AI search for dental practices in Boulder.

What the September scan found

What it was: an automated scan of public web pages, using the same engine as the free scan on this site. It queries no answer engine and cannot see Google Business Profiles. It is not one of our seven Growth Snapshot batches — none has covered dentistry — so none of this is data from the Front Range AI Visibility Index.

How to read it: these were not neglected websites. The gap was the machine-readable layer. Half of the practices had not stated their address, phone and hours as structured data, and a third had none at all, which leaves an engine to infer the basic facts of a practice from its prose.

One result we no longer read as a gap. The lowest-scoring dimension was review and rating markup, and we would not advise adding it: Google treats ratings a business marks up about itself as self-serving and ineligible for review snippets, and ratings copied from other sites are not allowed. Patients' reviews do their work on Google and the platforms that collect them. That dimension pulled every overall score down under the rubric of the time; the scan stopped scoring the markup on September 13, so those scores are a rough ordering rather than a grade.

We have not published which practice scored what. They are our neighbors and possible clients, not exhibits.

What the work covers for a dental practice

1. Nothing blocking the engines

   robots.txt, CDN bot rules and noindex or nosnippet tags checked against the crawlers behind each answer: Googlebot for Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. And the Search Console setting for Google's generative AI features left on its default, which includes your site. These failures are cheap to check and absolute when they happen.

2. Profiles for the practice and its dentists

   Google's rules differ for a practice and the practitioners in it: in a group practice each dentist's profile carries their name alone, and Google recommends that a solo dentist practicing under a brand share one profile with the practice. We set yours up the way Google's guidelines describe, with the right categories, hours and services.

3. Business facts a machine can state

   Address, phone, hours and services in structured data, using the Dentist type and matching what the page shows and what your profile says. This is the gap half of the scanned practices had.

4. Reviews, inside four rulebooks

   Google allows asking and bans incentives and asking only the patients you expect to be happy. Yelp asks businesses not to solicit reviews at all. The FTC's rule bans fake reviews and paying for positive or negative ones. And a reply must never confirm that someone is a patient: HHS's Office for Civil Rights reached a settlement with a dental practice over patient information disclosed in its replies to Yelp reviews.

5. Pages for the questions patients ask

   Procedure pages, first-visit and emergency information, and plain statements about insurance and cost, written for patients and specific enough to quote. The review guide for dental practices and the structured data guide go deeper.

6. Measured every month

   The free scan before and after, and a dated log of the questions your customers ask — run in fresh sessions across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and repeated monthly. Answers vary between people and between days, so we report a repeated sample: whether you were named, how you were described, and who was named instead.

Where our evidence stops

• We have not measured how often Boulder patients ask an AI assistant to choose a dentist, and we will not estimate it.
• The scan read six websites. It did not read an answer, a Google Business Profile or a review platform.
• No Growth Snapshot batch has covered dentistry. The Index's finding that half of the 66 audited businesses we could sell to graded weak is about breweries, restaurants, fitness studios, salons and spas, and law offices — not dental practices.

In Boulder

Boulder is our home city, so in person is the default. The Boulder page sets out what our research batches found here in other trades, and local AI search services covers the same work for any local business.