How AI search is changing the way patients find doctors

More patients now ask an AI assistant, not just a search box, questions like “Which dermatologist near me treats eczema?” Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Gemini answer with a short summary and a few cited sources. To become one of those sources, your practice needs pages these tools can read, plain answers to patient questions, and business information that matches everywhere it appears.

This is no longer a niche habit. A KFF poll published in March 2026 found that about one in three US adults had used an AI chatbot for health information in the past year.

Which AI search tools are patients using?

Google AI Overviews and AI Mode: AI-generated answers inside Google Search. To be shown as a source, a page must be indexed in Google and eligible to show a snippet.
ChatGPT search: OpenAI’s search feature, which uses its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, along with partner search providers.
Perplexity: an answer engine that cites its sources and indexes the web with PerplexityBot.
Microsoft Copilot: grounds its answers in queries it sends to the Bing search service.
Gemini: Google’s assistant, which can ground its answers in content from the Google Search index.

How do AI assistants choose which practices to mention?

None of these companies publishes a complete recipe, and nobody can guarantee that an assistant will cite your practice. What they do document points to familiar foundations:

Access. A tool can only cite pages its crawler can reach. OpenAI says that to appear in ChatGPT search answers, a site must allow OAI-SearchBot, and its host or CDN must not block OpenAI’s crawler.
Indexing. Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations for AI Overviews or AI Mode. The usual SEO fundamentals apply.
Clear text. Google recommends keeping important content in text form and making sure structured data matches what is visible on the page.
Current business information. Google also advises keeping your Business Profile up to date.
Trust. For health topics, Google gives extra weight to experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, and expects content to be accurate and consistent with expert consensus.

Reviews, consistent listings and mentions on reputable sites, such as hospital affiliations, medical associations and local news, are signals patients and search engines already use to judge a practice. No assistant publishes how much they weigh, but strengthening them is a sound bet.

What can a practice do to show up in AI answers?

Answer patient questions plainly. Start each service page with two or three sentences that say what the treatment is, who it is for and how to book. Add a short FAQ with the questions your front desk hears every day. Our medical website checklist covers the rest of the page.
Show who wrote and reviewed the content. Add physician bylines or “medically reviewed by” lines with credentials, linked to full bios. Google encourages accurate authorship information.
Add structured data. Use schema.org types such as MedicalClinic and Physician. Google says AI features need no special schema, but it does use structured data to understand page content.
Keep your name, address and phone identical on your website, Google Business Profile, Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Yelp and insurance directories. Our local SEO checklist covers this step by step.
Keep earning reviews, and reply without exposing patient information, as explained in our guide to patient reviews.
Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools. Copilot relies on Bing, so being indexed there matters. Since February 2026, Bing Webmaster Tools has offered an AI Performance report, in public preview, that shows how often your pages are cited in Copilot and in Bing’s AI-generated summaries.

Which AI crawlers should you allow in robots.txt?

Your robots.txt file tells crawlers what they may read. Most AI companies run separate bots for search and for model training, so you can choose deliberately:

Search crawlers: OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), PerplexityBot (Perplexity) and Claude-SearchBot (Anthropic’s Claude), along with Googlebot and Bing’s crawler. Blocking them can keep your pages out of those tools’ answers.
Training controls: GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic) and Google-Extended, which governs use of your content for training Gemini models and for grounding in Gemini apps. Google says Google-Extended does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search; AI Overviews follow your Googlebot rules.

Allowing training crawlers is a business decision, not a requirement for appearing in AI search. Also note that user-triggered fetchers such as ChatGPT-User and Perplexity-User may not follow robots.txt, and that firewall or CDN bot settings can block AI crawlers even when robots.txt allows them.

Can you measure traffic from AI search?

Only partly, and measurement is still immature. Google Search Console counts clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode in its regular Performance report, under the “Web” search type, without separating them. Bing’s AI Performance report counts citations, not visits. And an answer that names your practice may lead to a phone call rather than a click.

The practical approach is to track calls, booking requests and new-patient forms, and to ask new patients how they found you. Add “AI assistant (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.)” as an option on your intake form. If you use analytics on a medical website, read our guide to HIPAA and tracking pixels first.

Related service: SEO for medical practices

Want to know how AI search sees your practice?

Our free marketing diagnosis reviews your website, search presence, Business Profile and reputation, the same foundations AI assistants draw on, and gives you a short list of priorities.