AI search for clinics: how ChatGPT and Perplexity choose

Bottom line: AI search for clinics does not rank you the way a results page does. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude can search the web and write an answer from the pages they retrieve, which may include your website, directories and mentions elsewhere. A clinic earns a mention by being one clear, consistent entity. Nobody can promise a mention, but you can check what the assistants say.

In short:

• Assistants retrieve and summarise, so the same question can name different clinics on different days.
• In one US study of ChatGPT Search local results, business websites were cited most, then mentions, then directories. We have no Indian equivalent, so your own website is the first place to put accurate, quotable facts; keep your Google listing consistent too, because patients and Google use it.
• A quotable clinic is one entity with one name, address and phone number (NAP), plain service pages, written FAQ answers, schema markup and, optionally, an llms.txt file.
• Read the rules before you publish: the 2002 medical ethics code restricts doctor advertising "through any mode", and the data protection law has its own consent rules.
• You can check what the assistants say about you weekly and monthly, within plan quotas. Nobody can promise the outcome.

How does AI search for clinics answer "best dentist in Bopal"?

An AI assistant answers a clinic question the way a careful intern would. It searches, reads a handful of pages and writes a summary. The summary is composed fresh for each question.

ChatGPT (OpenAI), Perplexity, Gemini (Google) and Claude (Anthropic) can all search the web and write an answer with sources, though the details differ by product and change without notice. When a patient in Ahmedabad types "best dentist in Bopal", the assistant may run one or more web searches, read what it finds and compose an answer. The clinics it names are those whose pages, listings and mentions it retrieved.

Stat: More than 230 million people ask health and wellness questions on ChatGPT each week (OpenAI, January 2026, company-reported, global) — source. Last checked 1 Oct 2026.

On the Google side, BrightEdge, a search-analytics vendor, tracked healthcare keywords across December snapshots in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Stat: Google AI Overviews appeared on 89% of tracked healthcare keywords in December 2025, up from 59% in December 2023 (BrightEdge, vendor-tracked keyword set, not an Indian sample) — source. Last checked 1 Oct 2026.

In the same dataset, queries with local or provider intent, such as "near me" searches, showed 0% AI Overview presence in December 2025. Read that as a phenomenon in one vendor's data, not a plan. Inside ChatGPT or Perplexity, the answer is assembled from whatever text the assistant retrieved.

Suppose a patient asks "which dentist in Bopal does a root canal and what does it cost". An assistant can only quote a fee that is written on a page it can read. Be that page (if your code allows publishing fees; see the rules below).

Which sources do assistants read, where is India thin, and do reviews count?

The one measured split we can cite is American, and it puts business websites first, mentions second and directories third.

Stat: In ChatGPT Search local results, business websites made up 58% of cited sources, business mentions 27% and directories 15% (BrightLocal, December 2024, 800 manual searches across 20 US cities and 20 verticals in November 2024, US-only study) — source. Last checked 1 Oct 2026.

Two cautions apply. The study is American and nearly two years old. And the directories ChatGPT is reported to use for local data are US ones: Local Falcon's review of its local data sources names Bing Places, Yelp, Tripadvisor, BBB and MapQuest (source, 5 November 2025). The same article says ChatGPT has no direct integration with Google Business Profile.

We have not measured Indian coverage of those directories, so we make no claim about it. What is within your control is your own website, your Google Business Profile, your listings on Indian directories such as Practo and Justdial, and anything written about you elsewhere.

Take a hypothetical physiotherapy clinic in Baner that lists different hours on its website, on Justdial and on Google. An assistant that retrieves all three has no way to tell which is right, so it may hedge or lean towards a competitor whose details agree everywhere. The fix costs nothing: one set of facts, copied exactly to every place you control. Our guide to name, address and phone consistency across Practo and Justdial walks through it.

Do reviews feed AI answers? Nobody outside the AI companies can say for certain how much weight an assistant gives them. Reviews are public text, so an assistant that retrieves a review page can read it. What the data does show is that patients themselves lean on reviews.

Stat: 84% of US patients read online reviews before choosing a new provider; 61% weight reviews over friend and family referrals; 40% have cancelled an appointment or changed their care plan based on online reviews (rater8, survey of 1,008 US adults in December 2024, report dated February 2025, US survey) — source. Last checked 1 Oct 2026.

We have no traceable Indian equivalent. Google's Maps review policy bans incentives for reviews and review-gating. A review reply should never confirm what someone was treated for, because patient confidentiality is an ethics duty (see the rules below). Our review reply templates for clinics stay inside that line.

Sunbots' part here is modest. Its Google Business page has a GET MORE REVIEWS card with Copy link and Download QR, so the front desk can hand patients your review link. Review requests, SMS and WhatsApp messages to patients stay with the clinic: Sunbots does not send them. Asking happens within Google's rules. The guide to getting more Google reviews covers the permitted asks.

What makes a clinic quotable: entity, pages, schema and llms.txt

A quotable clinic is one unambiguous entity, meaning one clear identity for software to recognise, with pages that answer patient questions in full sentences. That is what generative engine optimization (GEO) for clinics comes down to. It is mostly the same work as GEO in general, done with a medical code in hand.

Make the entity unambiguous. Use one legal name, one address format and one phone number everywhere: website footer, Google Business Profile, Practo, Justdial, LinkedIn. An assistant may read "Smile Dental Bopal", "Smile Dental Care" and "Dr Patel's Smile Clinic" as three places unless every source agrees they are one.

Give each service its own page. Say what the treatment is, who it is for, how long it takes and what aftercare involves. Add the fee or fee range only where your code allows it (see the rules below). Add a written FAQ page: an assistant quoting "Do you see children? Yes, from age three" has a sentence to lift. This is what answer-engine optimization (AEO) means in practice, and our AEO versus SEO explainer covers the difference.

Add schema markup that matches the page. Schema.org markup tells software what kind of thing a page describes. For a clinic that means the MedicalClinic, Physician or Dentist types, with address, phone, opening hours and services. It does not make a claim true. The schema markup guide for clinics has worked examples.

Treat llms.txt as optional. It is a plain-text file at the root of your site that summarises it and links to its key pages. Sunbots publishes its own at /llms.txt. We know of no AI company that guarantees it reads the file, so treat it as hygiene, not a lever. The llms.txt guide explains what to put in it.

Take a hypothetical skin clinic in Banjara Hills that writes one page per service, each with a duration and a "what to expect" paragraph. It adds an FAQ page and MedicalClinic markup, and publishes no before-and-after photos. That clinic gives an assistant more it can quote than a competitor with a glossy homepage and an Instagram grid of transformations.

What can patients ask, and what do the rules say?

Patients ask plain factual questions: do you see children, is there parking, what are Saturday hours, what does a first consultation cost. Whether a fact may go on a clinic's website is a rules question, so read the code first.

The Indian Medical Council (Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations 2002 (the IMC 2002 Regulations) are the code the National Medical Commission (NMC) adopted and made effective by gazette on 23 August 2023. The same day it held its own 2023 conduct regulations, notified 2 August 2023, in abeyance (Medical Dialogues, 24 August 2023).

These are the clauses in the 2002 text that matter most here (text on Indian Kanoon):

• Regulation 6.1.1 says soliciting of patients, directly or indirectly, is unethical. It bars a physician from using their name as the subject of advertising or publicity "through any mode" that invites attention to their position, skill, qualifications or achievements.
• The same clause bars giving an endorsement of a drug or commercial product for use with the physician's name, signature or photograph in advertising.
• Regulation 6.1.1 then lists formal press announcements a practitioner may make: starting practice, a change of type of practice, a change of address, temporary absence, resumption, succeeding to another practice and a public declaration of charges.
• Regulation 6.1.2 treats printing a self-photograph on a letterhead or signboard as self-advertisement.
• Regulation 7.17 says a practitioner shall not publish photographs or case reports of patients without permission, in a way that identifies them. Where identity is not disclosed, consent is not needed.
• Regulation 7.14 covers confidentiality. A patient's secrets may be disclosed only in a court of law under a judge's orders, where there is a serious and identified risk to a specific person or community, or for notifiable diseases.

The clauses are written for physicians' advertising and publications. State medical councils (Maharashtra and Karnataka among them) have acted on misleading social-media ads, so confirm with yours how far the clauses reach a clinic's website, posts or reviews.

Dentists are under a different code, the Dental Council of India (DCI) Revised Dentists (Code of Ethics) Regulations 2014 (gazette PDF). Regulation 8.2.9 says a website where all information is factual is not unethical, and that it can carry details of treatment facilities and the fees. Regulation 8.2.7 covers announcing new equipment or services "without boastful claims of being the 'best' or 'first'". The rules on testimonials and before-and-after photos and our guide to whether doctors can advertise in India go deeper.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) applies, under section 3, to the processing of digital personal data in India. Where processing rests on consent, section 6(1) says the consent must be free, specific, informed, unconditional and unambiguous, with a clear affirmative action (Act text via PRS). The Act does not create a separate health-data category.

The DPDP Rules, 2025 were notified on 13 November 2025. The consent-manager provisions apply from 13 November 2026 and the remaining duties from 13 May 2027 (gazette PDF). Our DPDP guide for clinics has the practical steps.

How do you check if you're mentioned, and what can nobody promise?

Ask the assistants the questions your patients ask, on a schedule, and record what comes back. That is the whole of what an AI visibility check for a clinic is.

In Sunbots, the page is /dashboard/seo/ai-visibility, under the "AI visibility" heading. The QUESTIONS WE TEST panel holds up to 20 active questions. Press Add and type one the way a patient would ("dentist in Bopal open on Sunday"). Two checks matter here:

• Weekly question probes, every Monday at 10:30 IST, ask each active question of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. A probe runs only for engines whose API keys are configured, and the panel shows which engines were asked.
• A monthly mention snapshot on the 2nd of each month at 10:30 IST asks the AI engines about each tracked keyword through DataForSEO, a search-data provider. Each keyword checked uses one of your plan's AI-visibility checks: 50 a month on Presence, 150 on Growth, 300 on Domination. It needs tracked keywords, so add locality keywords in Rankings.

The KEYWORD BREAKDOWN section is separate: it lists the monthly snapshot result for each of your tracked keywords, with the keywords AI mentioned you on shown first. Google AI Overviews are outside these checks.

Rank tracking is another weekly job: Monday at 09:30 IST, with 25, 50 or 100 tracked keywords by plan, never daily. Plans cost ₹30,000, ₹55,000 and ₹80,000 a month + 18% GST. The AI visibility check tutorial shows the screens, and what an AI visibility check is and isn't covers the limits.

Two labels confuse people. The blog scorecard under "QUALITY / THIS PIECE" shows "Answer-ready (AEO)", "AI overview (AIO)" and "Cited by assistants (GEO)". Those are scores on a draft, not a live result from any engine. The free visibility test is one automated read of a single website page (a Gemini report plus a DataForSEO competitor lookup). It does not ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or any assistant anything.

How often should you look? Sunbots runs the questions weekly and the keyword snapshot monthly, so the snapshot is the number to compare month on month and quarter on quarter. A single answer can differ from one run to the next.

Nobody controls the assistants, so nobody can promise you a mention. Each answer is generated from whatever was retrieved, so two patients asking the same question an hour apart may be shown different clinics. The assistants can change their search partners and retrieval rules without notice, and they do not publish why a particular clinic was named.

What can be promised is the work: one consistent entity, facts in full sentences, markup that matches the page, reviews answered within the ethics code, and a record of what the assistants said. If the mentions move, the snapshot shows it. If not, you still have a website and a Google listing that serve patients better. LLM optimization for healthcare is a by-product of that work, not a product anyone can guarantee.

Two phrases to walk away from in a sales call: "we get you into ChatGPT" and any AI share-of-voice promise. See also why we don't promise rankings.

Frequently asked questions

Can ChatGPT recommend my clinic?

It can name your clinic if it retrieves and understands pages about you, but nobody can make it do so. Each answer is assembled from what it retrieves at the time. Your levers are a consistent name, address and phone number, clear service and FAQ pages, schema markup and a complete Google Business Profile. Check the clause text of your council's code, or the DCI code for dentists, before you publish a page. See can ChatGPT recommend a clinic.

Is GEO different from SEO?

Mostly in emphasis. Search engine optimization aims to rank a page in a list; generative engine optimization aims to have a page retrieved and quoted inside a written answer. The work overlaps heavily: consistent entity data, plain pages, markup, reviews and third-party mentions. GEO adds the habit of writing in quotable full sentences and checking what the assistants say. We treat it as a lens on local SEO, not a second budget.

Does Sunbots check Google AI Overviews?

No. Every Monday Sunbots asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude your active questions, for the engines that are configured. On the 2nd of each month it runs a separate snapshot across your tracked keywords. Google AI Overviews are not part of either.

Does llms.txt guarantee anything?

No. llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of your website that summarises the site and links to its key pages. Sunbots publishes one at /llms.txt. We know of no AI company that guarantees it reads the file, so file it under optional hygiene, after your service pages, FAQ page and markup. The pages it points to, written in full sentences, do the real work.

How long before AI mentions change?

There is no fixed date and no published schedule. The monthly snapshot is the number to compare, so judge movement across two or three snapshots rather than one. Fix the facts first (entity consistency, service pages, FAQs, markup), answer reviews within the ethics code, then watch the quarter. Anyone offering a timeline for a ChatGPT mention is guessing.

Related guides

• What is GEO (generative engine optimization)?
• How to get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity
• Healthcare marketing in India: the 2026 guide
• How Sunbots works

Next step: Run the free visibility test on your clinic's homepage to see what one automated read of the page finds.

This explains the rules as published on 1 October 2026. It is not legal advice. Confirm with your state council and a lawyer before you publish.