We ran a systematic audit of how India's most popular healthcare aggregators handle clinic listings from the perspective of Google, AI assistants, and the clinic owner. The results explain why thousands of clinics across India, generating ₹1–5 crore in annual revenue, are building patient acquisition on a platform they don't control.
What actually happens when a patient searches Practo
A patient in Bengaluru searches "skin clinic near me". A Practo listing appears. They click, browse your profile, read your reviews, and book a consultation. You receive a notification with their name and number.
That's where your access ends. What Practo retains:
- The keyword that brought the patient to Practo's platform in the first place
- How many patients saw your listing versus how many clicked (impression data is not shared)
- Which other clinics the patient viewed before choosing you
- The patient's full search path before landing on your profile
- Whether the patient searched by condition, location, or procedure name
You receive one datapoint per booking: a name and number. Practo keeps the rest.
Three things you lose by depending on Practo
1. Your patient data
Every search query, every click, every comparison your patient made before booking stays on Practo's servers. You get a name and a phone number. Over time, Practo builds a more detailed picture of your patient base than you have yourself. They use that data to improve their platform and sell advertising to the clinics on it, including your competitors.
2. Your reviews
When a patient leaves a five-star review on Practo after a successful procedure, that review improves Practo's Google ranking. When their friend searches for the same treatment and finds the listing, they arrive at Practo's page, not your clinic's website. You created the patient experience. Practo captured the credit in search.
3. Control over your own visibility
In 2023, Practo raised subscription fees significantly across multiple cities. Clinics that had built their patient acquisition on the platform faced a simple choice: pay more or lose the ranking they had built over years. Some saw their listings move down within hours of non-renewal. Your ranking on Practo is not yours. It belongs to Practo's algorithm.
What about embedding a Practo widget on your website?
Many clinics think they've solved this by embedding a Practo booking widget on their own site. The widget looks like it lives on your page. It doesn't.
Embedded widgets load inside an <iframe>: a sandboxed container that is invisible to Google's crawler and every AI agent. The content inside runs on Practo's domain, in Practo's document context. Google doesn't index it. ChatGPT can't read it.
- No SEO value: Service names, consultation fees, and treatment descriptions inside the iframe generate zero keyword rankings for your domain
- No AI citations: When a patient asks ChatGPT what a consultation costs at your clinic, the widget can't be cited, even if that information is inside it
- No conversion tracking: Because the widget runs on Practo's origin, your analytics can't accurately track form interactions or booking completions
- No A/B testing: You can't optimise what you don't control
Practo vs. owning your own presence
| What you want | On Practo | With Iris on your domain |
|---|---|---|
| Know what patients searched to find you | ✗ Not available | ✓ Full keyword data in Google Search Console |
| Reviews that build your domain authority | ✗ Reviews go to Practo | ✓ Google reviews build your GBP and domain |
| Appear in ChatGPT and Gemini answers | ✗ Practo gets cited, not your clinic | ✓ Your clinic's domain cited by AI assistants |
| Control your consultation booking flow | ✗ Practo controls the experience | ✓ On-domain booking, fully customisable |
| Track WhatsApp enquiry conversions | ✗ Not supported | ✓ One-tap WhatsApp with full attribution |
| Visibility if you stop paying the platform | ✗ Ranking drops immediately | ✓ Your organic ranking stays |
| Voice search discoverability | ✗ Siri and Alexa can't access Practo listings | ✓ Structured data enables voice citations |
What Iris builds instead
Iris moves your clinic's booking, services, and search presence to infrastructure on your own domain. That means an on-domain booking page Google can index, schema markup that tells AI assistants what you offer, Google Business Profile management with regular posts, and content that ranks for the searches your patients make.
Every patient who finds you through Google or ChatGPT and books through your website is a patient whose data you own, whose journey you can measure, and whose loyalty you can build on your own terms.
Find out what patients search before they book
A free visibility audit for your clinic. See where you're invisible and what it's costing you in lost consultations.
Check my clinic's visibility →