How patients find doctors through ChatGPT and Google's AI answers

A patient with a sore knee used to search "knee doctor near me" and scroll through a page of links. More often now, they ask a question in full sentences: "Who treats knee arthritis without surgery in Naples?" The answer comes back as a short paragraph naming a few practices, from ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot, or Claude.

If your practice isn't in that paragraph, the patient may never see your website at all. The good news is that the answers aren't random. They are assembled from information your practice can check and improve.

Where the answers come from

AI assistants don't know your practice from memory. When someone asks a local, specific question, the assistant searches the web and reads what it finds. Broadly, it draws on three kinds of sources:

• Your own website. Service pages, provider bios, location pages, and any structured data (code that labels facts like your address and hours for machines).
• Listings and directories. Your Google Business Profile, Healthgrades, Doximity, Zocdoc, Vitals, WebMD, insurance directories, and the national NPI registry.
• Other mentions. Local news, hospital and university pages, professional associations, and reviews.

The assistant then looks for agreement. When your website, your Google listing, and Healthgrades all say the same thing about who you are, what you treat, and where you are, the assistant can state those facts with confidence. When they disagree (an old address, a provider who left two years ago, a specialty worded three different ways), the safer move for the assistant is to leave you out.

Why your website may be invisible to them

Two problems come up again and again on practice websites.

The assistant isn't allowed in. A file called robots.txt tells automated readers which parts of a site they may visit. Some sites block AI crawlers there, often by accident through a template or plugin. Some hosting and security services, Cloudflare in particular, can also block AI crawlers before they reach your site at all. We cover both in Is your website blocking AI assistants?

The facts aren't written down. Many practice sites are built for people scrolling on a phone: big photos, short slogans, a phone number. That works for visitors, but an assistant needs plain sentences. If your site never states in text that you treat rotator cuff tears, accept Medicare, and see patients on Saturdays, an assistant can't repeat it. Text inside images, PDFs, and pop-ups is often missed too.

Five things to check this week

1. Ask the assistants yourself. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google the questions your patients ask: the condition, the treatment, and your town. Note who gets named and what gets said about you. Repeat this monthly, since answers change.
2. Make your Google Business Profile match your website. Same practice name, address, phone, hours, and categories. This is the listing many assistants lean on most for local questions.
3. Write your conditions and treatments down in plain words. One clear page or section per major condition and treatment, in the words patients use ("knee arthritis", not only "osteoarthritis of the knee").
4. Give every provider a real bio page. Full name, credentials, specialty, board certification, training, and the locations they work at. Use the same name format everywhere.
5. Add structured data. A short block of code on your homepage and provider pages that labels your practice, providers, locations, hours, and common questions in a format search engines read directly. It has to match what visitors can see on the page.

Keep it accurate as things change

The hard part isn't writing these facts once. It's keeping them the same everywhere as providers join, hours change, and locations open. A single source of truth for your practice details (one place where the current, approved version lives) makes every listing and page easier to keep in step.

That is what AdLivo's AI Visibility page is for. It reads your website, checks whether AI assistants can access it, suggests the practice facts it finds with the page each one came from, and turns your approved profile into the structured data and plain-text files your web person can add to your site.