How to Appear in AI Searches
For twenty years, being found meant ranking on Google. That's changing. Patients are increasingly putting the question to ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini or Claude, and acting on the shortlist that comes back. They ask things like:
"Who offers Invisalign in Bristol?"
"What does varicose vein treatment cost?"
"Which physiotherapist near me has the best reviews?"
It answers with a paragraph naming two or three providers. Not ten blue links. A shortlist.
If you're not on it, you lose the enquiry without ever knowing it existed. There's no missed click in your analytics and no dip in traffic to explain, because the patient never reached your website. They contact one of the practices that was named.
In this blog, we discuss nine key steps towards making the shortlist.
1) Check that AI can read your website
Before anything can recommend your practice, it has to be able to read it. Two things commonly get in the way, and neither is usually anyone's decision.
Crawlers are blocked. Your robots.txt file, or a security service such as Cloudflare, can turn AI crawlers away by name. This is often switched on by default, so it happens to practices who never chose it. GPTBot, Google-Extended and ClaudeBot all need access to your site.
There is nothing to read. If your text uses JavaScript and loads after the page opens, a crawler arrives at a blank shell and leaves. Server-side rendering solves this, so your words are there the moment the page opens.
Ask your developer to check both. Every step below depends on it.
2) Add schema markup
Schema markup is hidden code that states your facts plainly. Patients never see it. Each page gets its own. For example:
A home page carries your practice name, address and opening hours
A treatment page carries the treatment, what it involves and what it costs
A clinician's profile carries their name, role and registration
It matters because the rest of your website is written for humans, which leaves an AI system to infer what you offer from your wording. Schema removes the guesswork and hands over the facts directly.
A developer can usually add it across the site in an afternoon, making it a quick win.
3) Put the answer directly under the question
AI tools rarely summarise a whole page. They lift one short passage and quote it. That passage has to stand up alone, with none of the surrounding text there to explain it. So make the question your heading, worded the way a patient would ask it, and write the answer immediately underneath, before any of the detail.
What is Invisalign?
Invisalign uses a series of clear, removable aligners to straighten teeth gradually over 6 to 18 months, without traditional metal braces.
Then expand: how it works, who it suits, what to expect.
Pricing works the same way, except the answer has to contain an actual number.
How much does varicose vein treatment cost?
Varicose vein treatment at our clinic costs between £2,000 and £3,500 per leg, depending on the number of veins treated.
"Contact us for a quote" gives a chatbot nothing to repeat, so it names whoever did publish a figure. A realistic range with the reason it varies is more useful to a patient anyway.
Do the same for how long it takes, recovery, discomfort and results, and keep them all on the treatment page rather than a separate FAQ. Someone reading about Invisalign should find everything there, and so should anything quoting the page.
Lastly, name the treatment rather than calling it "it". "Invisalign takes 6 to 18 months" works wherever it is quoted, while "it takes 6 to 18 months" means nothing once the heading is gone.
4) Write pages for symptoms, not just treatments
That last step improves the pages you already have. This one is about the pages you haven’t got. Patients describe the problem long before they know the name of the fix. They search:
How do you straighten crooked teeth?
Why do my legs ache and feel heavy by the evening?
My knee hurts going downstairs
Those searches come months before anyone types Invisalign, endovenous ablation or ACL rehabilitation.
A website built only around treatments misses that entire first stage. Give each common symptom you treat its own page, written in the patient’s own words and linked to the treatment that resolves it. This is the biggest single gap we find on healthcare websites.
5) Put a name on every page
Medical content is held to a higher standard than most, because getting it wrong can affect someone's wellbeing or finances. Google calls this category YMYL, Your Money or Your Life, and the first thing it looks for is who is responsible for what you have written.
Every page should show:
The author's name
Their professional title
Their registration number, linked to their entry on the register: a GDC number for dentists, a GMC number for doctors, an HCPC number for physiotherapists
A review date you keep current
A link to their full profile on your site
Blogs need a named author as well. Pages with nobody’s name on them carry less weight, and that applies to the patients reading them just as much as to the tools quoting them.
6) Keep your practice details identical everywhere
Steps 3 to 5 were about your own website. The rest are about everywhere else you appear. Your practice name, address, phone number and opening hours should read exactly the same in every place they appear:
Your website
Your NHS profile
Your CQC listing
Healthcare directories such as Doctify, WhatClinic and any specific to your field
An old phone number in one place, or two versions of your name, makes a single practice look like several unrelated businesses. ChatGPT has no way of knowing that the clinic on your website, the one on Doctify and the one on your CQC record are you. It sees separate sets of details and has to work out whether they belong together.
You settle it by listing links to every one of those profiles on your About page. Most will let you link back to your website too, and you should, but the outward link from your own site is the one that groups them. This is the step most practices skip.
If you have more than one branch, keep the group-wide profiles on the About page. Each branch’s own Google Business Profile and directory listings belong on that branch’s location page, which is the next step.
7) Give each location its own page
Two branches or ten, nothing assumes they belong to one business unless you make it obvious.
Each location needs its own page and its own listings, showing the address, phone number and opening hours that belong to it, all under one brand name spelled identically every time.
Treatment and symptom pages can be shared across the group, but they need to link to the location pages, and each location page needs to list the treatments available there. So your Invisalign page links to Clifton and Bedminster, and both of those pages list Invisalign. That is what ties a treatment to a town, which is exactly what "who does this near me" is asking.
The same applies if one clinician works across several sites. Their profile should say which sites they work at, and each of those sites should list them, so the connection is stated rather than left to be worked out.
The usual mistake is branches listed under slightly different names. It splits one reputation into several, and a large group can end up losing out to a single independent practice down the road.
8) Build a reputation beyond your own website
What other websites say about you counts for more than what you say about yourself. Your own site is the one source guaranteed to be complimentary, so it carries the least weight. These count for more:
Doctify and WhatClinic
Your NHS profile
Professional bodies
Local news coverage
Patient forums and community threads
Reviews count too, provided they keep coming. A cluster from 2021 and nothing since suggests a practice that has stopped. A steady handful every month, across two or three platforms, builds a picture that holds up.
Keep your details identical across all of these, or you undo step 6. This is the slowest step here and the one that keeps compounding, so start it now rather than later.
9) Check where you stand, ten minutes a month
The only way to know what patients see is to look. You don't need a tool for this. Once a month, put your five most common enquiries into ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude:
"Who offers Invisalign in Bristol?"
"What does varicose vein treatment cost?"
"Which physiotherapist near me has the best reviews?"
Note three things:
Whether you are named. If you have more than one location, ask town by town.
Who is named instead. Your competitors’ answers tell you what got them there. Look at the page being quoted. If it is a treatment page with a price on it and yours says "call for a quote", you have your answer.
Which websites get cited. This is the most useful part, and it is steadier than the names. Open each source and check what it says about you. If the price or the phone number is wrong, you have found the page to fix. If it is accurate, you have found a page worth keeping current, and worth getting a profile on if you do not have one.
One warning: do not read too much into a single result. The same question can return different names an hour later, so being named once does not mean you are safe and being missed once does not mean you are invisible. The pattern over a few months is what tells you anything.
If you would rather not do this by hand, Ahrefs has a free AI visibility checker that gives you a snapshot in seconds with no signup. Its paid Brand Radar service tracks mentions continuously, but it starts at roughly £250 a month on top of a subscription, which is hard to justify for a single practice.
Nothing covers the last part, though. Google Analytics will show visits arriving from AI, so you know it is sending you patients, but it can never tell you what was asked or what was said. None of that happens on your site. That is the gap the monthly check fills.
Start here
Ask ChatGPT the question one of your patients would ask. See who gets named, what information is included and where it came from. If you're not in the answer, the nine steps above are your to-do list.
At 2C Digital Marketing we help healthcare, legal and insurance firms get named in AI searches through our website and blogging packages. If you’re looking to improve your visibility, get in touch with a member of our specialist team today.
About the author: Sara Toussimanesh is Director of 2C Digital Marketing, a Bristol agency specialising in PPC, web design and blogging for healthcare, legal and insurance firms. CIM Diploma in Marketing Communications. Connect on LinkedIn
