Be the practice the answer recommends.
Ask an assistant for a dentist nearby who’s taking new patients, and it answers from whatever it can read about the practices around you. Speak Local shows what it reads, and whether it names yours.
Free. Up to 25 pages graded across Local, SEO, AEO and GEO, usually in under a minute. No email, no card.
How does a dental practice get recommended in Google and AI answers?
By making the practical details easy to find and identical everywhere: insurance accepted, whether you’re taking new patients, hours, location. Give each treatment a page that answers patients’ real questions, ask every patient for a review, and reply without confirming that anyone is a patient. Mark the practice up as a Dentist, with each dentist as a Person.
Updated 9 October 2026
What do patients ask before they book?
The things they’d ask the front desk. Six worth tracking:
- Dentist near me accepting new patients
- Which dentists in your city take an insurer?
- Emergency dentist open Saturday in your city
- How much do dental implants cost in your city?
- Best pediatric dentist in your area
- Are clear aligners worth it for adults?
Examples to adapt, not data. Put the ones that bring you business to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini on a weekly or monthly round, and each answer is recorded: named, cited or absent, with whoever was named in your place. How AI answers are tracked
What do Google and AI assistants weigh for a dental practice?
Health is a category engines handle carefully. They lean on details they can verify and clinicians they can name.
The practical details, in words
Insurance plans, new-patient availability, Saturday hours, parking, languages spoken. Patients ask about them in plain words, and an assistant can only repeat what a page states. A strip of insurer logos in an image says nothing to a crawler.
Treatment pages that answer
Implants, aligners, crowns, whitening. Lead each page with what the treatment is, who it suits, what affects the cost and how many visits it takes. Then the detail.
Reviews, answered safely
Replying matters. But a reply like “sorry your crown came loose” confirms the reviewer is a patient, and HHS has fined practices for disclosing patient information in review replies. Thank them, invite them to call, and keep the details offline.
Dentists as people
Each dentist’s credentials, schooling and focus on a real page, with Person schema linking them to the practice. Health content is held to a higher bar of trust, and a named, qualified author is how a page meets it.
Which schema should a dental practice use?
Dentist, which schema.org defines as both a medical business and a medical organization. That gives you two properties most practices miss: isAcceptingNewPatients and medicalSpecialty.
Speak Local’s scanner reads Dentist as entity schema on your homepage, along with every other schema.org LocalBusiness type.
isAcceptingNewPatients, kept currentopeningHoursSpecificationwith your real Saturday hoursemployeeor a linkedPersonfor each dentist- Insurance plans in the page’s text, where patients and crawlers can both read them
Check it with Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator before it goes live.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Dentist",
"@id": "https://www.example.com/#practice",
"name": "Example Family Dental",
"url": "https://www.example.com/",
"telephone": "+1-555-0100",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "100 Example Street",
"addressLocality": "Your City",
"addressRegion": "ST",
"postalCode": "00000",
"addressCountry": "US"
},
"isAcceptingNewPatients": true,
"medicalSpecialty": "Dentistry",
"openingHoursSpecification": [
{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday"],
"opens": "08:00",
"closes": "17:00"
},
{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": "Saturday",
"opens": "09:00",
"closes": "13:00"
}
],
"employee": [
{
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Test Dentist",
"jobTitle": "Dentist",
"honorificSuffix": "DDS"
}
]
}Where should a dental practice start?
In this order. None of it needs a new website.
-
Put the practical details on the page
Insurance plans by name, whether you’re taking new patients, Saturday or evening hours. The same facts on your Business Profile.
-
Write one reply you can use for every review
Thank the reviewer, say you take feedback seriously, invite them to call the office. Never mention a visit, a treatment or that they’re a patient.
-
Give each treatment you want booked its own page
Start with the highest-value ones, written answer-first.
-
A bio and Person schema for every dentist
Credentials, schooling, focus and a photo.
-
Check what loads without JavaScript
Some site builders put the whole page in scripts, and crawlers that don’t run them, AI ones included, see an empty page. Your scan reports how many words each page serves before any script runs.
How does Speak Local help a dental practice?
Every plan includes all of it. See the full platform for how the pillars combine into one score.
Asked and answered.
Can we reply to negative reviews without violating HIPAA?
Should we ask every patient for a review?
Does each dentist need their own Google Business Profile?
Do we still need FAQ schema?
What does Speak Local see of our patients?
See where a dental practice like yours stands.
Audit, score, fix and monitor how you show up in Google and in AI answers.