Help patients find and trust your practice.

Engines are most careful about who they quote on health topics. Speak Local checks the signals they look for, from clinician bylines to accepted insurance, and asks the assistants which practice they’d recommend.

Free, in under a minute, no email or card. It grades up to 25 pages across Local, SEO, AEO and GEO.

The short answer

How does a medical or dental practice get recommended by AI assistants and Google?

By showing who stands behind the advice and keeping the practical details exact. Each clinician needs a real page with credentials; each condition, service or treatment you offer needs a plain-language page reviewed by a clinician; and your locations, hours, accepted insurance and whether you’re taking new patients need to agree everywhere they appear. Mark the practice up as a MedicalClinic, Physician or Dentist, and reply to reviews without confirming that anyone is a patient.

Updated 12 October 2026

What do patients ask before they choose a practice?

Patients ask where to go, who takes their plan and whether they can be seen soon. These six are worth tracking:

  • Dentist near me accepting new patients
  • Urgent care open now near me
  • Which dentists in your city take an insurer?
  • Best physical therapist for back pain in your city
  • How much do dental implants cost in your city?
  • Do I need a referral to see a dermatologist?

These are examples to adapt. Put the ones that bring you business to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini on a weekly or monthly round, and each answer is recorded as 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 medical or dental practice?

Google’s quality guidelines hold health pages to their highest standard of trust, and assistants are cautious in the same places.

A named, qualified author

A byline, a “medically reviewed by” line naming a real clinician, and a bio with credentials. That is how a health page shows the experience and expertise engines look for before they quote it.

Practical details written out

Insurance plans, new-patient availability, evening and 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.

A page per condition, service and treatment

“Knee pain”, “ACL rehab” and “dental implants” are what patients type and ask. A page for each, in plain words, with who it suits, what a visit involves and what affects the cost, gives an assistant something specific and safe to cite.

Reviews without patient details

Reply to every review, and never confirm the reviewer is a patient. A reply like “sorry your crown came loose” does exactly that, and HHS has fined practices for disclosing patient information in review replies.

Which schema should a medical or dental practice use?

The most specific type: Dentist, MedicalClinic, Physician, or a specialty such as Physiotherapy, Dermatology or Pediatric. Dentist, MedicalClinic and Physician are also schema.org medical organizations, which gives them isAcceptingNewPatients and medicalSpecialty; Physician even takes a usNPI.

Speak Local’s scanner reads all of these as entity schema on your homepage.

Worth adding
  • isAcceptingNewPatients, kept current
  • medicalSpecialty for what you treat
  • parentOrganization from each location to the practice
  • Person for each clinician, linked from their bio page

Check it with Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator before it goes live.

MedicalClinic · one locationJSON-LD · example values

  "@context": "https://schema.org"
  "@type": "MedicalClinic"
  "@id": "https://www.example.com/locations/your-city/#clinic"
  "name": "Example Health Your City"
  "url": "https://www.example.com/locations/your-city/"
  "telephone": "+1-555-0100"
  "address": 
    "@type": "PostalAddress"
    "streetAddress": "100 Example Street"
    "addressLocality": "Your City"
    "addressRegion": "ST"
    "postalCode": "00000"
    "addressCountry": "US"
  
  "medicalSpecialty": "PrimaryCare" "Pediatric"
  "isAcceptingNewPatients": true
  "parentOrganization": 
    "@id": "https://www.example.com/#organization"
  
  "employee": 
    
      "@type": "Person"
      "name": "Test Physician"
      "jobTitle": "Family physician"
      "honorificSuffix": "MD"

Where should a medical or dental practice start?

Work through these in order. None of them needs a new website.

  1. Put the practical details on the page

    Insurance plans by name, whether you’re taking new patients, evening and Saturday hours. Put the same facts on your Business Profile.

  2. Name a clinical reviewer on every health page

    A real clinician, with a link to their bio and the date they last reviewed the page.

  3. Give every provider a real page

    Credentials, specialties, locations, languages, and Person schema.

  4. 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.

  5. Let AI crawlers in

    Security tools can block GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot by default. Your scan fetches your site as each of them and reports what came back.

How does Speak Local help a medical or dental practice?

Every plan includes all of it. See the full platform for how the pillars combine into one score.

People on the site: whether your pages show a real byline or Person schema, because engines trust a practice with visible people behind it
AI answers: patients’ questions put to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, with the sites each answer cited, so you see when a directory is getting the credit
Every location: each with its own market, Google listing, reviews, rankings and map grid
Reviews across locations: every Google review in one inbox, filtered by location, replied to from here, with a notification when one lands
Crawler and rendering checks: your site fetched as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, and how many words each page serves before any script runs
Schema checks: Dentist, MedicalClinic, Physician and the other medical types, plus FAQPage and Person

What it looks like for a medical or dental practice

Six screens from the workspace of an example dental practice, as they look in the app. Choose one to see it.

Overview Every tool for one business on one screen: the audit score, traffic, rankings, backlinks and AI answers, each with its trend.
The Overview screen in Speak Local, for an example dental practice
Site Audit 32 checks across Local, SEO, AEO and GEO. Issues are sorted worst first, and each one shows how many points its fix adds to your score.
The Site Audit screen in Speak Local, for an example dental practice
AI Answers Your customers’ questions put to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Every answer is kept word for word, with who was named and which pages were cited.
The AI Answers screen in Speak Local, for an example dental practice
Rankings The searches you choose to watch, with your position, the page that ranks and the last 30 days of movement.
The Rankings screen in Speak Local, for an example dental practice
Map grid One search checked from up to 49 points around the business, so you can see where you rank across town and not only at your own address.
The Map grid screen in Speak Local, for an example dental practice
Analytics Visits by source, with AI assistants counted on their own line, and the calls and form fills those visits turn into.
The Analytics screen in Speak Local, for an example dental practice

An example workspace for a fictional dental practice. The site audit and the competitors’ scores are real scans of test sites; the rankings, answers and traffic are sample data. Swipe the screen to see all of it.

Common questions

Can we reply to negative reviews without violating HIPAA?
Yes, if the reply doesn’t confirm the reviewer is a patient or say anything about their care. Thank them, say you take feedback seriously, and invite them to call the office. Even “we’re sorry about your visit” confirms a patient relationship. This is general information, not legal advice; check replies against your own compliance guidance.
What does E-E-A-T mean for a medical or dental practice?
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust: what Google’s quality raters look for, held to the highest standard on health pages. For a practice it means visible clinicians with credentials, content they’ve reviewed, accurate contact details, and nothing that overpromises.
Does each dentist or physician need their own Google Business Profile?
Public-facing practitioners who can be reached at the practice may have one alongside the practice’s own. Support staff don’t qualify, and Google advises against one profile per specialty. A solo practitioner working under the practice’s brand is better served by one shared profile, named in the form “Practice name: Practitioner name”.
Do we still need FAQ schema?
Use it where a page shows real questions and answers. Since 2023 Google shows FAQ rich results only for well-known, authoritative government and health sites, so most practices won’t get the expanded result, but the markup still tells engines which text is a question and which is its answer.
Can urgent care centers, chiropractors and med spas use this?
Yes. Anything with a website and patients who find it by place goes through the same audit, rankings, reviews and AI answers. Chiropractic has no schema.org business type of its own, so use MedicalBusiness, or MedicalClinic if you run a clinic.
Does Speak Local touch patient data?
No. The audit, rankings and AI answers read your public website and public listings, and reviews come from your Google Business Profile once you connect it. Speak Local doesn’t connect to your EHR, practice-management, booking or billing systems.

Other industries

Keep reading

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