Does your dental practice show up in ChatGPT? The ten-minute method to check

A patient looking for an implant no longer just types into Google. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity, and get a written answer, with two or three practices and sources. According to Arcom and Médiamétrie (April 2026), 56.6% of French people already use artificial intelligence, including to find a dentist.

Our guide How ChatGPT chooses the dentist it recommends explains what happens between the question and the answer. This article takes the next step: the method to measure for yourself whether your practice is part of the answers, in ten minutes, with a sheet of paper and no paid tool.

The method has five steps:

1. Ask three AI tools the five questions a patient would ask.
2. Note whether your practice is named, which source is cited and what the AI says about you.
3. Calculate your presence as a percentage.
4. Go through the four reasons you might be missing.
5. Run the test again every month, with the same questions.

Before you start: a private window and a sheet of paper

Open a private browsing window, without signing in to any account when the tool allows it. An AI you are signed in to remembers your conversations and knows you are a dentist. You would see an answer made for you, not the one a stranger gets. If a tool requires an account, use one that has never been used for the practice.

Then open three tabs: ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Each one searches in its own way.

Finally, prepare a sheet: three columns, one per tool, five rows, one per question, and the date at the top, which you will need next month.

Step 1: ask a patient's five questions

A patient does not type your name, because they do not know you yet. They describe their need, their town, sometimes their neighborhood. Your questions should do the same. Replace [city] with your town and [neighborhood] with your neighborhood or a nearby metro station.

• "Which dentist for an implant in [city]?"
• "Dentist [neighborhood] who places implants"
• "How much does an implant cost at a dentist in [city]?"
• "Dentist [city] reviews"
• "Which practice for veneers in [city]?"

Type each question exactly as written, in all three tools, without rewording it. Using the same sentence everywhere lets you compare the answers with each other, then from one month to the next. Never ask "Is the So-and-so practice reliable?": no patient does that.

If you do not place veneers, replace the last question with a treatment you do provide. Always keep five questions, and keep the same ones afterward.

Step 2: note what each answer says about you

For each of the fifteen answers, note three things.

First, is your practice named? The name of the practice and the name of a dentist count the same way.

Next, which source does the AI cite for you? Your website, your Google Business Profile, Doctolib (France's leading online booking platform), a directory, or nothing. If it is Doctolib and never your website, you already have a lead, covered in detail in our guide Doctolib outranks my website.

Finally, what does the AI say about you? Which treatments, which address, which dentists, which fees. An old address, a dentist who has left, a treatment you no longer provide: each error comes from a page the AI read somewhere, and shows you where to make a correction.

Here is the grid for a fictional practice, the Parc dental practice in Nantes:

Step 3: calculate your presence, never your "position"

Count the answers in which your practice is named, and divide by the number of questions asked, across all tools. The fictional Parc practice appears in three answers out of fifteen: its presence is 20%.

An AI does not rank dentists: it writes an answer, cites two or three practices, and the order changes from one time to the next. Talking about "first place in ChatGPT" makes no sense. Presence in AI search is measured as a percentage of answers, never as a position.

Ask the same question twice in a row: you will often get two different answers. That is normal, the AI runs a new search each time, and a single answer proves nothing. So the measurement is done over several questions and, ideally, over several days: ask the fifteen questions again two or three days later, and keep the average of the two rounds.

Also note how many times the cited source is your own website: the goal of AI search optimization is for your website to become the source, not Doctolib.

Step 4: go through the four reasons you might be missing

Check these four causes in order.

The crawler cannot read your website

An AI can only cite what it has been able to read, and three settings make a website unreadable to it. JavaScript first, a language that displays content after the page loads: the crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity do not read it, and a website that displays its text through scripts is invisible to them. Then Cloudflare, a protection service that has blocked AI crawlers by default since July 2025. And finally the robots.txt file, the small file that tells crawlers what they may read. Type your website address followed by /robots.txt and look for the line "Disallow: /": it blocks the crawler named just above it. The crawler that matters for ChatGPT is called OAI-SearchBot, not GPTBot, as OpenAI's page on its crawlers explains.

The website does not clearly state your treatments and your town

AI reads text. "A team that listens to you" teaches it nothing. It needs sentences that say which treatment, in which town, in which neighborhood. A general home page is not enough: you need one page per treatment, with the town in the first few lines, how the treatment goes and the fees. That is the heart of a dental practice website built to be read, by a patient as well as by a machine.

Your information differs from one place to another

AI cross-checks your website, your Google Business Profile, Doctolib and the directories. A name that changes, an address or phone number that differs, a treatment listed here and missing there: it loses confidence and prefers a cleaner practice. Compare, line by line, what each source says. The Google Business Profile is the first place to align, because AI tools cite it very often.

No one mentions your practice anywhere else

An AI is wary of a practice that only its own website talks about. It looks for traces elsewhere: the directory of the French Dental Council (Ordre national des chirurgiens-dentistes), reputable health directories, Doctolib, your Google Business Profile. If these pages are missing or do not mention your treatments, the AI only has your word. Check that each one exists and says the same thing as your website.

Step 5: run the test again every month

A single test is a snapshot, the series shows the trend. Ask the fifteen questions again every month, under the same conditions: private window, same tools, same sentences. Note the date, the percentage and the cited source. And give the work time. The article on how long dental SEO takes explains what moves fast and what takes months.

Do not draw conclusions from a single gap: a rise or a drop from one month to the next can be down to chance. Only a trend confirmed over two or three measurements means something. Two signals matter more than the raw percentage: the cited source shifts from Doctolib to your website, and the errors about your address or treatments disappear.

Since July 22, 2026, Google has shown AI Overviews and AI Mode in France. So add a fourth column to your grid: type the same five questions into Google and note whether the AI Overview cites you. Google states on its help page on AI features that no special setting is required: it is the same work as classic SEO. Our guide on Google AI Overviews explains what shows up there.

The free DeveloppIA test runs the same measurement automatically, for your town and your treatments, and shows the AI answers word for word. Once you have the number, the real question becomes: which of the four reasons applies to you, and where to start.

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