How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT, for clinics

Patients used to type three words into a search box. Now some of them type a whole worry.

The tempting conclusion is that the assistant has a secret list and you are not on it. The interesting part is that both providers I look at below describe something much more ordinary: their systems reach public web pages and show links to the ones that help answer the question. That turns a mystery into a checklist, and a checklist is something a clinic can work through.

One rule for the rest of this post. When I say how an assistant works, I quote the company that runs it, with the page and its date. When I give advice, I say so. There is a lot of confident guessing about AI search out there, and I would rather not add to it.

OpenAI’s crawler documentation names a crawler called OAI-SearchBot, the one that finds websites for ChatGPT’s search. If a site blocks it, OpenAI says that site is left out of ChatGPT’s search answers, apart from plain links people use to go straight to a known site. Its advice to anyone who wants to appear is to let OAI-SearchBot in through robots.txt.

The same page describes two other agents. GPTBot collects content that may be used to train OpenAI’s models, and OpenAI says each setting is independent: you can allow OAI-SearchBot and block GPTBot. ChatGPT-User visits a page when a person asks ChatGPT something that needs it; OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to those visits and that ChatGPT-User is not used to decide what appears in search.

Two more details are useful. OpenAI says a change to your robots.txt can take about a day to be reflected in its search results. And the page does not list ranking factors or explain how ChatGPT chooses which sources to show, so anyone who claims to know the formula is going further than the documentation.

Some patients will meet AI answers inside Google rather than in ChatGPT, so Google’s own page is worth reading too. Google’s position is that AI Overviews and AI Mode need nothing extra: the usual rules for Search apply. For a page to be linked from one of those answers, it has to be in Google’s index and allowed to show a text preview in ordinary results. Google is also clear that ticking every box still leaves the final choice with Google.

Google also says no special file for AI tools and no extra markup is needed for these features. The basics it lists instead are familiar: allow crawling in robots.txt and in any CDN or hosting setup, make content easy to find through internal links, keep important content in text, make structured data match the visible page, and keep your Business Profile up to date. Visits from these features are counted in the Search Console Performance report under the Web search type.

Put the two pages together and the picture is plain. Be reachable, be indexed, say clearly what you do. That is less exciting than a secret trick, and much more useful, because all of it is in your hands.

Start with the file that decides who may read your site. Ask whoever manages your website to open your robots.txt file and check what it says about the crawlers below. Then ask the same question about any firewall or bot protection your host or CDN runs, because a block there works like a block in the file.

The last two lines in that example are a choice about training, and they make no difference to search according to OpenAI. I would not change the file without your web person checking the rest of it first, since one wrong line can hide a whole site.

This step is my advice, and I think it matters more than anything technical. An assistant that reads three pages about your clinic and finds three sets of opening hours has a problem, and so does the patient who turns up on a Saturday.

• Opening hours, including evenings, weekends and holidays.
• Address, parking and which entrance to use, for each location.
• Treatments you offer, in the words patients use, and the ones you do not offer.
• Who you see: new patients, children, nervous patients, emergencies.
• How to book, and whether you take same-day appointments.

Check each fact on your website, your Google Business Profile (Google names it in the fundamentals above) and the directories you are listed in. Fix the source first, then the copies. It is dull work, and it is the work most clinics have never done in one sitting.

Look back at the late-night question. It asked about tomorrow morning, emergencies and nervous patients. A page that says "we offer comprehensive dental care" answers none of it. A page that says when you see emergencies and how you look after anxious patients answers all of it, in text anyone can quote.

The second version is longer and better in every way that matters to a patient. It is also, I suspect, what any system trying to answer that patient’s question would rather find. That last part is my reading, not something the providers state, so treat it as advice.

Make one page per treatment you want to be known for, link to it from your main menu or services page, and keep the important facts in plain text, not only in images or PDFs. Google lists both internal links and text content among the fundamentals.

Schema markup is code that labels the facts on a page, such as your name, address, hours and services, so software does not have to guess. Google’s page says structured data should match the visible text and that no special schema is needed for its AI features, so the job is ordinary: describe the clinic accurately, in the same words the page uses.

You may also be offered an llms.txt file, a plain summary of your site written for AI tools. Google says it does not need one for AI Overviews or AI Mode. It can be a tidy extra; I would not let anyone sell it to you as the fix.

Your own site is one page about you among many. Reviews, directory listings, local news and your local health networks all describe your clinic in public, and I treat them as part of the same job, because they are pages anyone can read, people and crawlers alike.

• Ask happy patients for reviews in their own words, and reply to reviews like a person.
• Keep your local SEO basics in order: categories, services and photos on your business profile.
• Correct wrong details on directories when you find them, starting with the ones that rank for your clinic’s name.

Never write reviews for patients, pay for them, or ask for particular words. Apart from the obvious problems, a review that sounds like your website is not much use to anyone.

You cannot measure this with one search. Answers change from person to person and day to day, so keep a small log and look at it over months. Ask the questions a new patient would ask, in the assistants your patients use, and write down what came back.

Two other places help. Google says visits from its AI features are counted in the Search Console Performance report under the Web search type. And your web host’s logs show whether OAI-SearchBot and Googlebot are reaching your pages at all, which is the first thing I would check if the log stays empty for months.

AI answers are a new front door, and it is easy to spend a month on them while the old door is stuck. I would fix these first.

• Your site does not show up in Google for your own clinic name.
• Your website has the wrong hours, an old address or a treatment you stopped offering.
• Enquiries from your site wait days for a reply, so new patients who find you go elsewhere anyway.
• You are booked solid for weeks, so more patients would only wait.

Every one of those also gets in the way of AI answers, so fixing them first is not a detour.

Everything above can be done by a clinic with a patient web person and a few spare afternoons. If those afternoons do not exist, this is the work our AI search visibility service does for you.

We ask the leading AI assistants and search engines the questions your patients ask and record how your clinic appears, if at all. We fix wrong or missing facts on your website and listings, write pages that answer real patient questions, and add schema markup where it helps. Each fix is logged with its date, and a person on our team goes through the results with you at regular reviews. It is done for you: we set up, connect and run it.

We cannot promise a recommendation either, and we say so on the demo. There are versions for dental practices and med spas with the questions patients in each field tend to ask.