"Flying Blind" — Why Most Dentists Have No Idea What AI Is Saying About Them

If you've ever opened ChatGPT or Google's AI and searched for your own practice to see how you show up — this episode is for you. What you see in those results is not what your patients see. And building a strategy around it is one of the most common — and costly — mistakes practice owners are making right now.

Dan breaks down why AI search is fundamentally personalized, how each platform sources and generates results differently, and why there's no such thing as a single, universal AI search result for your practice. He also gets honest about where AI visibility measurement actually stands today — it's early, it's imperfect, and the right approach looks nothing like checking your own searches.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why AI platforms personalize results based on your search history, behavior, and identity — and why that makes your own searches unreliable
• How ChatGPT, Gemini, and other platforms source their answers differently, meaning your visibility varies across all of them
• Why AI search results aren't static — and why what you see today may not be what a patient sees tomorrow
• What honest AI visibility measurement actually looks like right now
• How to start building the foundation that positions your practice to show up as AI search continues to evolve

The good news: you don't have to wait for the tools to catch up to start building a foundation that positions your practice to win as AI search matures. Head to dentalscapes.com/start to book a free strategy call and find out where you actually stand.

Check out the show notes and video podcast: https://dentalscapes.com/resources/blog/measuring-ai-visibility

Transcript

0:00

Welcome back to the Dental Marketing Mix. I'm Dan Bryan, co-founder of Dental Scapes, and this is the show where we cut through the noise and talk about what's actually working and what's not in Dental Marketing right now. Here's something I want you to think about for a second. If you wanted to know what patients in your area are seeing when they ask ChatGPT or Google's AI or Claude to recommend a dentist, would you just open it up and type the question yourself? A lot of practice owners are doing exactly that. And I get it, it feels like the logical thing to do. But this is the problem. What you see is not what your patients see. And making strategy decisions based on what you see is one of the most dangerous mistakes a practice owner can make right now. That's what we're getting into today. Why checking your own AI visibility is fundamentally flawed, why AI search measurement is still in its infancy, and what you can actually do about it. Let's start with how AI search actually works because it's not like Googling something in 2012. When a patient opens ChatGPT or Google's AI mode or Gemini and asks something like, who's the best dentist near me for Invisalign? That AI platform isn't just pulling a neutral, universal answer out of thin air. It's generating a response that's shaped by an enormous number of variables. What platform they're on, what device they're using, their search history, their location, whether they're logged in. What queries they've made before, what links they've clicked. In the case of Gemini and AI overviews specifically, Google has already confirmed that it's actively using your personal search history to personalize and deepen AI responses. It's not a search engine anymore, it is a personal AI assistant that increasingly knows who you are and what you're most interested in. So when you open ChatGPT and type best dentist in Miami, you're not seeing what a new patient sees. You're seeing a response shaped by the fact that you are a dentist, that you've probably searched your own practice name dozens of times before, that you've clicked on your own website. That the AI in some form or another has profiled you as someone deeply connected to that practice, the result you get back is almost certainly more favorable or at a minimum completely different from what a first-time patient searching cold would actually see. It's like checking your Yelp reviews while logged into your own account and wondering why everyone seems to love you. Now there's another layer here too, and this one is more technical but just as important. These AI platforms don't all work the same way. Chat GPT, for instance, pulls heavily from third-party directories and listings, Yelp, Healthgrades, directories like that. Gemini leans more on brand-owned websites and structured data. Perplexity has its own sourcing logic, as does Claude. What shows up for your practice on one platform may be completely different from what shows up on another, and a patient might be using any one of them. There's no single AI search result to check like there used to be for Google's traditional search rankings. There are dozens of possible outputs depending on the platform, the query phrasing, the user's context, and the moment in time. And that last part, the moment in time, matters more than people realize. These systems aren't static. They're updating constantly. The response you get today might be different from what a patient gets next week, because the underlying models are being retrained, new sources are being indexed, and the platforms are in a constant state of evolution. So let's talk about where measurement actually stands today, because this is an area where I want to be completely honest with you. The reality is AI search measurement is genuinely new territory. The tools that exist to track AI visibility are early stage. They're improving fast, but none of them give you the kind of clean, reliable data that you'd get from traditional SEO rank tracking. There's no AI equivalent of checking where you rank for dentist in Detroit and seeing a clear number. The outputs are generative, variable, and highly contextual. That's just the reality of where we are. What the best measurement approaches can do right now is simulate queries across platforms in a consistent and depersonalized way. So you're not asking the AI from your own account, you're asking it cold across a range of relevant queries and tracking what comes back over time. That gives you a far more honest picture than what you see when you run it yourself. I can tell you whether your practice is being mentioned at all, whether competitors are showing up when you're not. Whether the AI platforms seem to trust your website as a source, whether your directory presence is strong enough to get picked up by platforms that rely heavily on third party citations. That is the kind of intelligence that's actually useful, not a screenshot you took on your phone after googling yourself. So here's what I want you to take away from this. The dentists who are going to win in AI search aren't the ones who occasionally check their own results and feel good or bad about what they see. They're the ones who are treating AI visibility like a real measurable channel, even if the measurement is imperfect right now. And they're building a strategy around improving it systematically from top to bottom. That means understanding how your website is structured and whether AI platforms can actually parse it. It means knowing whether your directory and citation presence is strong enough to be picked up by the platforms that rely on those sources. It means understanding what questions patients are asking AI tools and whether your practice is positioned to show up in the answer. And it means tracking that visibility over time in a way that's consistent and most importantly, depersonalized, not just running your own searches and hoping for the best. This is exactly the kind of work we're doing at Dental Scapes with our clients right now. We're not waiting for the measurement tools to be perfect. We're building the foundation, the website structure, the content, the citation ecosystem, the authority signals that positions practices to show up as AI search matures and the measurement picture gets clearer. The practices that build that foundation right now are going to have a real advantage over the ones who wait until everything is figured out completely. So if you want to understand where your practice actually stands in AI search, not based on what you see when you Google yourself, but based on a real, honest assessment, we would love to talk. Head over to Downscapes.com slash start and book a free strategy call with us. We'll take a look at your AI visibility, talk through what we're seeing in your market, and give you a clear picture of what it would take to build a presence that holds up as this landscape keeps evolving. That's dentalscapes.com slash start. No pressure, no pitch, just a real conversation about where you stand and where you could go. And if this episode gave you something to think about, I would be really grateful if you take just a moment to leave us a five-star rating or review wherever you listen. It genuinely means a lot and honestly it's the best way to help us reach other practice owners who could use this kind of insight. We want to help as many dentists as we can navigate this stuff, and your review goes a long way toward making that happen. Thanks for listening to the dental marketing mix. I'm Dan Bryan and I will see you on the next one.