The short version
Patients increasingly ask ChatGPT or Google's AI which dentist to see. In a 2026 survey of about 1,000 U.S. patients, 47% said they had used AI to find a new provider, up from 31% nine months earlier (rater8). The common advice is that AI ignores your website. For dentistry, that advice is mostly wrong.
On "best dentist in [city]," ChatGPT cited a practice's own website in 1 of 63 runs. Review directories and "Top Dentists" lists own that question. Once the question names a procedure, your service pages win: 90% of runs for "dental implants in [city]" and 100% for a full-arch query. No advertiser appeared inside any of the 546 answers.
Who wins each kind of question
Three of the five are decided on pages you control. The other two are decided by things you also control, just not on your website.
Emergency searches are the biggest open opportunity
"Emergency dentist for a cracked tooth in [city]" cited a practice's own website in 63 of 63 national runs, and not one directory. The emergency lead-generation sites that crowd paid search for this query didn't appear at all.
To answer, the model needs your hours, your walk-in policy and whether someone can be seen today. Only practice websites publish that. If you take emergency patients and don't have a page that says so, with hours and what to do for a cracked or knocked-out tooth, you are missing the easiest citation in dentistry.
Insurance searches go to the carrier
"Dentist that takes Delta Dental in [city]" cited a practice website in 0 of 63 national runs. Delta Dental's own find-a-dentist tool appeared in 62 of them. This is an operations job: be in the networks you list, and keep each carrier's record of your address, phone and new-patient status current.
Reviews decide the "best dentist" question
Your website can't win the generic question. Reviews and directory records do. Healthgrades, WebMD Care, hosted review pages and city magazine "Top Dentists" features led the citations. ChatGPT still named practices in 62 of 63 generic answers, but 28 different practices took the top spot across those runs. Being named there is close to a coin flip.
The word "best" matters even on specific questions. In a controlled test, adding it cut practice-site citations for implants from 95% to 62%. Write headings that describe the service, like "Dental implants in Stamford," and skip the superlatives.
Publish your prices, or someone else will
In several implant answers, ChatGPT built its cost estimate from the few local practices that publish price ranges, and quoted them by name. Every other practice in that market had no part in the number patients saw. The same goes for accepted plans, emergency hours and which procedures you do in-house.
Give every location and service its own page
The most-cited practice domain in the whole study was a national group that publishes a distinct page for each city and each service. A well-known full-arch brand was named in 174 answers but cited as the source in only 11. Brand recognition gets you mentioned. Specific pages get you cited.
What a dental practice should do
- 1Build a real emergency page with your hours, walk-in policy and after-hours instructions.
- 2Give each major procedure its own descriptive page.
- 3Publish price ranges and financing options.
- 4Keep carrier records current. Outside big metros, add a plain-text accepted-plans page.
- 5Earn reviews, and keep your Google Business Profile, Healthgrades and WebMD Care records accurate.
- 6Give every location its own page and details.
- 7Make sure AI search crawlers can reach your site, and measure across many runs rather than one.
How we ran the study
We queried ChatGPT with web search through the DataForSEO scraper in 9 national metros and 3 smaller towns. Five question types, seven runs each, plus a controlled test of the word "best": 546 answers with zero failures. We classified every cited source and checked lookalike aggregator sites by hand so they weren't counted as practice websites. Limits: one model, U.S. only, one sampling period, one insurance carrier and one emergency phrasing. Read the rates as strong signals rather than exact figures for every case.
Download the full study with sources (PDF)