients ask the AI

Choosing a dentist, physio, optician or vet is a considered decision, and people ask follow-up questions. An AI assistant lets them do that in one conversation:

• "Which dentists in Grantham are taking new NHS patients?"
• "Good sports physio in Nottingham for a running injury?"
• "Is there a vet near Melton Mowbray with evening appointments?"
• "Private hearing tests in Lincoln, who do people recommend?"

The answer names a few practices and often adds details: opening times, prices, whether you're accepting new patients. Each of those details can be right, out of date or simply wrong.

What helps an assistant describe your practice correctly

• A page for each main treatment or service. Written for patients, saying who it's for, how long it takes, and whether it's NHS, private or both.
• Clear status lines. "We're accepting new private patients. Our NHS list is currently closed." Update it when it changes, and date it.
• Practitioners named, with their qualifications. Only what's true and current, and consistent with any professional register you appear on.
• Opening hours, parking and access in plain text. These are frequent questions, and they're often only in a PDF or an image.
• Consistent details across listings. Practices that have merged, moved or changed name often have old listings still online. Those are a common source of wrong answers.

Common gaps worth checking

Group practices often have one website for several sites, with the services of each mixed together. An assistant may then say a treatment is available at the wrong branch. Another frequent gap is a fee list that was updated in the practice but not online. If you only fix one thing this month, make your website say clearly, in text, what you offer at each address.

If an assistant is already saying something wrong about you, our page on what to do when AI gets your details wrong walks through tracing and correcting it.

What the free check tells you

We ask ChatGPT and Google's Gemini the kind of questions a new patient or client would ask, using your services and your town. You'll see whether your practice was named, roughly where, which practices were named instead, and anything the assistant said about you that looks wrong. Perplexity and other assistants aren't included.

AI answers change from one asking to the next, so it's a snapshot rather than a ranking. If you want a fuller picture later, the AI visibility audit covers more questions and more assistants. You don't need it to get the free check.