AI visibility for dentists
I scanned 35 Indian clinic sites, dental practices among them, and published every score. The headline is not the one you're expecting: most dental sites are fine. The ones that aren't, fail in one specific way.
This is the one vertical where I'm not speculating. I scanned 35 independent Indian clinic websites (dental practices, fertility clinics, aesthetics and hair) and published every score, named, with a method note and a correction address. You can read the whole thing in the AI Visibility Index.
The finding, including the part that's inconvenient for me
Most clinic sites are fine. The median scored 87/100. Thirty-one of thirty-five scored an A or a B. If you came here expecting to be told the category is a disaster, it isn't, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise to make the fix sound more urgent.
The real finding is narrow and sharp: 4 of 35 sites published no structured data at all, and they hold the three lowest scores in the sample: a median of 54 against 88 for everyone else. It's not a spectrum problem. It's a cliff, and a small number of practices are over it.
One of those four was a working dental clinic site with 1,377 words of real content, photographs, treatment descriptions and contact details. Everything a patient needs. None of it in a form a machine can read. That's the shape of this problem: not absent information, but unlabelled information.
Why dental is different from the rest of local search
Two things make this category its own problem.
First, the aggregators are unusually strong. Practo and Justdial are structurally built for "best dentist in Koramangala" in a way your practice site never will be. Concede that query. The winnable ones are your practice by name, your named dentists, and specific procedures like "single-visit root canal in Indiranagar", where breadth doesn't help the aggregator.
Second, health is scrutinised harder. Search engines have long applied extra care to topics that affect health and money, for the obvious reason. What that rewards, practically, is specificity and named credentialed people: the named implantologist with an actual qualification, attached to the procedure page. Most clinic sites are written in anonymous marketing voice: "our team of experts". A machine can do nothing with "our team of experts". It can do a great deal with "Dr. [Name], MDS (Prosthodontics), 14 years, performs the procedure".
The fixes, in order
- Add Dentist schema. It's a real Schema.org type under MedicalBusiness: address, hours, services, as labelled data. If you have several locations, each gets its own, with its own address. Not one generic blob for the brand.
- Name your practitioners, with credentials, in text. This is the highest-value thing on the list and it costs nothing but honesty. Mark them up as people, attached to the procedures they actually perform.
- Get your treatment descriptions out of images. Clinic sites love a nicely-set graphic listing procedures. It's unreadable. The same list as HTML text costs nothing and can be read.
- One page per procedure you actually want patients for, written to answer the question a patient asks (what it costs, how long it takes, whether it hurts) rather than to rank.
- Check your own site. The Report Card is free and takes ten seconds; if you're in the 11% with no structured data, you'll know immediately.
What I won't tell you
I won't tell you that fixing your schema will make ChatGPT recommend your practice. Nobody can promise that. The mechanism is retrieval and training data, not a ranking dial, and there's more on that in why ChatGPT recommends your competitor.
What the data supports is narrower and still worth acting on: if you're in the small minority publishing nothing machine-readable, you are demonstrably the worst-equipped site in your category, and that's cheap to fix. If you're already at 87 like most of your peers, the honest advice is that your marginal effort is better spent on being mentioned somewhere other than your own website.
Frequently asked questions
Do dental practice websites show up in AI search?
Most are readable enough to. In a sample of 35 Indian clinic websites I scanned and published, the median score was 87/100 and 31 of 35 scored an A or a B. The problem is concentrated: 4 of 35 published no structured data at all and scored a median of 54 against 88 for the rest.
What schema should a dental practice use?
Schema.org has a Dentist type, which sits under MedicalBusiness and LocalBusiness. It lets you state your address, hours, and services as data. Named practitioners can be marked up separately, which matters more in healthcare than in most categories because credentials are part of what's being assessed.
Why do Practo and Justdial outrank my dental clinic?
They publish structured, comparable listings across thousands of practices, which is exactly the shape a comparison question needs. You will not out-publish them on 'best dentist in [city]'. You can be the definitive source on your own practice, your own named dentists, and your own procedures, and most practices aren't.
Is health content held to a higher standard by AI systems?
Health sits in the category search engines have long treated with extra scrutiny, because bad information causes real harm. In practice that rewards specificity and named, credentialed authorship over anonymous marketing prose, which is the opposite of how most clinic sites are written.