In our June 2026 scan of 64 Raleigh dental practices, ChatGPT named zero of them when a patient asked for the best dentist in town. Perplexity's answers could barely be read in this scan. 63 of 64 queries returned an authentication error, not a visibility result, and the single valid reading is too small a sample to publish a rate for. 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 Raleigh dentists show up in AI answers?
None, on the one engine we could fully read. Across 64 practices, ChatGPT recommended zero. We could barely get a readable answer from Perplexity: 63 of the 64 queries in this batch came back as an authentication error, which is a data gap, not a visibility finding, and the one valid reading is too small a sample to score. What we can say with confidence: 0 of 64 Raleigh dental practices were named by ChatGPT.
Here is what each engine returned, out of the practices we could read it for. We tested ChatGPT and attempted Perplexity. We did not test Gemini in this scan, so we do not publish a Gemini number.
| AI engine | Raleigh practices it named | Share |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 0 of 64 | 0% |
| Perplexity | Not readable in this scan | — |
| Gemini | Not measured in this scan | — |
Source: Citevio scan of 64 Raleigh dental practices, June 24, 2026. 63 of the 64 Perplexity queries in this batch returned an authentication error before they could return a result; the remaining one is too small a sample to score.
Zero is below the 1.2% that SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index found nationally for ChatGPT, across nearly 350,000 business locations. With a sample of 64, a single visible practice would already push Raleigh's rate above that national average, so treat this as a small, real snapshot rather than proof that Raleigh is uniquely invisible. What it does mean: right now, if your practice has never been named by ChatGPT, you are not the exception in Raleigh, you are the pattern.
National comparison: SOCi 2026 Local Visibility Index, reported by Search Engine Land, January 2026. searchengineland.com
How we ran this scan
We took 64 Raleigh dental practices and asked ChatGPT the questions a patient would actually type, then recorded whether it named the practice, a competitor, or no one. The scan ran on June 24, 2026. We report the date openly because AI answers change, and a result from June is a snapshot, not a permanent verdict.
All 64 practices were tested against the same four patient-style queries, with Raleigh as the location:
- "best dentist in Raleigh"
- "best cosmetic dentist in Raleigh"
- "best Invisalign dentist in Raleigh"
- "best dental implant dentist in Raleigh"
A practice counted as visible if ChatGPT named it for at least one of the four queries. We started from 87 candidate listings pulled from local search data, and 23 of those turned out not to be dental practices at all once we checked them: beauty and spa businesses, a stone and tile supplier, three plastic surgery practices, a dental lab, a furniture restoration shop, and similar non-dental listings that shared a search result with real dentists. After removing those, we were left with 64 genuine Raleigh dental 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
What invisible practices have in common
The invisible Raleigh practices were mostly not blocking AI. Only 1 of the 64 blocked AI crawlers outright; 62 openly let them in. What most lacked was the next layer: complete structured data on their site. We also tried to check each practice's Bing index, since ChatGPT is known to draw on Bing for local answers, but a rate-limit error blocked all but one lookup in this batch, so we cannot report a Bing figure for Raleigh this round.
These signals came up across the 64 practices we scanned:
| Signal | Raleigh practices | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt | 62 of 64 (97%) | Access is not the problem; only 1 practice actually blocked AI bots |
| Complete structured data (schema) | 2 of 64 (3%) | Structured data helps engines read a page; almost none had it fully in place |
| Bing index | Not measurable this round | A rate-limit error blocked every check in this batch; we're flagging the gap rather than guessing |
Source: Citevio scan, June 24, 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 62 practices that openly welcomed AI crawlers, not one 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 97% of the sites we checked. The pattern is consistent with what we've found in other cities: 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 Raleigh practices ChatGPT skipped averaged 4.86 stars, with a median of 240 reviews. Every one of them already sat at 4.3 stars or higher, the rough level AI engines favor. One invisible practice held over 1,700 reviews. 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 ChatGPT did not recommend, which in Raleigh's case is all 64:
One invisible practice carried a 4.6-star rating on more than 1,700 reviews. If reviews alone decided AI recommendations, it would be near the top of any list. It was named by no one. That is the whole point: ChatGPT already assumes a good dentist has good reviews, so above roughly the 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 Raleigh practices from the scan, kept anonymous. Each has a reputation most clinics would envy. None was named by ChatGPT for any of the four queries. The gap between their reputation and their AI visibility is the story of this whole report.
Only 2 of the 64 practices in this scan had complete structured data on their site. Neither was named by ChatGPT either, which tells you something important: complete schema alone did not flip the switch. It is a precondition, not a guarantee, alongside indexing and being mentioned elsewhere on the web.
What Raleigh 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 Raleigh", "best cosmetic dentist in Raleigh", "best Invisalign dentist in Raleigh", "best dental implant dentist in Raleigh", 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, 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 Raleigh, the Nashville dentists report and the Charlotte dentists report use the identical method on different markets. Or check your own practice in about two minutes below.