How we check whether AI names you
We ask AI tools what patients ask, many times over, and count which practices they name. Here is exactly how.
The questions
A free snapshot asks five questions in the words a patient would use, with your town in them. For a private dental practice in the UK, they are:
- Who is the best private dentist in [your town]?
- Where can I get dental implants in [your town]? Which clinics would you recommend?
- I want Invisalign in [your town]. Which practices are good?
- Can you recommend a cosmetic dentist in [your town] for veneers or teeth whitening?
- I need an emergency dentist in [your town]. Which private practices would you suggest?
US dental practices and aesthetic clinics get their own five. An audit asks forty, written around the treatments you most want to be found for.
How we ask
We ask through OpenAI’s and Perplexity’s own developer tools, with web search switched on and your town set as the location. Each question is asked three times in each tool, because the answers change from one ask to the next: in one study, AI tools gave the same list twice less than one time in a hundred.
For audits, we also measure Google’s AI answers using Otterly, a tracking service. Google’s own developer tools don’t allow their AI answers to be analysed for a report like this, so we don’t use them.
How we count
- Named: the answer mentions the practice as somewhere to go.
- Named first: it’s the first practice the answer mentions.
- Used as a source: the answer links to the practice’s website, whether or not it names the practice.
Software reads the names out of each answer, and a name only counts if it really appears in the text. A practice written two ways (with and without “Ltd”, say) counts once per answer.
What a snapshot can’t see
The answers a person gets in the ChatGPT or Perplexity apps can differ from what the developer tools return. The apps know a person’s location more precisely, can remember earlier chats, and change how they work without notice. That’s why we report how often you’re named across many answers, rather than a single position, and why the monthly plan asks the same questions again each month.
What we work on
Google says its AI answers rely on the same things as ordinary search, and need no special files or markup. So the work is ordinary, careful work: complete and consistent profiles, a steady flow of genuine reviews, pages that answer patients’ questions in plain text, and being mentioned on the sites the answers already read. Each snapshot shows which sites those are for your town.
Your data
A snapshot uses public information only: your practice’s name, website and town, and what the AI tools say. We never need anything about your patients. Your snapshot page isn’t listed in search engines, and we’ll delete it if you ask. Our privacy policy has the details.