AI visibility is whether AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot name your practice when someone asks them for one, and whether what they say about you is true. It has two halves: being named, and being described correctly. A mention that quotes your old address or an insurance plan you dropped is worse than none.
You can audit it yourself in about an hour, with a spreadsheet and no paid tools. This guide shows how.
Leak 1 of 7: not being found. An AI answer that leaves you out, or describes you wrongly, is the first of the seven leaks between a first search and a returning patient.
Why an AI visibility score is only a sample
AI visibility tools give you a score or a share-of-voice figure. They work by asking a set of questions and counting how often you appear. That's useful, with one catch: the score describes the questions somebody chose, asked at a certain time.
Answers change with how a question is worded, where the person is, what the assistant remembers about them, and sometimes just from one run to the next. So treat any score as a sample. It's most useful as a trend: the same questions, asked the same way, every month.
The audit below does the same job by hand, with questions you choose because your patients actually ask them.
Before you start
- Pick the assistants. ChatGPT, Google (AI Overviews on a normal search, plus AI Mode), Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot.
- Start clean. Use a new chat, logged out where you can, or with memory and personalization turned off. Otherwise the assistant may answer from what it knows about you.
- Put the place in the question. Name your city or neighborhood, rather than relying on the assistant to know where you are.
- Open a spreadsheet with the columns in step 2.
Step 1: Write ten questions your patients actually ask
Use the words patients use, not your clinical vocabulary. Mix these five kinds:
| Kind of question | Example |
|---|---|
| Specialty and place | Private-pay therapist in Austin for anxiety |
| A specific service | Where can I get Spravato treatment near Denver? |
| Cost | How much does a concierge doctor cost in Scottsdale? |
| Comparison | Best functional medicine doctor in Nashville |
| Your own name | What does [your practice] charge, and does it take insurance? |
Your front desk knows the real questions. Ask them what people say on the phone before they book. Keep every question general; never type anything about a real patient into an assistant.
Step 2: Ask each question twice, and write it down
Ask every question in every assistant, twice, and record each answer on its own row:
| Column | What to record |
|---|---|
| Assistant | ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot |
| Question | Exactly as you typed it |
| Named? | Yes or no, and where in the answer |
| What it said | The sentence about you, copied word for word |
| Who else was named | The other practices in the answer |
| Sources cited | The pages linked as sources, if shown |
| Errors | Anything wrong: fee, address, insurance, services, clinicians |
Ten questions, six assistant views, two runs: about 120 rows, and most of an hour. The "who else was named" column matters. It tells you who the assistants think your competitors are, which is not always who you'd guess.
Step 3: Trace every error to its source
You can't edit an AI answer. You can fix what it read. For each error, look at the sources cited, or search for the wrong fact yourself. It usually comes from an old directory listing, a page on your site nobody updated, or a profile for a clinician who left.
Correct it there, then ask the question again next month. When the assistant searches the web to answer, a fix can show up once the page is crawled again. Answers drawn from training data take longer.
Step 4: Check the foundations
- Crawler access. Your robots.txt doesn't block OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot or Bingbot. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers (OpenAI).
- Facts in text. Your fee, insurance status, services and location are in the page's text, not only in images, PDFs or a booking widget.
- One story everywhere. Name, address, phone, hours, services and insurance match across your site, Google Business Profile and directories.
- Reviews. Recent, and asked for within your board's rules.
Our guide to showing up in ChatGPT covers each of these in detail.
Step 5: Read the free platform reports
Two search engines now report on their AI answers for free:
- Google Search Console added generative AI performance reports in June 2026, showing your impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report showing how often Copilot and Bing's AI summaries cite your pages, which pages, and the queries behind them.
For the other assistants, your spreadsheet is the record.
Step 6: Repeat monthly, and connect it to bookings
Keep the same ten questions and ask them the same way each month, so the changes you see are real. Add a new question only when patients start asking something new.
Visibility isn't the goal; booked appointments are. Add "an AI assistant, like ChatGPT" as an option wherever you ask new patients how they found you, and count it alongside Google, referrals and directories. That field should only ever ask about the source, never about health.
What a good result looks like
There's no position one in an AI answer. A good audit shows your practice named for the specialty-and-place questions in at least some of the assistants, described accurately every time it's named, and backed by sources you'd be happy for a patient to read: your own site and profiles that are up to date.
Fill The Lobby runs this audit every month for practices, fixes what it finds at the source, and reports it next to booked appointments. That's our AI visibility service. If you're weighing how much AI search matters yet, start with what the research says about ChatGPT and Google.
Sources
- OpenAI — Overview of OpenAI crawlers, checked 24 September 2026
- Google Search Central — AI features and your website (updated 10 December 2025), checked 24 September 2026
- Google Search Central Blog — Generative AI performance reports in Search Console (June 2026), checked 24 September 2026
- Bing Webmaster Blog — AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (10 February 2026), checked 24 September 2026