In our June 2026 scan of 154 Charlotte dental practices, ChatGPT named just 2 of them when a patient asked for the best dentist in town. The other 152, about 99%, never appeared. Perplexity was nearly as sparse. 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 Charlotte dentists show up in AI answers?
Very few. Across 154 practices, ChatGPT recommended 2 and Perplexity recommended 3. Just 5 surfaced in either engine in our scan. That means roughly 96–99% of Charlotte dentists are missing from the AI answers patients now read before they book. The rate is low everywhere, but it is not random, and the next sections show what separates the handful that surface.
Here is what each engine named, out of the practices we could read it for. We tested ChatGPT and Perplexity. We did not test Gemini in this scan, so we do not publish a Gemini number.
| AI engine | Charlotte practices it named | Share |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 2 of 154 | 1.3% |
| Perplexity | 3 of the 135 it returned a readable result for | 2.2% |
| Gemini | Not measured in this scan | — |
| Either engine | 5 of 154 | 3.2% |
Source: Citevio scan of 154 Charlotte dental practices, June 6–23, 2026. Perplexity returned an error for 19 of the 154, so its rate is figured on the 135 readable results.
That 1.3% for ChatGPT is not a Charlotte problem. It almost exactly matches the 1.2% 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." So if ChatGPT has never named your practice, you are sitting with almost every other dentist in the city, not behind them.
National comparison: SOCi 2026 Local Visibility Index, reported by Search Engine Land, January 2026. searchengineland.com
How did we run this scan?
We took 154 Charlotte 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 from June 6 to 23, 2026. We report the date openly because AI answers change, and a result from June is a snapshot, not a permanent verdict.
For Charlotte, transparency also includes how the underlying research can be reused. Citevio's dental market research is published openly under CC-BY-4.0 with a DOI, so the numbers can be checked and reused; client data is never published.
Most practices, 130 of the 154, were tested against the same four patient-style queries, with Charlotte as the location:
- "best dentist in Charlotte"
- "best cosmetic dentist in Charlotte"
- "best Invisalign dentist in Charlotte"
- "best dental implant dentist in Charlotte"
The other 24 practices, scanned in an earlier batch, were tested on a similar set of local queries, including "cosmetic dentist Charlotte" and "Charlotte dentist open Saturday." The result held across both: 23 of those 24 appeared in neither engine. A practice counted as visible if an engine named it for at least one of its queries. We started from 177 scan files, removed duplicates and a handful of non-dental businesses that shared a listing (a masonry company, a furniture store, a couple of dental labs), and landed on 154 genuine practices. 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 June'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
A permanent record beyond this dated city page is available under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22016876.
What do invisible practices have in common?
The invisible Charlotte practices were not blocking AI or hiding. Only 4 of the 154 blocked AI crawlers at all; 147 openly let them in. What most lacked was the next layer: solid indexing in Bing, complete structured data, and mentions elsewhere on the web. Opening the door to AI is necessary, but on its own it does almost nothing.
These three signals came up again and again across the 154 practices:
| Signal | Charlotte practices | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt | 147 of 154 (95%) | Access is not the problem; only 4 practices actually blocked AI bots |
| Complete structured data (schema) | 3 of 154 (2%) | Structured data helps engines read a page; almost none had it fully in place |
| Weak or thin Bing index | at least 22 of 154 (14%) | ChatGPT leans on Bing's index, so a thin Bing footprint limits what it can retrieve |
Source: Citevio scan, June 2026. ChatGPT's reliance on Bing per Damian Rollison, Search Engine Land, 2025. searchengineland.com
The Charlotte crawler reading above is not a nationwide denominator. Citevio's separate national study read 6,497 readable US dental practice robots.txt files on 22 July 2026 and tested 13 AI and data crawlers.
The robots number is the one that surprises most owners. Of the 147 practices that openly welcomed AI crawlers, 145 still never appeared in ChatGPT. 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") is a reading aid, not a magic trigger, and it was missing or incomplete on 98% of the sites we checked. The pattern is consistent: these practices are readable, but they are not retrievable or well-referenced, and that is what keeps them out of the answer.
Does a five-star rating help?
Not by itself. The Charlotte practices ChatGPT skipped averaged 4.82 stars, with a median of 264 reviews. Ninety-one percent of them already sat at 4.5 stars or higher, comfortably above the 4.3-star average of the locations ChatGPT recommended in SOCi's 2026 index. Eighteen invisible practices held 700 or more reviews. Reviews are not the missing piece — something else decides who gets 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 ChatGPT did not recommend:
One invisible practice carried a 5.0-star rating on nearly 3,000 reviews. If reviews alone decided AI recommendations, it would be first on every list. It is on none. That is the whole point: ChatGPT already assumes a good dentist has good reviews, and since the locations it does recommend average about 4.3 stars, more stars barely move the needle. What moves it is whether the engine can find and trust your practice through indexing, 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.
The broader question of whether Google reviews carry any weight with ChatGPT at all is examined directly in whether Google reviews move a ChatGPT answer.
Which three practices should be everywhere, and aren't?
To show what "invisible" looks like in practice, here are three real Charlotte 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 five practices that did surface were not bigger or better reviewed than these three. One of the two ChatGPT named was among the very few with complete structured data on its site. That is the pattern worth sitting with: in Charlotte right now, being findable beats being famous.
What can Charlotte dentists 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, confirm your site is indexed in Bing, 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 Charlotte", "best cosmetic dentist in Charlotte", "best Invisalign dentist in Charlotte", "best dental implant dentist in Charlotte" — or read how to check what ChatGPT says about your practice for the step-by-step version.
- Fix what's keeping you out. Indexing, structured data, reviews 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 Charlotte, the Columbus dentists report uses the identical method on a different market. Or check your own practice in about two minutes below.
Citevio publishes its pricing: Visibility is $1,400/mo plus $1,900 setup, Authority is $2,900/mo plus $3,500 setup, and Dominance is $5,500/mo plus $7,500 setup. Citevio does not guarantee placement, but it does guarantee the fee: if at least two of the four engines have not named the practice in one of the commercial-intent questions agreed at onboarding within 45 days of confirmed setup, the setup fee is refunded in full. Read the pricing and terms