You might run a great dental office with excellent clinical work, but unless patients can actually find you, all you’re ever going to be is the best kept secret in your area.

And the way patients find a dentist has changed a lot over time. It started with the yellow pages and ads in the local newspaper. Then Google came along, and patients started typing in “dentist near me” to find a practice. 

Now we’re in the middle of the next shift: more and more patients are opening AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity and simply asking “what’s a good dentist in my area”, then calling whoever the AI recommends.

 Even Google itself now answers these questions with AI Overviews at the top of the page, before anyone clicks on a single website. And unless your practice shows up in those answers, you’re missing out on new patients every single month. 

Naturally, many companies are trying to sell you the solution. AI search optimization, AEO, GEO, ChatGPT visibility packages, all of them promising to get your practice into those AI answers. The problem is that most of what they’re selling won’t actually move the needle. 

What actually moves the needle and gets your practice recommended by ChatGPT, and more importantly gets you new patients, are the things we talk about in the article below. And the good news is that you don’t have to do anything special.

When a patient opens ChatGPT and types in “what’s a good dentist in my area”, ChatGPT looks for signals that a dentist is trustworthy before putting their name in the answer. 

And those signals are the same ones Google uses, and honestly the same ones an actual person would look at if they were checking you out:

That’s what ChatGPT is researching when it decides whether to recommend you.

Now that you know what ChatGPT is looking at, the obvious question is what to actually do about it.

 AI tools actively look for evidence that the person behind the website is a real, qualified professional before recommending them. So your credentials, your education, your years of experience and your bio need to be clearly visible on your site.

A generic “about us” page that doesn’t say much isn’t enough. Write about who you are, what you’ve done, and why patients should trust you with their teeth. Do the same for your team.

AI tools lean heavily on your Google Business Profile when answering local searches like “best dentist near me”. Are your hours current, is the address right, are there recent photos, are all your services listed? If not, work on updating your profile and make sure you keep it up to date.

ChatGPT builds a picture of how trustworthy and well known your practice is by scanning reviews across Google, Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Yelp and anywhere else patients talk about you.

The more consistent and positive that picture is across platforms, the more confidently AI tools recommend you. Make asking for reviews part of your routine, every week, not just when you remember. A practice with fresh reviews coming in every month beats a practice with 200 reviews from three years ago.

If you need help gathering more Google reviews, we put together a course your staff can go through to learn exactly how to do it. It covers things like when to ask patients for a review, what to say, and how to make sure most of them actually follow through and leave one. In a market this competitive, a high star rating and a steady stream of fresh positive reviews are some of the most valuable assets your practice can have. 

One page that lists whitening, implants, veneers and crowns together doesn’t rank for any of them. As Dr. Wank says: “If you want to show up for dental implants and you don’t have an implants page and there are 30 people who rank ahead of you for dental implants, you’re going to have a much harder time.”

Here’s why this matters so much for ChatGPT. Patients don’t just ask it for “a good dentist”, they ask for a dentist who solves their specific problem. “Who does dental implants near me.” “Best dentist for Invisalign in my city.” “Where can I get my teeth whitened.” 

When ChatGPT goes looking for an answer, it’s searching for a practice that clearly offers that exact service in that exact area. A dedicated implants page that talks about implants at your practice, in your city, gives ChatGPT something concrete to match against the question.

Here’s something that happens to a lot of dentists. You get a new website built, and the web design agency fills the pages with basic templated content. It reads fine at first glance, but it’s a placeholder, It doesn’t say anything real about you, your practice, or what a patient can actually expect, and it’s sitting on thousands of other dental websites in nearly identical form.

What you need instead is content that goes in depth, answers the questions patients really ask, and is genuinely helpful. This matters for ChatGPT because of how it builds an answer. 

When a patient asks about whitening or implants or a dentist nearby, ChatGPT is reading through websites looking for content that actually answers the question. Templated filler gives it nothing to work with, there’s no real information in it, and it looks identical to a hundred other sites, so there’s no reason to pick yours.

 A page where a real dentist explains the procedure, what it costs, who it’s for and what to expect gives ChatGPT useful, specific material it can pull from and cite. The more helpful your content is to a patient, the more useful it is to ChatGPT, because ChatGPT’s whole job is finding helpful answers for its users.

Open ChatGPT and type in the searches your patients would actually use. “Best dentist in [your city].” “Dentist that does implants in [your city].” “Affordable teeth whitening in [your city].” See if your practice comes up. 

Pay attention to what ChatGPT says about you, not just whether you show up. Sometimes it surfaces outdated information, an old address, old hours, services you no longer offer, even an old phone number. A recommendation that sends patients to a number that doesn’t ring is worthless.

If you’d rather not do this manually every month, there are tools built specifically for tracking your visibility in AI tools. They automatically run searches across ChatGPT and other AI platforms and tell you when and where your practice gets mentioned or cited. 

Otterly AI or Sight AI gives you an AI Visibility Score and shows you which patient questions are triggering mentions of your practice and which ones aren’t. You can also see which questions your competitors are showing up for and you’re not. If the practice down the street keeps getting cited when patients ask about implant costs or Invisalign, that tells you precisely what content to create next.

The whole purpose of showing up on Google or in ChatGPT is visibility, getting your practice in front of patients who are looking for a dentist right now. But visibility is just the beginning of the patient journey. Once a patient finds you, you still have to convince them that you’re the right choice, and that happens on your website, in your reviews, and most of all on the phone. That’s where your front desk plays a huge role.

And this is exactly where a lot of dental practices quietly lose patients they never even knew they had.

The average dental receptionist books only 1 out of every 3 new patient calls. Think about what that means. Two out of three people who found your practice, liked what they saw and picked up the phone never made it onto your schedule. Not because your marketing failed, but because of what happened in the first 30 seconds of that call. 

The truth is that if you’re busy in the operatory all day, you can’t really know what’s happening on your phones. You’re with patients while the calls come in, and you only ever see the ones that turned into appointments, never the ones that didn’t. Most dentists who finally listen to their own call recordings are pretty shocked by what they hear.

If you want to see how well your staff actually performs on the phone and whether they need additional training, check out our Scorecard software. It shows you how your team compares to other dental practices across the country, where your biggest leak of new patients is, how much it costs you to get one new patient through the door, and a lot more.