Dental practices
The patient asks an assistant who takes their plan and sees new patients. It names three practices.
Someone new in town asks ChatGPT for a dentist that takes their plan, is seeing new patients this month and can do a crown without three visits. The assistant reads practice websites and answers with names and reasons. It does not call your front desk to check.
A patient's question about a dental practice asks for facts its website can state: the plans you are in network with, whether you are taking new patients, what you do for a same-day emergency, the range a crown or an implant falls in, sedation, languages, the youngest child you see. Facts about the practice, not claims about outcomes. A site that leaves them to the phone gives the assistant nothing to repeat.
How your customers ask
What patients ask before they call
The new patient decides before the first phone call
A patient's question is a filter: a plan, an opening, an urgency, a procedure, sometimes a special need. The AI assistant applies the filter to the pages it can read and returns the practices that pass. A practice whose site says nothing about insurance does not fail the filter. It never enters it.
Most patient questions turn on four facts: the plans you accept, whether you are taking new patients, what you do for an emergency today, and what a common procedure costs. Behind them sit the second tier: sedation, the youngest age you see, the languages at the desk and in the chair, evening and Saturday hours. Your front desk answers these every day. The site has to answer them once, in text.
Everything on that list is a fact about the practice, and none of it is a clinical claim. 'Gentle, pain-free dentistry' gives the assistant an adjective. 'Nitrous oxide and oral sedation are offered for adults; we do not offer IV sedation' gives it an answer it can repeat to the patient who asked about sedation.
The facts a practice site has to state, and where
The middle column is what your treatment coordinator says on the phone. The right-hand column is the form a machine can read.
| The patient asks | What your site states | Form |
|---|---|---|
| Do you take my plan | The plans you are in network with, by name, and what you do for patients out of network | A list in text on one page, with the date it was last checked |
| Are you taking new patients | Yes or no, and how soon a new patient exam can be booked | One sentence near the top of the homepage and on the contact page |
| Can you see me today | What counts as an emergency, whether you hold same-day slots, the number to call after hours | Text; one emergency number, the same on every page |
| What will it cost | A range for the visits patients ask about most: exam and cleaning, a filling, a crown, an implant, whitening, and what moves each | Text next to the procedure; priceRange in the markup |
| Will it hurt, can my child come, do you speak my language | Sedation options offered and not offered; the youngest age you see; the languages spoken | Plain sentences on the about page |
| When are you open | Hours by day, including evenings and Saturdays if you have them | Text plus OpeningHoursSpecification |
| Who are you | One practice name, one address, one main number; each dentist by name with credentials | Dentist, the schema.org type, in JSON-LD; a Person node per dentist |
| Are you any good | Patient reviews quoted on the page as text | Quoted text, with the platform named |
The type is Dentist, which schema.org lists under MedicalBusiness and under LocalBusiness, with the properties Google's local business documentation reads: name, address, telephone, opening hours, priceRange. Each dentist is a Person with credentials, so the name on the door and the name in the LocalBusiness schema agree. Google's structured data introduction recommends JSON-LD and asks that markup describe only what a visitor can see on the page.
Write the questions as headings with the answer in the first sentence, and do it for the assistant rather than for a Google rich result. Google limited the FAQ rich result to government and health sites in August 2023 and stopped showing it on May 7, 2026, so no practice's site can expect one. The heading and the sentence under it are still what an assistant lifts; that is the point of an FAQ page.
What the crawl found: questions on the page, answers on the phone
In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros across the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, late August to early September 2026), 61.5% had no question-and-answer content of any kind, and 50.7% had at least one heading phrased as a question with no answer under it a machine could isolate. A dental version of that shape is a heading that asks 'Do you accept my insurance?' above a paragraph that asks the patient to call. The question is on the page. The answer is on the phone, where no assistant can reach it.
43.1% were inconsistent about who and where they are across their own three main pages, and 36.9% published more than one phone number. A practice has a main line, an appointment line, an emergency line and often a tracking number from an ad, and each is a fact only if the page says which is which.
64.7% showed no review signal a crawler can read, and only 8.9% carried rating schema. 17.8% had no schema.org markup at all, and most of what the rest carried described the website, not the practice; LocalBusiness of any subtype appeared on roughly a quarter of sites.
When we put one buyer question per business to Claude, with web retrieval on, 14.9% of 9,240 businesses were named. One question, one assistant, one day: a direction, not a rate, and a Claude number only.
The order to fix it in
- An insurance page: the plans you are in network with, by name, what you do for everyone else, and the date you last checked the list.
- One sentence on the homepage saying whether you are taking new patients and how soon a new patient exam can be booked. Change it when the answer changes.
- An emergency paragraph: what counts, whether you hold same-day slots, the one number to call, and the hours it is answered.
- One practice name, one address and one main number on every page, then Dentist markup with hours and priceRange and a Person node per dentist, every value matching the page.
- A page per procedure patients ask about: what it is, the range it falls in, what moves the range, how many visits. No outcome claims; the facts are what get quoted.
- Reviews on the page as text, with the platform each came from, and kept out of your review schema: Google's review snippet rules say not to aggregate reviews from other websites, and a practice gets no review stars for reviews of itself.
- Check what a crawler receives with the crawler access check, then measure the same patient questions before and after, as our methodology describes.
Go deeper
Articles for dental practices
Fundamentals
AI visibility for dentists: named for the filter the patient added
AI Engines
A dental practice, ChatGPT and Gemini: which crawlers reach the site, and what they find there
Content & Answer Pages
Implants, whitening and cleanings: what a dental practice's treatment pages have to say
Measurement & Reporting
Does the AI recommend your dental practice? A 30-minute check, and what to do with the result
What practice owners ask
Can we publish prices when every case is different?
Publish the range and what moves it. Your treatment coordinator already says that a crown depends on the material and whether a build-up is needed, and gives a range; write that sentence on the crown page. A range with conditions is a fact an assistant can repeat, and the practice whose page carries one can be named for the cost question. 'Call for pricing' takes you out of it.
We rely on our Google profile and a review platform. Isn't that enough?
The assistant reads those and your site, and when they disagree about hours or the number it has a contradiction to resolve. The profile carries what Google's Business Profile guidelines ask for: real name, real address, categories, hours. Your site carries everything the profile cannot: plans, procedures, ranges, sedation, languages, which dentist does what. Both have to say the same thing about who you are.
Could an assistant say something about our practice that we never said?
Yes. An assistant assembling an answer sometimes fills a gap with a guess, which the glossary calls a hallucination. The defense is a page that states the fact plainly, so retrieval finds a sentence instead of a gap. In our measurement every answer is kept verbatim, so we can show you exactly what was said about the practice and which pages the answer read.
We have three locations. One website or three?
One site, with a page per location that carries that office's address, hours, number and dentists, each marked up as its own Dentist node under the same practice name. Three sites with the same text are three copies an assistant cannot tell apart. One site with three distinct location pages is one practice with three addresses, which is the truth.
Sources: our audit of 9,483 small-business sites, with its method · schema.org, MedicalBusiness and its subtypes · schema.org, Person · Google, local business structured data · Google, introduction to structured data · Google Search Central blog, changes to FAQ rich results · Google, review snippet · Google Business Profile guidelines · Google Search Central, documentation updates