Ask ChatGPT “where should I get Invisalign in your town” and see who it names. Typically: healthcare directories, a national chain or two, and occasionally an independent practice whose website happens to state things plainly. The economics make this worth your attention: a single implant patient can be worth thousands of pounds, and the AI answer happens before the patient ever sees your Google listing, your ads, or your reviews.
Why practice websites do badly with AI
Dental sites tend to be built as brochures: beautiful photography, treatment pages that open with reassurance rather than facts, prices hidden behind “book a consultation”. Humans forgive that; machines can't work with it. When a model weighs whether to recommend your practice for “emergency dentist open Saturday”, it needs your opening hours, your location, your emergency policy and ideally a from-price as text it can read. If those live in a booking widget, an image, or nowhere, the model recommends whoever states them — usually a directory.
There's also a trust layer specific to healthcare: models are noticeably more cautious recommending medical providers than plumbers. That caution is your opening — practices whose credentials (GDC registration, CQC registration, named clinicians and their qualifications) are machine-readable give the model the confidence it needs to name them. Most practices have all of this and state none of it where a machine can see.
What to fix, in order
- Treatment pages that answer. First paragraph of the Invisalign page: what it is, from-price, typical duration, which of your clinicians does it. The reassurance copy can come second — the answer has to come first.
- Credentials as data. Dentist and MedicalClinic structured data with your GDC/CQC details, clinicians, and opening hours — not just footer badges.
- Location in words. The towns and postcodes you draw patients from, written in page text. “Emergency dentist near me” resolves to named places.
- Crawler access. Practice sites on managed healthcare platforms often block AI crawlers without anyone ever choosing to. Two minutes to check, and everything else depends on it.
- Reviews connected to you. Your Google profile and healthcare-directory listings linked from your site's structured data, so the model can attribute the five stars to your practice.
Check your practice in 60 seconds
The free check reads your site the way AI crawlers do — access, structured data, answer-first content — and scores it out of 100. The £19 citation audit then asks all five major AI models twelve real patient questions for your treatments and area, and shows who gets recommended, question by question. Fair warning on timing: technical fixes prove out the same day, but new citations typically follow in two to four months — here's why, and what order to fix things in.