--- title: "Would ChatGPT Recommend Your Practice? Here's How to Find Out" entity: "blog" canonical_url: "https://www.hiveality.com/blog/would-chatgpt-recommend-your-practice" markdown_url: "https://www.hiveality.com/llms/blog/would-chatgpt-recommend-your-practice" lastmod: "2026-07-30T19:02:45.127Z" --- Open ChatGPT right now and type: "Who is the best naturopathic doctor near me?" or "Recommend a pelvic health physiotherapist in [your city]." Did your practice come up? For most practitioners, the answer is no. And that matters more every month, because a growing share of your future patients are not starting on Google anymore. They are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Mode, and Claude the same questions they used to type into a search bar, and they are taking the short list those assistants hand back. This post walks you through testing your own AI visibility in about two minutes, explains why most practices are invisible to AI assistants, and shows you exactly what to fix. It also covers how Hiveality tracks and improves this for you automatically, because this is one of those jobs that is miserable to do by hand and easy to automate. ## How do you test your own AI visibility? You do not need any tools for a first pass. Run these four prompts in ChatGPT (and Perplexity if you have two extra minutes): 1. **The category prompt:** "Who are the best [your profession] in [your city]?" 2. **The problem prompt:** "I have [a condition you treat]. Who should I see in [your city]?" 3. **The brand prompt:** "What do you know about [your practice name]?" 4. **The comparison prompt:** "Is [your practice name] a good choice for [service]?" Score yourself honestly. If you appear in prompts 1 and 2, you are ahead of nearly everyone. If prompt 3 returns wrong information, an old address, or "I don't have information about that practice," you have a fixable problem. If a competitor consistently appears where you do not, that gap compounds with every patient who asks. If you want the thorough version of this test rather than the two-minute version, our free [Authority Diagnostic](/tools/authority-diagnostic) runs a structured scan of your practice's online authority, including how you show up in search and AI, and gives you a scored report. ## Why is your practice invisible to AI assistants? AI assistants do not crawl the web the way you might imagine. When someone asks for a recommendation, the assistant leans on a blend of what it learned in training, live web results, and structured signals it can verify. Practices fall through the cracks for predictable reasons: **Your website does not say plainly what you do and where.** AI models are literal readers. If your homepage says "Rooted in wellness, growing with you" and never states "naturopathic doctor in Kelowna, BC," an assistant has nothing to anchor a recommendation to. **There is no structured data.** Schema markup is machine-readable labeling for your practice: your services, location, hours, and credentials in a format assistants can trust. Most practitioner websites have none. **Nothing third-party talks about you.** Assistants weigh independent corroboration heavily: directories, reviews, articles that mention you. A practice that exists only on its own website looks unverifiable. **Your content answers no questions.** Assistants assemble answers from pages that answer questions. If your site is five pages of service descriptions and no actual answers to the questions patients ask, there is nothing for the assistant to cite. **No one is watching.** Rankings you monitor tend to improve. AI visibility is the same, except almost nobody is monitoring it yet, which is exactly why it is still an open opportunity for small practices. ## What do AI engines actually read? Cutting through the hype, the inputs are knowable: - **Plain, factual statements** of who you are, what you treat, and where you practice, on pages the engines can reach. - **Structured data (schema)** that confirms those facts in machine-readable form. - **An accurate, active Google Business Profile**, which feeds both local search and the AI features built on top of it. - **Question-and-answer content**: FAQ sections and posts that directly answer "what does a naturopath treat," "how much does an initial consult cost," and the hundred other questions your patients ask. - **Third-party mentions**: professional directories, reviews, and citations that corroborate your existence and quality. - **A current sitemap and an llms.txt file**, the emerging convention that tells AI crawlers what your site contains and what matters on it. None of this is exotic. It is the same trust-building that good SEO always rewarded, held to a stricter standard of clarity. We cover the search side in depth in our [SEO checklist for naturopathic doctors](/blog/naturopathic-seo-checklist), and every item there also feeds your AI visibility. ## How does Hiveality track AI visibility automatically? Here is the honest problem with everything above: testing four prompts once tells you where you stand today. It tells you nothing about next month, whether the fix you shipped worked, or whether a competitor just overtook you. Manually re-running prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI results every month is a job nobody keeps up with. This is why we built Search & AI Visibility into every Hiveality website. It is part of [our SEO feature set](/features/seo), not a separate subscription: ![Hiveality's Search & AI Visibility panel: track key searches, see AI mentions, and get recommended fixes, with a visibility preview showing Google ranking and AI mention scores](https://ucarecdn.com/e474f477-c75c-428c-9b65-fcc766685354/) - **Tracked targets:** you tell it the search topics that matter ("naturopath Kelowna," "hormone testing near me") and it checks your Google rankings for them every week, reporting your top 10 rankings over time. - **AI mentions:** every month, it checks whether AI assistants mention your practice for your tracked topics, and records which of your pages get cited in AI answers. - **Prompt checks:** you can add your own AI questions, the exact phrasings your patients use, and run one-time checks on demand. "Who offers pediatric physiotherapy in Halifax?" becomes a monitored question, not a one-off experiment. - **Automatic groundwork:** the inputs AI engines need are maintained without you touching them. Clean metadata and canonical tags, automatic image alt text, structured data, and a sitemap and llms.txt that stay current every time you publish. When you make eligible changes, IndexNow tells search engines to recrawl right away. - **Fix routing:** when the audit finds an issue, it does not just report it. Straightforward metadata problems can be cleared in one click, and the rest arrive as a prioritized task list instead of a 40-page PDF. The practical effect: the two-minute test you ran at the top of this post becomes something your website runs for you, on schedule, with a record of whether the trend line is going the right way. ## What should you do this week? 1. **Run the four prompts.** Ten minutes, brutal honesty. 2. **Run the free [Authority Diagnostic](/tools/authority-diagnostic)** for the structured version with a score you can retest against. 3. **Fix the literal-reader problems first.** Make your homepage state your profession, services, and city in plain words. Add an FAQ that answers real patient questions. 4. **Get your structured signals in order.** Schema, alt text, sitemap, llms.txt. On Hiveality these are automatic; elsewhere, put them on your developer's list. 5. **Start monitoring.** Whatever platform you use, decide who checks AI visibility monthly. If the answer is "nobody," that is the gap. ## Frequently asked questions **Do patients really use ChatGPT to find practitioners?** A meaningful and fast-growing share do, especially for research-heavy decisions like choosing a functional medicine doctor or a therapist. Even patients who book through Google often ask an AI assistant first to build their short list. Being absent from that short list is invisible lost revenue: you never see the patients who never found you. **Is AI visibility different from SEO?** It overlaps heavily. Strong local SEO, structured data, and genuinely useful content feed both. The differences are in measurement (AI mentions and citations instead of only rankings) and in emphasis (plain factual clarity and third-party corroboration matter even more to AI engines than to Google). **What is llms.txt and do I need one?** It is a file that gives AI crawlers a clean map of your site's important content, similar in spirit to robots.txt. It is an emerging convention rather than a ranking guarantee, but it costs nothing when your platform maintains it automatically. Hiveality sites publish and update it for you. **Can I just pay an agency to handle this?** You can, and AI-visibility tracking is becoming its own software category with tools charging $50 to $100+ per month for monitoring alone. Before adding another bill, check what your platform already includes. Every Hiveality plan includes rank tracking, AI mention monitoring, and the automatic technical groundwork described above. **How long until I show up in AI answers?** Fixes to your own site (clarity, schema, FAQs) can be picked up within weeks. Third-party corroboration builds over months. The practices that show up consistently started before their competitors thought it mattered, which is the entire argument for starting now. --- Want to know exactly where your practice stands? Run the free [Authority Diagnostic](/tools/authority-diagnostic) for a scored report, or [get started with Hiveality](/start) and let your website handle the monitoring for you. Questions first? [Book a call](/book).