Patients now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews which doctor to see. We make your website, schema, Google Business Profile and reviews easy for these tools to read and trust, so your practice is the one they name.
Who's a good plastic surgeon near me for a tummy tuck? I'm in Phoenix.
Your Practice is a strong option. Its board-certified surgeon has a detailed tummy tuck page covering candidates, recovery and financing 1, and recent Google reviews mention the doctor by name 2. The practice is also listed on Healthgrades 3. You can book a consultation on its website.
Each source is something we build or keep accurate for you.
AI search optimization makes your practice easy for AI tools to read, trust and quote. When a patient asks which doctor to see, your name is in the answer, with a link to your own page.
Patients ask these tools longer questions than they type into Google: the treatment, the city, their insurance, whether the doctor is board-certified, how long recovery takes. The practice whose own pages answer those details is the practice the tool can name. The rest of this guide shows how the engines choose, what we change, and how we measure it.
No AI tool picks a doctor at random. It reads five kinds of sources about your practice and names the one whose facts are clear and agree with each other. Select a source to see what the AI looks for.
The page that answers the patient's question is the page an AI tool cites. When the answer is buried under a slogan, the tool cites a directory instead.
Schema is code inside the page that states facts as facts: this is a medical clinic, this is the doctor, these are the hours, these are the questions this page answers.
Google's AI Overviews, AI Mode and Maps lean on your Business Profile first, and other assistants read it through the search results.
AI answers often summarize what patients say ("reviewers mention short wait times and Dr. Lee's bedside manner"). The words in your reviews become the words in the answer.
Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Yelp, WebMD, insurer directories and board listings confirm that the practice and the doctor are real, and that the details match.
For "near me" and "best doctor for" questions, ChatGPT runs a web search, reads a handful of pages and lists them as sources. It reads through its own crawlers (OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User), so a site that blocks them is left out.
Both are built on Google's index and Business Profile data. The practices they name usually rank in regular search and the map pack already, which is why this work starts with SEO and your Google profile.
Searches the live web for every question and numbers each source it uses. It favours pages that answer the question in the first lines, and practices whose website and directory profiles agree.
Seven pieces of work, done by the same team that runs your SEO, website and Google profile.
Contact UsEvery treatment, condition and location gets its own page that answers the patient's question in the first lines: what it is, who it suits, recovery, cost or financing and the doctor who performs it. Then come FAQs written the way patients ask them. Copy is written from a live search of what ranks for that treatment, not from a template.
Your own before-and-after photos and videos go on the page, because AI tools and patients both trust proof over adjectives.
On sites running our WordPress plugin, we build your practice schema from your real details: Physician or MedicalClinic (one node per location for groups), your doctors, address, hours, specialty, social profiles and your real Google rating. Each page then gets its own Service markup, plus FAQPage markup when it carries real questions.
No invented star ratings, ever. A fake rating is the fastest way to lose an engine's trust.
llms.txt is a plain-text map of your site written for AI tools: your practice, your specialty and every important page with a one-line summary. Ours is rebuilt from your live pages every day, leaves out pages you removed, and is served at yoursite.com/llms.txt.
Many practice websites block AI crawlers without anyone knowing, through a robots.txt rule or a firewall's "block AI bots" switch. We keep robots.txt open to GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and others, and turn off AI-bot blocking on domains in our Cloudflare.
The robots.txt the public actually receives is checked every three hours, so a plugin update cannot quietly lock the AI out.
We manage your Google Business Profile, publish its posts and sync the hours and address it holds into your website and schema. Every week we check for duplicate listings that share your phone number or website. One set of facts everywhere is what lets an AI tool trust them.
When a visit is marked complete in your EMR or our CRM, the patient gets a review request. It is one ask per patient, follow-ups only if you want them, and each request is tracked from sent to clicked to reviewed. Reviews that name the treatment and the doctor are the ones AI answers quote.
AI tools cite the page that states a fact most clearly. We give every doctor, location and treatment its own URL, link them to each other, and put each doctor's credentials on their page. The source cited is then your site, not a directory that also lists your competitors.
The same tummy tuck page, before and after. Switch between them to see what changes for an AI tool reading it.
Tummy Tuck in Phoenix, AZ
Your Practice · Board-certified plastic surgery
A tummy tuck (abdominoplasty) removes loose skin and fat from the lower abdomen and tightens the stomach muscles. It suits adults at a stable weight, often after pregnancy or major weight loss.
<schema> Service · FAQPage · Physician · MedicalClinic
AI answers change from one person to the next and from one run to the next, and no AI tool publishes a ranking. So we do not sell an "AI rank". We measure what decides whether you can be named, and the patients who arrive from AI tools.
You can test it yourself too. Write down the ten questions your patients ask most, ask each one in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and note who gets named and which pages are cited. Repeat it every month: the sources cited show you which page to improve next.
Every engine on this page reads what good SEO already builds: clear pages, accurate facts and real reviews. That is why AI search optimization is part of our SEO for medical practices and runs alongside your Google Business Profile, reviews and website. When an AI answer sends a patient who calls at 9 pm, our AI front desk answers and can book the visit straight into your EMR.
Five-star Google reviews
Best investment in my cosmetic surgery practice. Roy runs google ads, SEO, and website design for us and has been a phenomenal return on investment.
We are a large ENT practice on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and partnered with Pilot Practice in September of 2025. Laura has been exceptional with our website build and marketing, and has extensive knowledge in her field. We are extremely pleased with the instant results we have seen after deploying Pilot Practice.
The team is incredible! Skyrocketed our surgeries and designed the most beautiful websites for us.
It is the work of making your practice easy for AI tools to read, trust and quote. When a patient asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews which doctor to see, those tools name practices whose websites, listings and reviews answer the question clearly and agree with each other.
Answer engine optimization (AEO) aims to get your page used as the answer to a direct question. Generative engine optimization (GEO) aims to get your practice named and cited when an AI writes a longer recommendation. In practice the work overlaps almost completely, and we do both.
For local health questions ChatGPT searches the web, reads a few pages and summarizes them. It tends to name practices whose pages answer the exact question, whose details match across the website, Google and directories, and whose reviews are recent and specific. It cannot recommend what its crawlers are blocked from reading.
Open your site to AI crawlers, give every treatment its own answer-ready page, add accurate schema, keep your Google Business Profile and listings consistent, and keep new reviews coming in. Those are the seven steps on this page, and they are the ones we run for our clients.
No. Google's AI Overviews are built from pages that already rank, and ChatGPT and Perplexity read search results too. Strong SEO is the base, and AI search optimization builds on it.
llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of your site that lists your practice, your specialty and your key pages with short summaries, so AI tools find the right page quickly. It does not replace good pages, but it costs nothing, and we generate it every day for each site running our plugin.
Schema helps search engines read facts without guessing: who the doctor is, where the clinic is, what the page covers and which questions it answers. AI Overviews draw on Google's regular index, so accurate schema helps the facts in that index be right. We add it to every page.
Yes. AI answers often summarize what reviews say, and they lean toward practices with recent, detailed reviews that name the treatment and the doctor. Our review requests go out after completed visits, so new reviews keep coming in.
Crawl access, llms.txt and schema are live within days. The engines then need to read your pages again, and answers shift as new pages and reviews build up, so plan in months rather than weeks, as with SEO.
No one can guarantee that, and you should be careful with anyone who does. What we can do is give AI tools accurate, detailed information about your practice, keep it open to their crawlers, and show you the patients who arrive from AI assistants.
Leads from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot appear on their own line in your monthly report, next to Search Console clicks, booked appointments and review counts. Crawler access, llms.txt and schema are checked automatically. We do not report an "AI rank", because AI tools do not have a stable one.
Yes. The work uses public information about your practice: pages, schema, listings and reviews. No patient data is sent to any AI tool, and review requests go out through our HIPAA-compliant platform.
Usually not. Most of the work happens on your existing pages, schema and listings. If your site blocks crawlers, hides its text in images or cannot run our plugin, we fix that first, or rebuild it with our website design team.
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