In our June 2026 scan of 111 Austin dental practices, Perplexity named 7 of them when a patient asked for the best dentist in town. ChatGPT hit a rate-limit error on 90 of the 111, so we could only read a result for 21, and of those it named just 1. Below is the full breakdown: the queries we ran, what the invisible practices have in common, and why a wall of five-star reviews doesn't fix it.
How many Austin dentists show up in AI answers?
Perplexity was the engine that actually worked here. Across all 111 practices, it returned a usable answer every time and named 7, about 6.3%. ChatGPT could only be checked on 21 of the 111 because 90 came back as rate-limit errors, and of those 21 it named 1. We report that as a count, not a rate — a sample of 21 is too small to turn into a trustworthy percentage.
Here is what each engine named, out of the practices we could actually read a result for. We tested ChatGPT and Perplexity. We did not test Gemini in this scan, so we do not publish a Gemini number.
| AI engine | Austin practices it named | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Perplexity | 7 of 111 | 6.3% |
| ChatGPT | 1 of the 21 we could read (90 more returned a rate-limit error) | too few readable results to state a rate |
| Gemini | Not measured in this scan | — |
| Either engine | 7 of 111 | 6.3% |
Source: Citevio scan of 111 Austin dental practices, June 24–25, 2026. ChatGPT returned a rate-limit error (API_ERROR_429) for 90 of the 111, so its count is figured on the 21 readable results only; we do not know the outcome for the other 90.
That 6.3% for Perplexity sits close to the 7.4% that SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index found nationally, across nearly 350,000 business locations. In that study, the authors put it plainly: AI visibility is "three to 30 times harder to achieve than ranking well in traditional local search." Austin's Perplexity number looks less like an anomaly and more like the national baseline showing up in one more city.
National comparison: SOCi 2026 Local Visibility Index, reported by Search Engine Land, January 2026. searchengineland.com
How we ran this scan
We took 111 Austin dental practices and asked ChatGPT and Perplexity the questions a patient would actually type, then recorded whether each engine named the practice, a competitor, or no one. The scan ran over about 13 hours on June 24–25, 2026. We report the date openly because AI answers change, and a result from June is a snapshot, not a permanent verdict.
All 111 practices were tested against the same four patient-style queries, with Austin as the location:
- "best dentist in Austin"
- "best cosmetic dentist in Austin"
- "best Invisalign dentist in Austin"
- "best dental implant dentist in Austin"
We started from 134 scan files and worked down to 111 genuine practices. That meant removing 22 non-dental businesses that had been swept up in the same local listings (a landscaping company, wood and stone suppliers, a plastic surgeon, a teeth-whitening-only studio, a nail salon, among others), and merging 2 pairs that turned out to be the same practice scanned twice under two different domain names with identical review profiles, confirmed by opening both sites. A practice counted as visible if an engine named it for at least one of its queries. AI answers also drift week to week: a 2025 Profound analysis found that roughly 40–60% of the sources an engine cites for a question change within a single month. So treat these numbers as this week's weather, and see how we measure AI visibility for the full method behind them.
Volatility figure: Profound domain-drift analysis, 2025 (~80,000 prompts per engine). tryprofound.com
What invisible practices have in common
The invisible Austin practices were not blocking AI or hiding. 106 of the 111 openly let AI crawlers in; only 2 blocked them outright. What most lacked was the next layer: complete structured data, and enough of an indexed footprint elsewhere for an engine to lean on. Opening the door to AI is necessary, but on its own it does almost nothing.
These signals came up again and again across the 111 practices:
| Signal | Austin practices | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt | 106 of 111 (95.5%) | Access is not the problem; only 2 practices actually blocked AI bots |
| Complete structured data (schema) | 5 of 111 (4.5%) | Structured data helps engines read a page; almost none had it fully in place |
| Weak or thin Bing index | 11 of the 101 we could measure (10.9%) | ChatGPT reads Bing's index; our Bing check itself timed out on 10 sites, so this covers what we could actually confirm |
Source: Citevio scan, June 2026. ChatGPT's reliance on Bing per Damian Rollison, Search Engine Land, 2025. searchengineland.com
The robots number is the one that surprises most owners. Of the 106 practices that openly welcomed AI crawlers, 99 still never appeared in either engine. Letting the bots in is table stakes, not a strategy. Structured data (the behind-the-scenes labels that tell an engine "this is a dentist, here are the hours and services") was missing or incomplete on 95.5% of the sites we checked. One curiosity worth flagging rather than building a theory on: the single practice ChatGPT did name also carried a thin Bing footprint by our read. We are not claiming a thin index doesn't matter — only that in this one case it did not block the outcome. The pattern that does hold across the sample is the one above: readable is not the same as retrievable or well-referenced, and that gap is what keeps most of Austin out of the answer.
Does a five-star rating help?
Not by itself. The Austin practices named by neither engine averaged 4.82 stars, with a median of 231 reviews. Ninety-one percent of them already sat at 4.5 stars or higher, comfortably above the roughly 4.3-star level AI engines favor. Seven of them held 700 or more reviews at 4.8 stars or better. Reviews clear the bar, but they are not what gets you named.
This is the finding most owners find hardest to accept, because they have worked for years to build that reputation. The numbers below are only for the practices named by neither engine:
One invisible practice carried 1,426 reviews at 4.8 stars, more than any practice either engine actually named. If reviews alone decided AI recommendations, it would be first on every list. It is on none. ChatGPT and Perplexity already assume a good dentist has good reviews, so above the roughly 4.3-star line, more stars barely move the needle. What moves it is whether the engine can find and trust your practice through structured data and citations from elsewhere. Google reviews still matter for patients and for the map pack; they are just not the lever for AI visibility once you clear the floor.
Three practices that should be everywhere, and aren't
To show what "invisible" looks like in practice, here are three real Austin practices from the scan, kept anonymous. Each has a reputation most clinics would envy. None was named by ChatGPT or Perplexity for any of the four queries. The gap between their reputation and their AI visibility is the story of this whole report.
The 7 practices Perplexity did name were not bigger or better reviewed than these three — one surfaced with just 211 reviews. That is the pattern worth sitting with: in Austin right now, being findable beats being famous.
What Austin dentists can do about it
Start by seeing what a patient sees, then fix the plumbing before the polish. Check your own practice in ChatGPT and Perplexity, add the structured data that helps engines read you, and keep your business details identical everywhere. None of it requires paying an engine for placement, and most of it is the same work whether you do it yourself or hire help.
Two next steps, in order:
- See where you stand today. Run the same queries we did — "best dentist in Austin", "best cosmetic dentist in Austin", "best Invisalign dentist in Austin", "best dental implant dentist in Austin" — or read how to check what ChatGPT says about your practice for the step-by-step version.
- Fix what's keeping you out. Structured data, indexing and consistency, in that order. The full sequence is in how to get your dental practice recommended by ChatGPT.
We run this same scan in other cities too. If you work outside Austin, the Charlotte dentists report and the Columbus dentists report use the identical method on different markets. Or check your own practice in about two minutes below.