Patients do use AI to find local businesses: 45% of US consumers asked an AI tool for a business recommendation in the past year, according to BrightLocal's 2026 survey, and OpenAI says over 230 million people ask ChatGPT health questions weekly. Practices are mostly missing from the answers. In our June 2026 scans, ChatGPT named 2 of 212 dental practices.
This page measures the demand side: what patients do, which tools they reach for, and whether they believe what comes back. Two kinds of numbers appear below. The first kind comes from named, dated studies you can open and read yourself. The second comes from our own scans of real dental markets. No one has published a national figure for how many patients use AI specifically to find a dentist, so this page gives the closest measured data rather than inventing that number.
| What was measured | Figure | Source and year |
|---|---|---|
| US consumers who used an AI tool for a local business recommendation, past year | 45% (up from 6%) | BrightLocal, 2026 |
| People asking ChatGPT health and wellness questions each week | 230M+ | OpenAI, Jan 2026 |
| ChatGPT weekly active users | 900M+ | OpenAI, Feb 2026 |
| Share of ChatGPT messages that seek information or advice for a decision | ~49% | NBER, Sept 2025 |
| US adults who sought physical health information from AI, past year | 29% | KFF, Mar 2026 |
| Share of locations ChatGPT recommends in local queries | 1.2% | SOCi, 2026 |
Do patients actually use AI to find a dentist?
Yes, and the share moved quickly. In BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 45% of US consumers said they had used an AI tool for a local business recommendation in the past year, up from 6% a year earlier. ChatGPT was the most used tool at 31%. That survey covers local businesses as a group, not dentists on their own.
Age splits that number sharply. 64% of consumers aged 30 to 44 had asked AI for a business recommendation, against 24% of those aged 60 and over. That split matters for a cosmetic practice, because the 30 to 44 band is also where a lot of elective treatment demand sits. We are reading across two things there, so treat that last point as our inference rather than a measured finding.
This is self-reported survey data from 1,002 US adults, not observed behavior, and 455 of them were AI users. A jump from 6% to 45% in a single year is very large for a survey question, and some of it will be growing awareness and question wording rather than pure growth. We would read it as a direction that is clearly up and clearly fast, not as a precise share of your patients.
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. View the Zenodo data
The permanent identifier for that published research is DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22016876.
How many people ask AI about health each week?
OpenAI said in January 2026 that over 230 million people ask health and wellness questions on ChatGPT each week. That sits inside a service with more than 900 million weekly active users. Dental questions are part of that volume, but no one has published a dental slice of it.
The shape of the question matters as much as the count. In an NBER working paper published in September 2025, researchers classified about 1.1 million de-identified ChatGPT conversations from May 2024 to June 2025 and found that roughly 49% of messages fall into the category the paper calls Asking, meaning messages that seek information or advice to support a decision. The study does not break that category down by industry, so the link to dentistry is our reading rather than its finding: choosing a dentist is the same shape of question, which is why this category of usage matters more to a practice than the headline user count does.
Independent polling puts a floor under the health numbers. KFF's tracking poll on health information and trust, fielded from 24 February to 2 March 2026 among 1,343 US adults, found that 29% had sought physical health information from AI tools in the past year. These are health and wellness figures, not dental ones, and we are not going to pretend otherwise: the dental share is a slice of this, and nobody has measured it yet.
Which AI engine are patients actually using?
ChatGPT, by a clear margin. In BrightLocal's 2026 survey, 31% of consumers had used ChatGPT for a business recommendation in the past 12 months and 23% had used Google's AI Mode. Being used most and naming the most businesses are different things, though. ChatGPT recommends local businesses less often than any other AI engine in the SOCi index.
| Tool | Consumers who used it for a business recommendation (past 12 months) | Share of locations it recommends in local queries |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 31% | 1.2% |
| Google AI Mode | 23% | not in the figures we cite |
| Google Gemini | not given separately | 11% |
| Perplexity | not given separately | 7.4% |
| Google local 3-pack (not AI) | not applicable | 35.9% |
The distance between how often patients reach for ChatGPT and how often ChatGPT names a business is the problem in one line: the most used tool recommends the fewest businesses. Search Engine Land's report on the SOCi index puts it plainly: "AI visibility is three to 30 times harder to achieve than ranking well in traditional local search."
One caution about Gemini. It recommends locations more often than any other AI engine in the SOCi index, at 11%, but Gemini was not included in Citevio's own scans, so none of our scan figures say anything about it.
Do patients trust what AI tells them about a dentist?
Trust splits sharply on whether someone has tried it. In KFF's March 2026 poll, 69% of adults who had used AI for health advice trusted it to give reliable health information, against 18% of those who had not. Trust is not blind, though: 97% of AI users in BrightLocal's survey said they sometimes check an AI recommendation against real reviews.
Taken together, the trust figures describe a filter rather than a replacement. In BrightLocal's 2026 survey, 63% of AI users said they trust AI recommendations and 10% said they distrust them, and almost all of them still go and look at reviews afterwards. Our reading of that: the assistant decides who makes the shortlist, and reviews decide who gets the call. A practice with excellent reviews that never gets named is never in the running to have those reviews read.
What happens when a patient asks AI for a dentist in your city?
We ran that question against two real markets. Across 154 dental practices in Charlotte and 58 in Columbus, scanned in June 2026, ChatGPT named 2 of the 212 in response to patient-style queries such as "best dentist in Charlotte." Perplexity named a few more. Most practices in both cities were named by neither engine.
| City | Dental practices scanned | Scan window | Named by ChatGPT | Named by Perplexity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charlotte, NC | 154 | June 6 to 23, 2026 | 2 | 3 of the 135 we could read |
| Columbus, OH | 58 | June 19 to 23, 2026 | 0 | 3 of the 21 we could read |
| Both cities | 212 | June 2026 | 2 | denominators differ, not combined |
Those answer outcomes are different from crawler access. 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 scanned set covers dental practices of every type in each city, general and specialist alike, not only cosmetic clinics. Most of them were scanned with a four-query set, three of which were cosmetic, Invisalign or implant queries, so this is a fair test of the questions a cosmetic practice would want to win.
The practices that went unnamed were not weak on the things practices usually worry about. In Charlotte, the ones ChatGPT did not name averaged 4.82 stars with a median of 264 reviews, and 91% of them were already at 4.5 stars or higher. In Columbus the same group averaged 4.74 stars with a median of about 205 reviews. One Charlotte practice with a 5-star average and nearly 3,000 reviews was named by neither engine.
The full engine-by-engine breakdowns for each city are in our AI visibility report for Charlotte dentists and our AI visibility report for Columbus dentists. Both cities sit at the floor, and we do not claim one is harder than the other: at 58 practices, a zero and a 1.3% are the same finding. These scans are also a June snapshot, and AI answers move month to month, so treat them as a reading of two markets rather than today's live result for any single practice. The method, the engines and what counts as visible are documented in how we measure AI visibility, and what Citevio is is written out in plain terms.
Why a handful of names matters more than any traffic number
Search results give a patient a page of links to sort through. An AI answer gives a short list of names instead. That is the shift this data describes: patient demand is moving toward a surface with far fewer slots, so the question stops being where you rank and becomes whether you are named at all.
There is a second reason the small numbers carry weight. Semrush research published in June 2025 found the average visitor arriving from an AI search source was worth about 4.4 times an average visitor from traditional organic search, measured by conversion. That study looked at more than 500 digital marketing and SEO topics, not healthcare, so we would not attach that multiple to a dental practice. What survives the difference in scope is the direction, and our reading of why: someone who arrives after an assistant named them has already been given an answer and is checking it, not starting a search.
None of this makes AI the main way patients find a dentist in 2026. Google's local 3-pack still recommends locations 35.9% of the time in SOCi's index, roughly thirty times ChatGPT's rate, and that is still where most local demand lands. The honest summary is narrower and more useful: a fast-growing share of patients now asks an assistant at some point, and in the two markets we scanned, almost no practice was there to be named. If you want the mechanics of getting named rather than the demand data behind it, that is covered in our guide on getting recommended by ChatGPT.
See what AI says about your practice today
Before acting on any of these numbers, it helps to see where your own clinic stands. The free checker below reads your website and scores its AI-readiness in seconds. No email and no call.
Want to run the test by hand instead? Here is how to check what ChatGPT says about your practice, or use the full AI visibility checker for dentists.
Common questions about patients and AI
How many patients actually use ChatGPT to find a dentist?
No one has published a dentist-specific number, and any page that gives you one is guessing. The closest measured figures: 45% of US consumers used an AI tool for a local business recommendation in the past year, and 31% used ChatGPT specifically, according to BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026. Separately, OpenAI says over 230 million people ask ChatGPT health and wellness questions each week.
Do patients trust AI recommendations for healthcare?
Trust depends almost entirely on whether they have tried it. KFF's poll of 1,343 US adults, fielded in late February and early March 2026, found that 69% of people who had used AI for health advice trusted it to give reliable health information, against 18% of people who had not used it. Trust is also conditional: 97% of AI users in BrightLocal's 2026 survey said they sometimes check an AI recommendation against real reviews.
Which AI engine do patients use most to find local businesses?
ChatGPT. In BrightLocal's 2026 survey, 31% of US consumers had used ChatGPT for a business recommendation in the past 12 months, ahead of Google's AI Mode at 23%. Usage and visibility are not the same thing, though: SOCi's 2026 index found ChatGPT recommends only 1.2% of locations in local queries, against 11% for Gemini and 7.4% for Perplexity.
How fast did AI usage for finding local businesses grow?
Very fast. In BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 45% of US consumers said they had used an AI tool for a local business recommendation in the past year, up from 6% a year earlier.
Does the 45% figure specifically mean people are using AI to find a dentist?
No, it covers local businesses as a group, not dentists specifically. BrightLocal's 2026 survey measures AI use for local business recommendations broadly; no one has published a dentist-specific version of that number.
How much weight should I put on a jump from 6% to 45% in one year?
Some caution is warranted. This is self-reported survey data from 1,002 US adults (455 of them AI users), not observed behavior, and a jump that large in a single year for a survey question will partly reflect growing awareness and question wording, not pure growth. Read it as a direction that is clearly up and clearly fast, not a precise share of your own patients.
Are younger patients more likely to ask AI for a business recommendation?
Yes, sharply so. 64% of consumers aged 30 to 44 had asked AI for a business recommendation, against 24% of those aged 60 and over, in BrightLocal's 2026 survey. That band overlaps with where a lot of elective, cosmetic treatment demand sits, though that connection is our reading of the age data rather than a measured finding.
How many people ask ChatGPT health questions every week?
Over 230 million, according to OpenAI in January 2026. That sits inside a service with more than 900 million weekly active users as of February 2026, though no dental-specific slice of that health-question volume has been published.
What share of ChatGPT messages are people asking for advice to help make a decision?
About 49%, according to an NBER working paper published in September 2025 that classified roughly 1.1 million de-identified ChatGPT conversations from May 2024 to June 2025. The paper does not break that category down by industry, so linking it to choosing a dentist is our reading of the data, not the study's own finding.
What share of US adults have gone to AI for health information at all?
29% of US adults sought physical health information from AI tools in the past year, according to KFF's tracking poll, fielded from 24 February to 2 March 2026 among 1,343 US adults. That is health information broadly, not dental-specific.
What is the second most-used AI tool for business recommendations after ChatGPT?
Google's AI Mode, used by 23% of consumers for a business recommendation in the past 12 months, against 31% for ChatGPT, in BrightLocal's 2026 survey.
Does being the most-used AI tool mean ChatGPT also recommends the most businesses?
No, the opposite. ChatGPT is the most-used tool at 31% of consumers, but SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index found it recommends only 1.2% of locations in local queries, against 11% for Gemini and 7.4% for Perplexity. Search Engine Land summed up that gap directly: "AI visibility is three to 30 times harder to achieve than ranking well in traditional local search."
How does Gemini's recommendation rate compare to the other AI engines?
Higher. Gemini recommends locations in 11% of local queries in the SOCi 2026 index, more than any other AI engine measured there. Gemini was not included in Citevio's own city scans, though, so none of our own scan figures say anything about it.
How does AI recommendation compare to Google's regular local search results?
AI still trails by a wide margin. Google's local 3-pack recommends locations 35.9% of the time in SOCi's 2026 index, roughly thirty times ChatGPT's 1.2% rate, and that is still where most local demand lands.
Do people trust an AI health recommendation the same whether or not they've used AI before?
No. In KFF's March 2026 poll, 69% of adults who had used AI for health advice trusted it to give reliable health information, against just 18% of those who had not used it. Trust here depends almost entirely on prior experience.
Do patients just accept an AI recommendation, or do they check it against real reviews?
They check it. 97% of AI users in BrightLocal's 2026 survey said they sometimes check an AI recommendation against real reviews, and in the same survey 63% said they trust AI recommendations against 10% who said they distrust them.
What happened when Citevio actually tested patient-style dentist searches in real cities?
Almost nothing. Across 154 dental practices in Charlotte and 58 in Columbus, scanned in June 2026, ChatGPT named only 2 of the 212 practices combined in response to queries like "best dentist in Charlotte." Perplexity named a few more, but most practices in both cities were named by neither engine. Full breakdowns are in the Charlotte report and the Columbus report.
Were the dental practices ChatGPT skipped in that scan actually low-quality or poorly reviewed?
No. In Charlotte, the practices ChatGPT did not name averaged 4.82 stars with a median of 264 reviews, and 91% were already at 4.5 stars or higher. In Columbus the unnamed group averaged 4.74 stars with a median of about 205 reviews. One Charlotte practice with a 5-star average and nearly 3,000 reviews was named by neither engine.
Was that city scan only testing cosmetic dentistry queries?
Mostly, but the scanned set covered dental practices of every type in each city, general and specialist alike. Most practices were tested with a four-query set, three of which were cosmetic, Invisalign or implant queries, so it is a fair test of the questions a cosmetic practice would want to win.
A separate website-level Citevio study covered 527 US dental practice websites across seven metros plus nine nearby towns, read between 6 and 26 June 2026.
Is a patient who arrives after an AI recommendation worth more than one from a regular search?
Possibly, though the closest data isn't dental-specific. Semrush research published in June 2025 found the average visitor arriving from an AI search source was worth about 4.4 times an average visitor from traditional organic search, measured by conversion, across more than 500 digital marketing and SEO topics, not healthcare.
Should a dental practice stop investing in regular Google SEO now that patients use AI?
No. None of this data makes AI the main way patients find a dentist in 2026 — Google's local 3-pack still recommends locations 35.9% of the time in SOCi's index, and that is still where most local demand lands. The honest summary is narrower: a fast-growing share of patients now asks an assistant at some point, and in the two markets Citevio scanned, almost no practice was there to be named.