ChatGPT Recommended a Competitor: The Ten-Prompt Audit to Run Tonight

What the engine read about the other practice

It read the same public pages a patient could open, and it found the answer to the patient's question on one of them. Google says its AI Overviews and AI Mode are rooted in ordinary Search ranking: the engine splits a question into several smaller queries, retrieves pages for each, and writes from what came back, and details from a Business Profile can surface in those responses 1Ref 1Google Search Central (2026).Google's Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features on Google Search.Google's statement that AI Overviews and AI Mode are rooted in core Search ranking with query fan-out, that Business Profile details can surface in AI responses, that eligibility requires an indexed, snippet-eligible page, that the Search Console generative AI report measures visibility, and that no third-party tool has access to its ranking or AI systems..

A practice named in that answer had a page that was indexed, eligible for a snippet, and specific about the thing the patient asked 1Ref 1Google Search Central (2026).Google's Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features on Google Search.Google's statement that AI Overviews and AI Mode are rooted in core Search ranking with query fan-out, that Business Profile details can surface in AI responses, that eligibility requires an indexed, snippet-eligible page, that the Search Console generative AI report measures visibility, and that no third-party tool has access to its ranking or AI systems.. For the local half of the question Google names three factors: relevance, meaning how well a profile matches the search; distance from the searcher; and prominence, meaning how well known the business is. It adds that a profile with complete and accurate information is more likely to appear in local results, and that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking 2Ref 2Google (2026).Tips to improve your local ranking on Google.Google's three local ranking factors (relevance, distance, prominence), that complete and accurate profile information makes a business more likely to appear in local results, and that a better local ranking cannot be requested or paid for.. So the practice the patient heard about most likely stated the evening hours or the first-visit fee somewhere the engine could read, and stated it the same way in more than one place.

ChatGPT reads through a narrower gate. OpenAI says a site that disallows its OAI-SearchBot crawler will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it may still appear as a navigational link 3Ref 3OpenAI (2026).Overview of OpenAI Crawlers.OpenAI's statement that a site disallowing OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it may still appear as a navigational link.. A site whose web person blocked every bot in robots.txt two years ago is invisible to that engine on purpose, and nobody remembers deciding it.

The ten prompts, and how to run them tonight

The audit is ten prompts, run logged out, in three engines, from the practice's own city. The first prompt is the patient's question in their own words, as near as you can recover it. The other nine are the questions patients ask before they book, written the way a person types them, with your town and your service word filled in. Record two things for every answer: whether your practice is named, and which sources the answer cites.

Use a private browser window so no account history colors the answer, with the location set to the practice's city. Run each prompt once in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, and paste each answer with its cited links into a sheet, dated. Thirty answers is one evening.

TOWN is the town a patient would type, PLAN is the plan the front desk is asked about most, NEIGHBORHOOD is where the patient lives if you know it, and where a prompt says practice, write your own service word. Prompts nine and ten name you directly. They test whether the engine holds anything about you, and whether what it holds is right; an answer that gives a former suite number is a finding in its own right.

Read each answer for its sources before you read it for your name

The sources an answer cites tell you where the engine looked, and that is the evidence you sat down for. An answer that names the competitor and cites their Business Profile, one directory and their own site tells you which three records they got right. An answer that leaves you out and cites nothing of yours tells you the engine never met a page of yours that answered the question.

In a Stanford audit of four generative search engines, only 51.5 percent of generated sentences were fully supported by their citations, and only 74.5 percent of citations supported the sentence they were attached to 4Ref 4Nelson F. Liu, Tianyi Zhang and Percy Liang, Stanford University (2023).Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Engines.The Stanford audit's finding that only 51.5 percent of generated sentences were fully supported by their citations and only 74.5 percent of citations supported their sentence, so a cited link needs to be opened and read.. The Tow Center's 2025 test of eight AI search tools found them citing syndicated or copied versions of a page instead of the original, and citing fabricated or broken links in more than half of the responses from two of the tools 5Ref 5Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar, Tow Center for Digital Journalism (2025).AI Search Has a Citation Problem.The Tow Center's March 2025 finding that AI search tools cite syndicated or copied versions of a page instead of the original and that more than half of two tools' responses cited fabricated or broken links.. So when an answer does name you, open the link it cites. It may be a directory's copy of your listing, years old.

Log the cited domains as well as the practice names. After thirty answers, the domains that keep appearing are the map of where these engines read local facts in your town.

Open the competitor's sources and list the facts you do not state

Open every source the answers cited for the other practice and write down each fact it states that your equivalent source does not. Call it the parity list, because it is the finding of the night. The gap is nearly always a plain operational fact: hours on the profile, a fee on the site, an appointment link that lands on a booking page, the accepting-new-patients flag set and current.

Google lists what a Business Profile can carry: one primary category and up to nine more, and a business description of at most 750 characters that may not contain links 6Ref 6Google (2026).Edit your Business Profile.The editable fields of a Business Profile and their limits: one primary plus up to nine additional categories, a 750-character description with no links, up to three phone numbers, a website as a full URL, and an owner-answerable Q&A section.. It also takes up to three phone numbers, a website entered as a full address, and, for some categories and regions, a Q&A section that owners and managers can answer in 6Ref 6Google (2026).Edit your Business Profile.The editable fields of a Business Profile and their limits: one primary plus up to nine additional categories, a 750-character description with no links, up to three phone numbers, a website as a full URL, and an owner-answerable Q&A section.. Read the competitor's profile against that list with yours beside it. The parity list says which of the five sources to open first: the NPI registry, the business listing, the directories, your own site, or any other page that states the same facts.

What to fix first

Fix the one field the patient's question turned on, in the source the answers cited most, tonight. If the patient asked about evening hours, that is the hours field on the Business Profile and the contact page of the site. If they asked about video visits, it is one plain sentence on the services page. The rest of the parity list waits for the week, in the fix order: the cited record first, its source next, the copies last.

The Business Profile is edited by its owner or a manager, so if someone else holds the login, the first message tonight goes to them. While you are in it, check the category field and the appointment link. GBP is where a competitor's profile will look most different from yours, and that difference is readable in five minutes.

Directories come after the profile, and only the ones the answers cited. Claim each one the audit named, correct the name, address and phone to match the profile, and set the new-patient flag. If prompt nine returned a clinician who no longer works at your address, that is the departure sweep, a separate job with its own order.

The federal record sits underneath all of it. A covered provider must report a change of address or taxonomy to NPPES within 30 days of the change, online at nppes.cms.hhs.gov or on form CMS-10114 7Ref 7Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2026).Unique Identifiers FAQs.CMS's rule that a covered provider reports a change of address or taxonomy to NPPES within 30 days of the change, online at nppes.cms.hhs.gov or by form CMS-10114.. An audit sheet whose cited pages disagree with NPPES on either has found its first correction. Gale publishes a provider's gale.care page with the name, credential, address and phone taken from the NPPES record, stages a short Q&A capsule on that page for the provider to approve, and announces the page to Bing through IndexNow the day it changes, so the audit has one source to compare the others against.

What to tell the patient, and what to measure next month

Tell the patient what happened: the assistant read a page about the other practice that answered their question, and found no page of yours that did. Then thank them, because a patient who reports this is handing you the audit's first prompt. Add one line to the new-patient form asking how they found you, with an AI assistant among the choices, so the next report arrives on paper.

One audit is a snapshot, and answers change between sessions. The monthly prompt panel is the same idea run thirty prompts wide on a fixed day each month and reported as a rate, and it is where tonight's ten go once the fixes are in. Google says a site's visibility in its generative features is measured in the Search Console generative AI performance report, and that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems 1Ref 1Google Search Central (2026).Google's Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features on Google Search.Google's statement that AI Overviews and AI Mode are rooted in core Search ranking with query fan-out, that Business Profile details can surface in AI responses, that eligibility requires an indexed, snippet-eligible page, that the Search Console generative AI report measures visibility, and that no third-party tool has access to its ranking or AI systems.. A vendor who calls next week offering placement in AI answers is offering to move something the vendor cannot see, and the six vendor questions are the reply to send.