Nearly 50% of Patients Ask AI to Find a Healthcare Provider — Here’s How You Get Recommended Locally

Local patients begin their search for the right healthcare provider the same way they’d research other consumer decisions — like the best plumber in the area or the best-value hotel room in Miami. But the closer they get to booking or calling a practice, the more thorough they become.

They might check Google for a name, scan the reviews for how the practice handles patients who are anxious or in pain, check whether they take a certain insurance, and see how far the practice is on the map. Now, 47% of patients surveyed have used AI tools — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews — to narrow their list before they click through to a website.

At Uberall, we talk to multi-location healthcare organizations every week, and the same problem comes up a lot: Their location data is incorrect or inconsistent — and they have to manually manage it. On top of that, reviews are coming in on Zocdoc, Healthgrades and Yelp, but nobody’s monitoring or responding to them. All of this manual fixing and checking is costing them patience and patients.

This is the healthcare marketing strategy we recommend to organizations — from hospitals and elderly care homes to clinics, labs, imaging centers, and mental health or rehabilitation facilities. To perform better in local search, make sure you’re continuously looking at the four pillars of Location Performance Optimization (LPO): visibility, reputation, engagement, and conversion.

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AI Mentions the Practice It Knows Most About, Not the One With the Most Locations

Before looking at patient retention or engagement, make sure patients can actually find and trust you online. Better yet, make sure AI systems can find and trust you, too.

Our client ResMed, a global medical device and digital health company, centralizes its listings management with the Uberall platform, where a single update to an address or opening hours pushes out to every platform and location at once. With accurate, consistent profiles everywhere patients look, their Google Maps views climbed 28%, phone clicks rose 19%, and direction and website clicks grew 19% and 11%.

But what about beyond Google? Does any of that matter for AI search?

Well, when our GEO/SEO analyst Katya Shishchenko studied how AI recommends various businesses, including dental practices (read more about the methodology here), it wasn’t the big dental groups with the most locations and large market share that AI tools recommended. The big dental groups made up just 4.4% of AI recommendations, while independent practices took 72%.

That’s because AI recommends the practices it has the most consistent, specific information about, not the ones with the most locations.

Centralizing where you manage your listings across platforms and paying close attention to multi-location accuracy (business name, hours, services, insurance information) sounds like a dull AI strategy, but it’s really the best place to start in this industry.

That’s exactly what my team discussed in a webinar with the Society for Health Care Strategy and Market Development (SHSMD), featuring Krystal Taing, our VP of Solutions, who explains:

“AI is acting more like an investigator. It’s evaluating all these signals to answer one question: Can I confidently recommend this provider? And that confidence comes from consistency.”

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Every profile — whether it’s for urgent care, an imaging clinic, or a rehab facility — needs to be accurate, verified, and complete. That’s across Google Business Profile (GBP), Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp, Facebook, Zocdoc, Healthgrades, and industry directories (insurance networks, hospital finders, local healthcare associations).

Which Location Information Do You Need to Keep Consistent?

• NAP: name, address, phone number
• Primary and secondary categories
• Business hours, including walk-in or emergency availability
• Appointment options (in-person, virtual, referral-based)
• Pricing and accepted insurance plans
• Specialties and individual practitioner profiles
• Accessibility features
• Patient reviews and ratings
• Photos of the facility and staff
• Posts about health campaigns or new services

Every location also needs clear ways to act: a “Book Online” button, a link to your patient portal, telehealth options, insurance details, a phone number that connects. This matters more now, because as Christian notes in the webinar, AI tools increasingly put your contact details straight into the answer. A patient might call you before they’ve seen your website.

Local Landing Pages for Practices and Clinics

Give every healthcare location its own landing page targeting local keywords (“orthopedic specialist in Chicago”), schema markup for your medical services, and clear internal links.

Each one should display photos, a map, and the services offered at that site, and you should link to it from your listings, social posts, and campaigns rather than to a generic homepage. Doing this makes that location, not just your healthcare brand, as visible as possible to patients and search engines.

A few schema types worth implementing:

• @type: MedicalClinic, Hospital, Dentist, Pharmacy, Optician, VeterinaryCare
• Essentials: name, image, url, telephone, address, geo, openingHoursSpecification, areaServed
• Conversions: ReserveAction, ScheduleAction for online booking
• Other: FAQPage

This isn’t an exhaustive list; see Schema.org for the full set.

AI Mentions the Practices With Twice the Reviews, Not the Ones With the Best Ratings

“AI does not go at it the way Google did with those blue links. It’s based on a confidence score. The biggest mindset shift is that AI evaluates confidence — that’s how it recommends one hospital group or provider over another.”
— Christian Hustle, AI Search Evangelist, Uberall

You could have the most advanced equipment and the best-trained consultants, but if your reviews are low in volume, lack detail, or are unanswered, patients will choose another healthcare provider.

When Katya studied how AI recommends dental practices, for instance, star rating barely mattered. Across five review platforms (GBP, Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Yelp, and Vitals), not one rating score reliably predicted whether a practice got mentioned. What predicted a mention was review volume and the number of photos on the Google Business Profile (I’ll talk more about this below).

More reviews meant more recommendations: Practices with 1,000+ reviews were mentioned around 93% of the time, and the ones AI models mentioned had an average of more than double the reviews of the practices AI models left out of their responses.

Your healthcare marketing strategy shouldn’t be chasing a higher star average. Build a steady stream of recent, specific reviews, because that’s the signal AI models read as a real, active, trusted practice. And here’s a fun fact from our research: The average healthcare location receives 0.67 reviews a month; top performers get nearly four.

Providers should focus on delivering a good patient experience, ask every patient for feedback, and not fear the occasional less-than-perfect review. Patients tend to trust businesses with a real mix of star ratings.

Replying to these reviews with more than “Thank you for your feedback” is the next step — and doing that at scale for multi-location providers. The top healthcare teams respond to more than 99% of their reviews.

GBP Photos Are the Strongest Signal for Getting Mentioned by AI, and Most Practices Don’t Upload Regularly

Engagement is the part of your healthcare marketing strategy that keeps patients connected to you outside appointments.

Signals like scroll depth, clicks, and time on page are considered local ranking factors, so fresh website content that patients actually read helps your practice in both traditional and AI search.

The content still has to match how patients search. It’s just that they’re now asking more specifically.

For example, as Christian and Krystal point out in the webinar, not many search for “doctor near me” anymore; they type “primary care doctor who takes my insurance and has Tuesday morning appointments.” And the 47% asking AI are usually the most specific of all.

Treatment service pages and practice pages that answer those exact questions are what lead an AI model to flag you as the worthy answer.

Beyond your website, keep patients connected by updating your Google Business Profile, Apple Business profile, and socials with simple updates (seasonal health tips, vaccination reminders), new services, educational posts, and community news. In fact, Katya’s analysis found that profile categories, photos, Q&A, and posts all improve a profile’s AI visibility.

In Katya’s AI visibility study, the number of photos on a dental practice’s Google Business Profile predicted whether AI would mention that practice — and how often — more closely than star rating or number of locations did.

Photos don’t need captions to work: Google reads the image itself, so a shot of your reception area or your team in the corridor tells search systems what kind of place you are before a patient reads a word.

Social matters here too. In Katya’s study, the dental practices AI mentioned had nearly five times the Facebook following of the ones it skipped — so a Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok presence that people actually follow feeds the recommendation, not just the brand.

Krystal makes this point in the webinar: Social doesn’t replace AI search, it complements it. A patient finds a physician on TikTok, then goes to ChatGPT to check the reviews and whether they take her insurance. If your social presence sends people to an AI that can’t find you, you’ve lost them at the second step. So engage them before and between visits.

Ideas for social content:

• Behind-the-scenes glimpses of your care teams
• Health awareness campaigns or seasonal wellness tips
• Community partnerships and charity events
• Staff spotlights or patient success stories (with consent)
• Short video of a clinician explaining a common procedure or answering a common worry
• Updates about new facilities, technologies, or programs
• Pre-answers to regular patient Q&As

Be the Answer for the Half of Your Next Patients Asking AI First

What we tell multi-location healthcare marketing teams every week — often the ones fixing listings manually by platform and by location, and letting reviews pile up unanswered — is that cleaning location data is prio 1, followed closely by the reviews and social activity.

I’m going to borrow this advice from Krystal, and it takes five minutes. Open ChatGPT — or whichever AI tool you’re using — and ask for a provider in your specialty in your city, the way a patient would. You can specify details like insurance coverage, weekday preference, neighborhood. If you come up, check that what it says about you is true. If you don’t come up, investigate who does, because their listings, reviews, and photos are the ones matching each other.