In our June 2026 scan of 42 Tampa dental practices, ChatGPT named zero of them when a patient asked for the best dentist in town. Not one. Perplexity could not be read at all for this city — every request came back as an authentication error, so we have no usable Perplexity result to report. Below is what each engine returned, what the invisible practices share, and why being indexed and well reviewed did not put a single one into ChatGPT's answer.
How many Tampa dentists show up in AI answers?
Almost none. ChatGPT named 0 of 42 Tampa practices, and every one of the 42 requests came back with a readable result, so this is not a small or noisy sample — it is the full set. Perplexity was not readable in this scan at all.
Here is what each engine returned, and the base we measured it against. We tested ChatGPT and Perplexity. We did not test Gemini in this scan, so we do not publish a Gemini number.
| AI engine | Tampa practices it named | Base measured |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 0 | all 42, fully readable |
| Perplexity | Not readable in this scan | 0 of 42 (all authentication errors) |
| Gemini | Not measured in this scan | n/a |
Source: Citevio scan of 42 Tampa dental practices, June 24, 2026. ChatGPT was readable for all 42, which is why the zero is the number we stand behind. Perplexity returned an authentication error (API_ERROR_401) for all 42, so we do not report a Perplexity figure for Tampa.
Zero is not an outlier here. SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index found ChatGPT visibility of just 1.2% nationally, across nearly 350,000 business locations. At that rate, a scan of 42 practices would expect fewer than one visible result. Zero is exactly what the national number predicts for a sample this size, not evidence that Tampa is worse off than anywhere else.
National comparison: SOCi 2026 Local Visibility Index, reported by Search Engine Land, January 2026. searchengineland.com
How did we run this scan?
We took 42 Tampa 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 in a single ~53-minute window on June 24, 2026. We publish the date because AI answers change, and a June result is a snapshot rather than a permanent verdict.
Tampa's unreturned measurements are disclosed alongside the usable ones, and the underlying research follows the same openness rule. 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.
All 42 practices were tested against the same four patient-style queries, with Tampa as the location:
- "best dentist in Tampa"
- "best cosmetic dentist in Tampa"
- "best Invisalign dentist in Tampa"
- "best dental implant dentist in Tampa"
We started from 50 scan files that resolved to distinct practice websites and worked down to 42 genuine practices, after removing 8 non-dental businesses that had been swept up in the same local listings, including a gold-teeth jewelry shop, a dental warranty company with no clinic of its own, a dental laboratory that doesn't see patients, a plastic surgery practice, and a general health clinic with no dental service listed. We checked that ChatGPT was genuinely working rather than silently failing: in all 42 cases it named other, real businesses in its answer, just never the one we were testing. 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 this as a snapshot, and see how we measure AI visibility for the full method behind it.
Volatility figure: Profound domain-drift analysis, 2025 (~80,000 prompts per engine). tryprofound.com
For a persistent citation rather than this page's update date, use DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22016876.
What do invisible practices have in common?
Not what most owners assume. They were not blocking AI, and they were not hiding from it. 38 of the 42 openly let AI crawlers in, and the other 4 simply had no robots.txt file we could find — none were found actively blocking AI bots. What almost all of them lacked was complete structured data, the kind of behind-the-scenes labeling that helps an engine read a page as a dental practice rather than just text.
One thing this scan does not cover: the Bing and Foursquare checks returned API errors on all 42 practices, so there is no reading to report for either. We publish no Bing or Foursquare figure for this city, because an unreturned measurement is not the same finding as a measured "weak" result, and the two are never reported the same way.
| Signal | Tampa practices | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt | 38 of 42 (90.5%) | Access is not the problem; none were found actively blocking AI bots |
| Complete structured data (schema) | 4 of 42 (9.5%) | Almost none had it fully in place |
| Bing / Foursquare index | Measurement failed for all 42 | Both checks hit API errors on every practice; no figure to report |
Source: Citevio scan, June 2026.
No active block in this Tampa sample should be generalized to the country. 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 38 practices that openly welcomed AI crawlers, all 38 still never appeared in ChatGPT. Letting the bots in is table stakes, not a strategy. Structured data was missing or incomplete on 90.5% of the sites we checked. As Damian Rollison described in Search Engine Land in 2025, ChatGPT "performs a Bing search for the relevant local query, gathers 20-30 of the top web results returned by Bing, and organizes those results using its own logic." We cannot test that mechanism against Tampa's own Bing footprint this time, since our Bing check failed outright, but the underlying pattern — readable is not the same as retrievable or well-referenced — is consistent with what we found here through structured data alone.
ChatGPT's reliance on Bing per Damian Rollison, Search Engine Land, May 2025. searchengineland.com
Does a five-star rating help?
Not by itself. The Tampa practices ChatGPT skipped averaged 4.85 stars, with a median of 324 reviews (n=39; 3 practices had no Google rating on file). 97.4% 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. Three of them held 700 or more reviews at 4.8 stars or better. 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 1,634 reviews at 4.5 stars, more reviews than any Tampa practice in our scan. If reviews alone decided AI recommendations, it would be first on every list. It is on none. 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 structured data and citations 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.
Which three practices should be everywhere, and aren't?
To show what "invisible" looks like in practice, here are three real Tampa 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.
Because ChatGPT named zero Tampa practices in this scan, there is no "winner" to compare these three against. That is itself the finding: reputation this strong should be the easiest case for an AI engine to recommend, and in Tampa right now, none of it was enough.
What can Tampa dentists do about it?
Start by seeing what a patient sees, then fix the plumbing before the polish. Check your own practice in ChatGPT, 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 Tampa", "best cosmetic dentist in Tampa", "best Invisalign dentist in Tampa", "best dental implant dentist in Tampa" — 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 and consistency first, since that is what this scan could actually confirm was missing. 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 Tampa, the Austin dentists report and the Columbus dentists report use the identical method on different markets. 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