Industries · How dentists get recommended by ChatGPT and AI search
When a patient asks ChatGPT for a dentist, is your practice named?
New patients increasingly start with a question, not a search: "gentle dentist near me who takes Delta Dental". AI assistants answer with two or three names. Here's what decides whether yours is one of them.
Free, no account. We only read public files.
What people ask AI assistants
- “Best family dentist in [city] that takes Cigna”
- “Emergency dentist open Saturday near me”
- “Dentist in [city] good with anxious patients”
- “How much is a crown without insurance in [city]?”
Why does AI search matter for dentists?
Dental searches are local and high intent. Someone asking an assistant for an emergency dentist will usually call the first practice it names. There is no page two.
AI assistants build those answers from what they can read: your site, your Google Business Profile, directories such as Healthgrades and Zocdoc, and reviews. If your site hides basic facts (insurance accepted, hours, services, which dentist does what), the assistant fills the gap from somewhere else, or names a practice that spells it out.
Most practice websites come from a handful of dental marketing vendors. That's good news: the gaps tend to be the same template defaults, and they're quick to fix once you know where they are.
What we found on 34 dental practice sites
Full report and method →2 / 34
6%
block any AI crawler in robots.txt
robots.txt is rarely the problem
25 / 34
74%
have no llms.txt at all
8 / 29
28%
homepages with no Organization or LocalBusiness schema
of homepages we could read
5 / 34
15%
returned a firewall 403 to our automated request
From GeoLumen's own scan on 2026-10-19 of public files only (robots.txt, llms.txt, homepage). 9 of 29 readable homepages used an industry-specific schema type, and 5 of the 9 sites serving something at /llms.txt served a broken, empty or HTML file. Small samples: treat these as a snapshot, not a census.
The dental practice checklist
Things to do this week, roughly in order.
- Put the insurance plans you accept on an HTML page, by name, and link it from the homepage.
- Give each service you want new patients for (implants, Invisalign, emergency visits) its own page with what it involves and a price range or how pricing works.
- State your emergency policy in one sentence: same-day slots, weekend hours, or who to call when you're closed.
- Name each dentist on the team page with their degree (DDS or DMD) and what they focus on.
- Add Dentist schema with address, phone and opening hours to the homepage and each location page.
- Check that your Healthgrades, Zocdoc and Google Business Profile listings show the same hours and phone number as your site.
What are the common mistakes, and the fixes?
- 01
Your firewall may be turning bots away
Several dental sites in our scan returned HTTP 403 to an automated request even when we used a normal browser user agent. AI crawlers also fetch from data centres. If your host's bot protection blocks them, it doesn't matter what robots.txt says.
Free tool: AI Crawler Checker → - 02
No llms.txt, or a broken one
Most practices have no /llms.txt at all, and of the 9 that serve something there, 5 serve an HTML page, an empty file or one that fails the spec. A short, accurate file listing your services, insurance and locations gives assistants a clean summary to quote.
Free tool: llms.txt Generator & Validator → - 03
Generic schema instead of Dentist
Plenty of sites mark themselves up as a plain Organization or WebSite. Using the Dentist type with address, opening hours and phone makes those facts machine-readable. List the insurance you accept as text on the page.
Free tool: Schema / JSON-LD Generator → - 04
Insurance and pricing buried in PDFs
"Do you take my insurance?" is the most common pre-booking question. Put the list on an HTML page, not a scanned PDF or an image.
Which schema should dentists use?
Dentist is a LocalBusiness and MedicalBusiness subtype, so one block can carry your address, opening hours, phone and links to your profiles.
Generate it for your dental practice →Recommended type
"@type": "Dentist"
Start with the free check. If you'd rather hand it over, there's the Snapshot.
The free AI Crawler Checker shows in seconds whether AI crawlers can read your site. The $99 Snapshot audit goes further for one dental practice: 10 customer questions × 4 AI engines, crawler, robots.txt & CDN review, llms.txt and schema written for you, prioritised fix list (PDF). Delivered in 5 working days.
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