How can I check if my clinic appears in ChatGPT recommendations?

Open ChatGPT (free version is sufficient) and type: 'Who are the best [your specialty] clinics in [your city] for [your primary service]?' — for example, 'Who are the best dental implant clinics in Denver?' Check whether your clinic appears in the response. If it does not, check whether any competitor you recognise appears. If competitors appear but you do not, the gap is AI infrastructure. If no local clinics appear, the query may not be triggering local results — try a more specific location query.

How do I check if my website is blocking AI crawlers?

Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt in your browser. Look for User-agent lines followed by Allow or Disallow rules. You need to see either explicit Allow entries for AI crawlers (ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot) or a broad Allow: / rule covering all user agents. If you see Disallow: / with no specific AI crawler exceptions, or if AI crawler names are not mentioned at all, your site may be blocking them. If you use Cloudflare, also check Security → Bots in your Cloudflare dashboard.

What is a quick way to check if my clinic website has schema markup?

Go to search.google.com/test/rich-results and enter your website's homepage URL. Click 'Test URL'. Google will show you all detected structured data on the page. For a medical clinic, you want to see at least LocalBusiness or MedicalBusiness in the results. If the test shows no structured data or only generic types like WebPage or WebSite, your schema coverage is insufficient for AI search citation.

If an AI Agent Were Searching for a Specialist in Your City Right Now, Would It Find You? Here's How to Check.

You don't need a developer, an SEO agency, or any technical knowledge to run this audit. You need ten minutes and a browser. What follows are five specific tests that will tell you, with reasonable accuracy, whether your clinic is visible to AI search systems — and exactly which gap to address first if you're not. Most clinic owners who run all five tests find at least three failures. The ones who find zero failures are usually the ones already showing up in AI recommendations.

Test 1: The Direct ChatGPT Test — 2 Minutes

Open ChatGPT (the free version at chat.openai.com is sufficient — you do not need a paid account) and type the following, substituting your own details: "Who are the best [your specialty] clinics in [your city] for [your primary procedure or service]?" For example: "Who are the best dermatology clinics in Austin for acne scarring treatment?" or "Who are the best dental implant clinics in Nashville?"

Pass: Your clinic appears in the response, either named directly or linked as a source. The information cited is accurate — correct name, correct services, correct location.

Fail — Variant A: Your clinic does not appear but a competitor you recognise does. This means AI infrastructure, not clinical quality, is determining the recommendations. The competitor has built something you haven't.

Fail — Variant B: Your clinic appears but with inaccurate information — wrong address, old phone number, services you no longer offer. This is an entity data problem — your clinic's information is fragmented across inconsistent sources and AI systems are synthesising an inaccurate picture.

Fail — Variant C: No local clinics appear at all. Try a more location-specific query: "Best [specialty] near [specific neighbourhood or zip code]." If local results still don't appear, ChatGPT may not have sufficient indexed content for your local market — which means the first clinic to build AI-indexed content in your specialty and city will own that recommendation space.

Test 2: The robots.txt Check — 1 Minute

In your browser's address bar, type your website's domain followed by /robots.txt — for example, mydermatologyclinic.com/robots.txt — and press enter. You should see a plain text file containing rules for web crawlers.

Pass: The file contains either "Allow: /" covering all user agents, or explicit Allow entries for AI crawlers including ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, and OAI-SearchBot. If all of these are permitted, AI crawlers can access your website.

Fail — Common pattern 1: The file shows "Disallow: /" under "User-agent: *" — this blocks all crawlers including AI crawlers. This is the silent killer of AI visibility.

Fail — Common pattern 2: The file shows rules for Googlebot and possibly Bingbot but has no mention of AI-specific crawlers. Many clinic websites have robots.txt files written before AI crawlers existed. These files do not explicitly block AI crawlers, but they do not explicitly permit them either — and some AI crawler configurations are conservative enough to avoid sites without explicit permission.

What to do if you fail: Share the robots.txt file contents with your developer and ask them to add explicit Allow entries for AI crawlers. This is a five-minute developer task. If you use Cloudflare, also ask them to check the Bot Management settings in your Cloudflare dashboard, as Cloudflare's default WAF rules frequently block AI crawlers regardless of what your robots.txt says.

Test 3: The llms.txt Check — 30 Seconds

Type your domain followed by /llms.txt in your browser — for example, mydermatologyclinic.com/llms.txt. If a page of formatted text appears listing your clinic's most important pages in priority order, you have a llms.txt file. If you get a 404 error page, you do not.

Pass: A structured text file appears with your clinic's name, a brief description, and links to your most important service pages, FAQ content, and location information.

Fail: 404 error, blank page, or your website's main homepage loads instead. The vast majority of medical clinic websites fail this test. If you fail it, you are not alone — but you are at a disadvantage relative to any clinic in your market that has built one.

What to do if you fail: A basic llms.txt file can be created by a developer in two to three hours using your existing service pages and FAQ content as source material. The file does not require ongoing updates unless you add major new service areas.

Test 4: The Schema Check — 3 Minutes

Go to search.google.com/test/rich-results in your browser. Enter your clinic's homepage URL and click Test URL. Wait fifteen to thirty seconds for the results to load. The tool will show you all structured data detected on your homepage.

Pass: The results show MedicalBusiness, Physician, Dentist, Dermatologist, or another healthcare-specific schema type. Bonus: FAQPage or Speakable schema also appears.

Fail — Level 1: Only generic schema types appear (WebSite, WebPage, Organization without medical subtype). This means your website has some structured data but it is not identifying your clinic as a specific medical entity type. AI systems cannot reliably classify your clinic's specialty from generic schema alone.

Fail — Level 2: No structured data detected at all. This means your website has no schema markup. AI systems must infer your clinic's type, services, and authority entirely from unstructured page content — an unreliable process that produces inconsistent citations.

Test 5: The Google Search Console AI Report — 3 Minutes

If your clinic has access to Google Search Console (it should — if it doesn't, this is worth setting up separately), log in and navigate to Search Results in the left sidebar. Look for a section called Generative AI or AI Overviews — this report was launched in June 2026. Filter by Search Type to separate AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions from traditional search impressions.

Pass: Your pages show AI Overview or AI Mode impressions — even a small number (10–50 per month) confirms your content is being indexed and cited in some AI-generated responses.

Fail: Zero AI impressions, or the report shows no data. This confirms that your pages are not being cited in Google AI Overviews or AI Mode responses for any queries. Combined with the other tests above, this gives you a complete picture of your AI visibility gap.

Scoring Your Results

Five passes: your AI visibility infrastructure is stronger than most independent clinics. Check your agentic readiness score to identify the remaining gaps.

Three to four passes: you have partial AI visibility. The failed tests are your priority gaps — address them in order of impact: robots.txt first, schema second, llms.txt third.

Zero to two passes: your clinic has very limited AI search visibility. The good news is that so do most of your competitors. The clinic in your market that closes these gaps first will own AI search recommendations in your specialty before the field normalises.

For a comprehensive scored assessment across all six AI visibility dimensions — beyond what these five manual tests cover — the free Iris agentic readiness audit takes 60 seconds and gives you a 0–100 score with specific gap identification. Run these five tests first to understand the territory, then use the audit to see the complete picture.