What AI reads before it recommends a med spa, cosmetic dentist or plastic surgeon

A patient choosing who to trust with their face asks an assistant first. In the few seconds before it answers, it reads review pages, directories, list sites and, if they say anything, practices’ own pages.

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 · 5 min read

Somebody thinking about veneers, fillers or a facelift does not start with your website. Some of them now start by asking an assistant who is good in their town, and the assistant answers with two or three names.

Nothing about that is mysterious, and nothing about it is for sale. The assistant searches, reads a small set of pages, and writes from them. This page is about which pages, for medical practices specifically, based on the answers we recorded — and about the things on a practice’s site that the assistant cannot read at all.

For a question about a local practice, the assistant is not reciting what it learned in training. It searches. Google describes Gemini’s version plainly: the model decides whether a search would help, writes its own queries and answers from the results. Perplexity searches in real time and numbers its sources, and ChatGPT search uses an approximate location from the asker’s connection to find local results.

That is good news for a practice, because what gets read can be changed this month. It is also why the answer can change from one day to the next, and why one person’s screenshot proves little — the same question gets a different answer twice.

We recorded 87 answers to cosmetic dentist and med spa questions in Austin and the Denver area in late October 2026, with their sources. The full count is in the research post; the short version is that the sources fell into a handful of kinds.

Review pages. Pages hosted by review services, Healthgrades, Yelp and the Better Business Bureau. Pages hosted by Birdeye, a review service many practices use, were cited in 22 of the 87 answers.

“Best of” list sites. Pages ranking the top practices in a city. Three such sites between them were cited in 26 answers.

Booking platforms. Zocdoc and Opencare for dentists; Fresha, Vagaro and Mindbody for med spas. Your profile on a booking platform is a page about you, and the assistants read it.

Specialist directories. Four med spa directories were cited in 16 of the 42 med spa answers. For dentists, an insurer’s directory was cited in 7 of the 9 answers to “dentist accepting new patients”.

Forums. Reddit, cited in 12 answers, every one of them from Gemini.

Practices’ own sites. Some practices’ pages were cited often; most practices’ pages hardly at all. Of the 17 practices we checked that were named at least once, 14 had their own site among the sources.

What we did not see, in any of the 87, was a Google Maps page listed as a source. That does not make the Google profile unimportant — Gemini’s search runs on Google’s results — but it does mean the profile is not the only record that matters.

Very different amounts. In our answers ChatGPT showed a median of 5 sources, Gemini 7 and Perplexity 32. An assistant reading five pages is working from a very short list, and whether your practice is on it decides the answer. One reading thirty-odd is assembling a consensus, and consistency across many records decides it.

Either way the work is the same: be on the pages that get read, and make them agree with each other. The sources that keep coming back has the method for finding yours.

Medical and aesthetic sites are unusually visual, and that is where they lose.

Before-and-after galleries. A photograph tells a patient a great deal and an assistant writing a sentence very little. If the only description of a result is the image, there are no words for the assistant to quote.

Prices in a picture or a PDF. A treatment menu designed as an image, or a price list as a download, is often not read as text at all.

Content that needs JavaScript. Treatment lists in tabs, sliders and menus that only appear after a script runs. When Vercel studied crawler traffic in 2024, the crawlers run by OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity did not run JavaScript, so anything that needs it may be missing from what they read.

Credentials buried in a biography. A paragraph mentioning board certification in passing is harder to lift than a plain line saying which board, in which specialty.

The check is the same one that works for any business: view the page source and search for the words. If the treatment, the price or the board is not there as text, it is not there. What an assistant reads before it names you explains why.

Medicine adds a complication most trades do not have: patients choose a person as often as a business. They ask for the best injector, the best surgeon for a rhinoplasty, the dentist who did a friend’s veneers.

Google’s guidelines for Business Profiles handle this explicitly. A practitioner who sees patients can have a profile of their own, separate from the practice’s, titled with the practitioner’s name alone, and only one. A solo practitioner working under a practice brand shares the practice’s profile instead, named brand first, then the practitioner.

Whichever you use, the practitioner’s name should be written the same way on the profile, the practice site, the booking platform and the review pages. A surgeon listed three slightly different ways is three half-records, and an assistant reconciling them will describe none of them confidently.

ChatGPT and Google now carry ads in and around their AI answers. Both say the ads are labelled and do not change the answer — OpenAI that ads are “always separate and clearly labeled”, Google that buying ads doesn’t influence organic AI answers. For medical practices the rules on health advertising are stricter again. An ad can put you beside the answer. It cannot put you in it.

When several practices are credible, the tie tends to break on the same three things as anywhere else. Whether the sources agree about you. Whether there is anything specific to say — which treatments, what they cost, who performs them. And whether somebody unaffiliated has said something good about you, in a review or a thread.

Nothing on that list can be bought, and nobody can promise you a place in an answer, including us. All three can be worked on, and what a medical practice should publish is the list of where to start.