How do I get my clinic to show up when someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation?

Our earlier post explains why a competitor gets named and you do not. This one is the how-to. It stays inside what Google and OpenAI publish about their own systems, because that is the firmest ground we have, even though the engines change these pages without notice (the sources line gives the day we read each one), and it labels the few judgments that are ours.

FirstWhat the engines say they need

Google is plain about its AI features: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." The one condition is the ordinary one: "a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet". And on files and markup: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add."

OpenAI is plain about access: "OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot robots.txt tags to enable webmasters to manage how their sites and content work with AI." The two are separate switches: "a webmaster can allow OAI-SearchBot in order to appear in search results while disallowing GPTBot". And when a person asks ChatGPT something, "it may visit a web page with a ChatGPT-User agent."

So the job is not a trick. It is being readable, reachable, consistent and clear. Four checks.

Check 1Can a crawler read your words?

If your clinic's name, city, treatments and prices live inside images, or appear only after a script runs, a crawler may read nothing. Google gives you its own eyes: the URL Inspection tool in Search Console can "See a screenshot of how the Google-InspectionTool sees the page." Open your homepage there. If the rendered page is blank where the words should be, that is the first thing to fix, before anything about AI.

Check 2Does your robots file let the right crawlers in?

Google: "A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site." Open yours at your domain followed by /robots.txt. A line that disallows everything for every user agent blocks the content for Google ("Google won't crawl or index the content blocked by a robots.txt file"), and OpenAI's page says that sites "opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links", and "we recommend allowing OAI-SearchBot in your site's robots.txt file" if you want to appear in its search results; one cause to check for is a block left on after a rebuild. If you want ChatGPT's search to find you and still keep your pages out of training, OpenAI's page says those are separate decisions, one bot each.

Check 3Does your structured data match the page?

Google's page on AI features and your website lists, among its search fundamentals, "Making sure your structured data matches the visible text on the page". Markup is not a ticket to an AI answer, by Google's own words above; markup that disagrees with the page is the thing to fix. If your site says one phone number in the text and another in the markup, or lists services the pages do not describe, fix the markup to match the page, not the other way round.

Check 4Do your pages answer real questions in plain words?

Google's guide puts this above everything else it suggests: "Creating content that people find unique, compelling, and useful will likely influence your website's presence in generative AI search in the long run more than any of the other suggestions in this guide." Our reading of that for a clinic, and it is ours: a page for each question a patient actually asks, with the answer in the first two sentences, and the clinic's name, city and the treatment stated in text on that page. Our reading, not a measurement: the clearest answer on the page is the one that gets quoted.

What we measuredSixty-five Orange County clinics

In July 2026 we read the live sites of 65 Orange County clinics and med spas by machine. The published finding, in the audit's own words: "We audited 65 live Orange County health and wellness websites." and "85% carry no FAQ markup, 45% carry no business entity markup". Read that with Google's line above in mind: markup is not required to be cited, so the numbers say how many had written their facts in a form a machine can match to the page, not how many an engine will quote. What no audit of markup can measure is check 4, the words themselves, and that is where the work is.

This weekFour checks, in this order

Inspect your homepage in Search Console and look at the screenshot. Open your robots.txt and read the first ten lines. Compare your structured data with the page it sits on. Then ask the question a patient would ask, in ChatGPT and in Google, and read what comes back and who is named. The terms on this page are defined in their sources' own words on our AI search glossary, and the service page is AI search optimization.

Sources, read 2 October 2026, Pacific time: Google Search Central, AI features and your website, Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search and Robots.txt introduction and guide; Search Console Help, URL Inspection tool; OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers; PELORA, the Orange County clinic AI visibility report (29 July 2026). Sentences are quoted as the pages read on that date; the engines change them without notice.