How Medical and Dental Practices Get Described Correctly by AI: What Patients Ask, What AI Needs and Where US Advertising Rules Draw the Line

Patients now ask ChatGPT or Google things like “dentist open late near me” or “does this practice take new patients?” To describe you correctly, AI needs to find the same basic facts on your website and your Google Business Profile: specialties, providers, hours, how to book, location, and which insurance you take and what self-pay costs. Get those complete and consistent before you write treatment pages. Plain facts are also the easiest claims to back up, and US advertising law requires that you can back up what you say.

Patients ask AI to find someone nearby, check hours, pick a provider and ask about cost

The questions below are examples, not statistics. OpenAI says ChatGPT may use an approximate location based on your IP address to provide local results, and may share location with trusted third-party providers for things like nearby business listings (OpenAI Help Center). Your job is to make sure what it finds about you is correct.

Matching a symptom to a specialty is the AI's call. Your part is to list your specialties and services clearly, not to diagnose anyone online. Don't try to win questions like “which clinic gets the best results.” The advertising rules below explain why.

Write the facts AI needs in plain text, the same way everywhere

The FTC's guide for small businesses sums up the federal standard: advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive, advertisers must have evidence to back up their claims, and in most cases ads that make health or safety claims must be supported by “competent and reliable scientific evidence” (FTC Advertising FAQs). Facts about who you are, where you are and when you're open are the easiest things to back up, and they're what AI needs most. Here's where each one goes:

Two federal rules touch these pages directly. Under the No Surprises Act, CMS says providers must tell uninsured and self-pay patients they can get a good faith estimate of expected charges, and that this information must be easy to see, and easily searchable from a public search engine, on the provider's website, in the office and where scheduling or cost questions happen. CMS also says providers must have a process for sending accurate directory information to health plans (CMS fact sheet for providers, revised January 2025). So your insurers' directories are one more place where your address and hours should match.

Google recommends “making sure that important content is available in textual form” (AI features and your website). Don't post your schedule only as an image or a PDF flyer.

On Google Business Profile, keep the practice and each provider separate and set real hours

Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence, that complete and detailed information helps Google match you to searches, and that there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking (Tips to improve your local ranking). For a field-by-field walkthrough, see the Google Business Profile checklist. Practices need to watch these points in particular:

• Name: match your sign and website. Google says including unnecessary information in your business name isn't permitted and could get your profile suspended (Guidelines for representing your business). Don't add “Same-Day Appointments” or a neighborhood to the name.
• Provider profiles: Google counts doctors and dentists as individual practitioners. A provider who sees patients and can be contacted directly at the verified location during stated hours should have their own profile, and it may include a title or degree such as Dr. or MD. One provider shouldn't have several profiles for different specialties.
• Group practices: the practice gets its own profile, separate from the providers' profiles, and each provider's profile is titled with only the provider's name. If one provider is the only one at a branded location, Google says it's best to share a single profile named in the format “[brand]: [practitioner name].”
• Hours: for a lunch break, create two entries for the same day with different times (Edit your business hours). Use special hours for holidays and short closures.
• Booking and telehealth links: you can add appointment links, and a single link to a list of services such as telemedicine (Manage your local business links). The profile has to be verified, and a link has to go to a page dedicated to your practice where patients can actually complete the booking. Social media sites, messaging links, app store links and link shorteners aren't allowed (Business links policies). If you only book by phone, say so on your website.

US advertising rules for practices come from the FTC, federal health programs and your state board

There isn't one US law that lists what a medical practice may advertise. Three layers apply instead, and everything in this section was checked on official US government sites on October 16, 2026. The first is the FTC Act, whose false-advertising section covers services and devices as well as drugs, foods and cosmetics (FTC Health Products Compliance Guidance, December 2022). The second is the set of federal health program laws that limit gifts and copay waivers for Medicare and Medicaid patients. The third is your state: physicians and dentists are licensed by state boards, and their advertising rules differ from state to state. We didn't check every state, so we don't list state rules here.

On health claims, FTC staff's guidance on health products says individual consumer experiences “are never sufficient to substantiate claims about the effects of a health product,” and that a practitioner's observations of patients are anecdotal too. The FTC also says it looks at an ad's words, phrases and pictures in context, not just certain words (Advertising FAQs). Here's how common practice marketing lines up with the federal rules:

Penalties depend on the law. The FTC says its review rule lets courts impose civil penalties for knowing violations. HHS has settled with and fined practices over replies to reviews, covered in the next section. The FTC also says it concentrates on national advertising and usually refers local matters to state, county or city agencies, which is one more reason your state's rules matter.

This is a summary of official guidance, not legal advice for your practice. Whether a specific post breaks a rule depends on the facts and on your state. Before you publish, ask your state medical or dental board, or a healthcare attorney, about the points state rules usually decide: how you describe specialties and board certification, discounts and prepaid packages, and before-and-after photos.

When you reply to reviews, never mention a patient's condition or visit

A review is the patient's own words. Your reply is yours, and HIPAA applies to it. HHS says a covered entity may not use or disclose protected health information except as the Privacy Rule permits or requires, or as the patient authorizes in writing, and that every health care provider, regardless of size, that electronically transmits health information in connection with certain transactions, such as claims, is a covered entity (Summary of the HIPAA Privacy Rule).

HHS has enforced this against review replies. A California dental practice paid $23,000 and agreed to a corrective action plan after disclosing patients' health information in responses to online reviews, a practice HHS calls “illegal under HIPAA” (HHS: New Vision Dental). A North Carolina dental practice that disclosed a patient's health information in response to a negative online review, and then didn't respond to the investigation, received a $50,000 civil money penalty (HHS enforcement action).

Google's rules point the same way. Its Maps content policy bans posting personal information without consent and names medical information specifically (Prohibited & restricted content). Its review tips say never to share a reviewer's private information, and to ask the reviewer to contact you by phone or email instead (Tips to get more reviews). In practice:

• Don't say what the reviewer was seen for, what treatment they had or when they came in. The cautious approach is to add nothing and confirm nothing, even when the reviewer described their own condition.
• Move negative reviews offline. For example: “Thank you for telling us. We'd like to look into this directly. Please call our office and ask for the practice manager.”
• Invite every patient the same way, for example with the same QR code at checkout. Google bans asking only happy patients, requiring reviews while patients are in your office, requesting specific content, and offering discounts, free goods or free services for reviews.

Work through this list and get the facts right before you write content

1. Make one master fact sheet: the practice name on your sign, address, phone, specialties, each provider's name, credentials and board certifications, and hours for each day. Fill in every listing from it.
2. Check your listings in the provider directories of the health plans you're in network with, and send corrections through the process CMS says providers must have.
3. Give each provider a page in plain text: training, credentials, board certifications, services and the days they see patients.
4. On your Business Profile, use your real name, pick the most specific primary category, split hours around lunch breaks, and set special hours before holidays.
5. If you have an online booking page, add it as your Business Profile booking link. If you book only by phone, say so on your website.
6. List the insurance plans you take and your self-pay prices. If you see uninsured or self-pay patients, add the good faith estimate notice. Don't advertise gifts for new patients or waived copays.
7. Remove superlatives, cure claims and numbers you can't back up from your website, Business Profile and social media. On treatment pages, say who a treatment is for, who shouldn't have it and what the side effects are.
8. Before you post patient photos or stories, ask your compliance adviser about written HIPAA authorization, and add a clear statement of typical results.
9. Ask your web developer to add local business structured data with the most specific type, such as schema.org MedicalClinic or Dentist, and to keep it matching the visible text (Google's guide). Details are in the GEO technical checklist.
10. Ask your state medical or dental board how its advertising rules apply to your specialty claims, discounts and photos.

When you check AI, separate being mentioned from being cited and look at each platform on its own

Pick a few questions patients ask that don't include your practice name, and ask them separately in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google. For example, a family dental practice in Plano, Texas (a made-up example) might try “family dentist in Plano open Saturday” and “Plano dentist accepting new patients.” For each answer, write down whether you're mentioned (the AI says your name), whether you're cited (it links to your page as a source), and whether it gets your hours or specialties wrong. Answers change from run to run: we asked the same 14 questions twice and the mention rate came out 31.5% one time and 41.7% the other, so look at a range across several checks (our methodology). For the full method, see when customers ask AI for a recommendation nearby.

Frequently asked questions

Next step: build the master fact sheet, then make your website and Business Profile match it. To see whether ChatGPT can read your website, run a free quick scan. It looks at ChatGPT only, needs no sign-up and takes about 1–2 minutes. It checks whether AI can read your site, then runs 2 live ChatGPT questions.