There’s a lot of misconceptions about how AI recommends businesses, and many people think AI discoverability is the same as having good SEO. I want to explain why that’s not true and show how to actually get your practice recommended by AI.

For simplicity going forward, we’ll think of “factors” as different things that make you book an appointment, like location, comfort options, trustworthiness, insurance acceptance, etc.

The unexpected advantage of catering to AI using patients

Google search results can get sloppy when you start adding too many factors. That’s why Google searches generally start broad; like “dentist in miami” and the first 3-5 to practices to pop up for a search take all while all others aren’t even considered.

On the other hand, ChatGPT encourages people to search with variables. For example:

“Dentist in Miami that can do root canals with sedation and accepts Premera insurance, available this week”.

Using the above example, for your practice to turn up, you’d need the following information to be both on your website, but also structured in an AI-friendly way (more on this soon).

• You are a dentist

• In Miami

• Can do root canals

• Offers sedation

• Accepts Premera insurance

• Usually available within a week

  
  

You must also consider that patients often message ChatGPT back and forth several times with health-related queries before asking for a clinic recommendation, unintentionally giving it loads of context which it then uses in it's search to help find a qualifying practice.

AI discoverability relies both on novel, high-quality information, but also for it to be well-structured and readable. Lately I've seen more and more obvious ChatGPT-written filler text on dental websites. This actually signals to search algorithms that you have spam content and don’t deserve visibility. These algorithms are smart enough to know who's providing value and who's just filling the web with slop, which means a good portion of your competition is shooting themselves in the foot because they don’t know any better.

So how do you start getting attention from ChatGPT?

Start by building a clean, high-trust website homepage exclusively for human visitors. Rather than dumping a wall of text about your backstory, tend to the emotional side of human decision-making. Emphasize comfort, friendliness, simple payment terms, easy parking, and any of the other common, but often subconscious pain points people have regarding dentistry.

For the rest of the site, go wild. Each procedure you offer should have its own separate webpage with quality, insightful information. Just to create a clear distinction, human users are not the first priority for these pages. While they're still totally human-usable, we design these to be information-heavy, but well-structured for AI and search engines to do their thing.

If done correctly, someone looking for veneers via ChatGPT will end up directly on your 'veneers' page, having had ChatGPT already answer all their questions about you before they even get to your site. At that point, it's just up to your website to have a clear call-to-action button so they can make that phone call.

How to format your content to be seen by AI:

• AI loves the “question and answer” format (FAQs / Q&As) because the “question” side often closely resembles what people are typing into ChatGPT; therefore, it has to do less guessing. Your AI-bait pages should have loads of specific insightful content, while avoiding overly generic, cookie-cutter answers.

• AI loves tables (Excel spreadsheet type-format)

• AI loves schema markups; hidden code you attach to your pages so robots explicitly understand whats on them.

• AI sometimes won’t fully search slow, bloated websites because they blow time budgets. You can get a decent understanding of your site speed by using Google PageSpeed Insights.

  
  

Isn’t it super tedious to create all that content about so many procedures?

Only if you do it the old way. Here’s my content research sauce:

To make this as easy as possible, I perform an OpenAI Deep Research query to gather hundreds of real quotes from real people from various online communities, including r/AskDentists on Reddit. This research often parses 700+ sources and takes 20-30 minutes to complete. This helps us understand what real people are asking questions about before, let’s say, their upcoming root canal. Also, there’s no risk of hallucinations, because we’re pulling real quotes with cited sources we can check ourselves.

Using the raw quotes, I convert the Deep Research output into a curated, clean list of questions which I send to my clients. I find they always have novel input towards real patient questions even if it’s subtle. Instead of making them spend all day writing, I just have them send a voice message or answer the questions over a recorded meeting, then I use AI to clean up the transcript while maintaining the writing tone of voice, and inject subtle keywords and direct-match phrases to help trigger ChatGPT answers.

Final thoughts:

The way I see it, even if these algorithms hypothetically evolve over time, most practices stay under the radar because the important information people actually want to know often isn’t even there. While most SEO is optimized around keywords and short phrases, AI can pull nuance from large sums of text and match it exactly to what patients are searching. AI operates best when given context, so if you intimately know your patients, then you can intimately address their painpoints. Combine this with AI-friendly content structure and you get some major first mover's advantage.