What a medical practice should publish so AI can describe it

An assistant can only repeat what is written down somewhere it reads. For a practice that means a short list of plain facts, stated on your own site and agreed with everywhere else.

Shaik Arif Hussain

Local SEO and Google Business Profile consultant since 2019. He has helped more than 650 business profiles through suspensions, reinstatement, verification and ownership disputes.

29 October 2026 · 6 min read

A patient asking an assistant about you gets a sentence built from whatever the assistant read. If your site says what you do, what it costs, who does it and where, that sentence can be about you. If it says “luxury aesthetics” over a photograph, the sentence will be about somebody whose site said more.

None of the list below is clever, and none of it guarantees a place in an answer — nothing does. It is the set of facts a patient wants before booking, written so that software can read them as well as people.

A practice that lists every treatment on one page can be named as a practice. It cannot be the source for a question about one treatment, because there is no page about that treatment to cite.

Give each treatment you want to be asked about its own page: what it is, who it suits, how long it takes, recovery, roughly what it costs, who performs it, and the towns patients come from. Name it the way patients do — “lip filler” as well as the product name, “veneers” as well as the clinical term.

Making your own site the source covers the general case. For a practice the stakes are higher than usual, because these are research questions: people ask them days or weeks before they choose anyone.

Of the five med spa questions we asked, one was about price — botox, in the city, what it costs. All nine answers quoted dollar figures, and ChatGPT’s answers were built entirely from practices’ own pages, two of them pricing pages. The full count is here.

So the question will be answered with someone’s prices. A practice that publishes none has decided it will not be the one quoted.

Many treatments cannot be priced exactly before a consultation, and the page does not need to pretend otherwise. Publish what you can stand behind:

• a per-unit or per-syringe price for injectables;
• a typical range for procedures, with what moves it;
• what the consultation costs, or that it is free, and whether it is credited against treatment;
• whether you offer financing, and through whom.

Put the figures in text on the page, not in a treatment-menu image or a PDF, and say when they were last reviewed. Put your prices on the site answers the usual objections.

Patients ask assistants who is qualified, and assistants can only repeat a qualification that is written down. Say it in one plain line per person, not in the middle of a biography.

Name the board. “Board-certified” on its own leaves the question open. The American Board of Medical Specialties lists its member boards, the American Board of Plastic Surgery among them; if that is the certification, say so by name, so a reader can check it.

Be careful with “specialist”. Cosmetic dentistry is not one of the 12 dental specialties the ADA’s national commission recognises. Describing yourself as a cosmetic dentist is fine; calling yourself a specialist in it may break your state board’s advertising rules. Check them before you publish.

Say who performs what. For a med spa this matters most. Which treatments are done by a physician, which by a nurse practitioner or registered nurse, and who supervises. It is the question an anxious patient asks, and a page that answers it gives an assistant something specific to say.

Before-and-after galleries persuade people and tell an assistant almost nothing, because a photograph has no sentence in it. Keep the gallery, and add a line of text to each case: the treatment, the area, the number of sessions, the time between photographs.

Two rules apply before anything is published. Under HIPAA a full-face photograph is one of the identifiers that make health information identifiable, and using a patient’s health information to market your practice generally needs their written authorisation. And the photographs should show results you can stand behind as representative, not the best one in a hundred. A plain note on the gallery saying how cases are chosen and that consent was given is honest, and it is quotable.

If patients travel to you from the suburbs or further, say so. Write down the towns and areas you actually see patients from, in text, on a page about where you are. An assistant will not name you for a place you never claim, and a map graphic is not a claim. Say which towns you cover has the method.

If you have more than one location, give each its own page, its own address and its own hours, and make each match its own Google profile.

Reviews supply the evidence nobody else can: someone unaffiliated saying you were good. They are also where medical practices get into trouble, in three ways.

Do not buy them, and do not filter them. The FTC’s 2024 rule bans fake reviews and reviews bought on condition of being positive, and Google’s policy forbids offering incentives for reviews or selectively soliciting positive ones. Ask every patient, the same way.

Do not reply with patient details. A Texas dental practice paid HHS $10,000 in 2019 after replying to Yelp reviews with patients’ information. A reply that confirms somebody is your patient is a disclosure. Thank them, and take anything specific offline.

Ask for words, not just stars. A review that names the treatment and how it went gives an assistant a sentence it can use. “Amazing!” gives it a rating.

Your own site is one source among many, and usually not the deciding vote. In our answers the assistants read review pages, list sites, booking platforms, specialist directories and, for dentists, insurers’ directories. Check the ones that describe you and make them agree: the same practice name, the same address, the same phone number, the same practitioners written the same way.

On Google, follow its rules for practitioners: a practitioner who sees patients may have their own profile, titled with their name alone, separate from the practice’s. Set special hours for holidays, and keep the hours right — “open today” is a question patients ask.

Mark up the practice with the type that is true. schema.org has Dentist and PlasticSurgery, both kinds of local medical business. It has no type for a med spa; MedicalClinic is the honest choice where treatments are medical, and it can list the medicalSpecialty and the availableService. The rest of the block — name, address, hours, towns, links to your profiles — is in the schema walkthrough.

Mark up only what the page also says, and never a rating you assembled yourself.

Open your site on a phone as a stranger and try to find four things: what one treatment costs, who performs it, which board certifies the doctor, and whether you see patients from a town ten miles away. Time yourself.

Then ask an assistant the question a patient would ask, without naming your practice, and read the sources under the answer. Whatever those pages say about you — or fail to say — is your list.