Right now it probably isn’t you. That’s fixable, and the window to fix it cheaply is closing.
The Bigger Brand is a Manchester-based dental marketing agency providing answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO) for private and mixed dental practices across the UK and Ireland. The work covers answer-structured content, consistent business details across the web, structured data, AI crawler access and third-party citations. The aim is for your practice to be named when patients ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Claude for a dentist.
When an AI assistant names a practice, it reads to the patient like a recommendation from someone who’s already done the research. There’s no advert label and no long list to compare, just a short answer with a couple of names in it. For someone nervous about choosing a dentist, that carries real weight.
AEO and GEO are how you give these tools enough confidence to include you. The work sits alongside your SEO and local search, using the same website and profile but asking different things of them.
For twenty years the job was simple. Rank on page one, get the click, win the patient.
Then a chunk of your patients stopped visiting search results altogether. They open ChatGPT, type “best dentist for implants near Mansfield” and get a paragraph back with two or three practices named in it. No blue links, no page two, and no chance to be the fourth option they scroll to.
You’re either in that paragraph or you don’t exist in that conversation. And here’s the part most agencies haven’t caught up with: ranking well on Google and being cited by an AI are different things. A large share of the pages these tools quote aren’t in Google’s top ten at all, so you can be number one and still be invisible.
It’s a different game with different rules, and it’s still early enough to win it.
Nobody can guarantee an AI will mention your practice, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. These systems change monthly, the vendors publishing statistics about them have an interest in the numbers, and most of the data floating around is American.
What we can do is make your practice the easiest one to name: consistent, verifiable, structured and quotable, and backed up by sources that aren’t you.
It’s the same work that makes you easier for patients to trust, which is why it’s worth doing even if the whole thing changes again next year.
If ChatGPT names the practice down the road instead of yours, the reason is usually on this list.
AI tools lift short, self-contained answers. A beautifully written page about your philosophy of care gives them nothing to pull.
You might be “Smith & Partners Dental” on your site, “Smith and Partners Dental Practice” on Google and something else again on a directory. Inconsistency makes a model less confident, and an uncertain model names someone else.
These tools reward things they can check. Vague marketing language is exactly what they filter out.
This is the big one. AI tools lean heavily on third parties such as reviews, directories, local press and forums. Your own site is necessary, but nowhere near enough on its own.
Some sites block AI crawlers in robots.txt without anyone realising. It’s free to fix, and invisible until someone looks.
Here’s the work we do to make your practice the one AI tools can name with confidence.
We use real patient questions as headings, with a 40 to 80-word answer underneath that makes complete sense quoted on its own. That’s the unit AI tools lift.
Your practice name, address, phone number, clinician names and treatment terminology should be identical everywhere: your site, your Google Business Profile, every directory and every social profile. Pick “composite bonding” or “cosmetic bonding” and never switch.
That means Organization, LocalBusiness, Person for each clinician with their GDC number, and Service for each treatment. It’s how a machine reads what you are, rather than guessing.
We check that robots.txt and your server rules actually permit GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and the rest. Then we make sure the content renders without JavaScript, because some crawlers won’t wait.
Reviews, directory listings, local press, dental publications and supplier features all count. The citations that sit outside your control are the ones doing the heavy lifting.
Every month we check ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for the searches that matter in your town, and record whether you’re named, not named or named incorrectly.
We’ll ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews the questions your patients ask, and show you who gets named, who doesn’t, and why. It’s free.
Answer engine optimisation structures content so it can be lifted directly into an answer, rather than only ranking as a link. It uses question-based headings with short, self-contained answers beneath them. Traditional SEO aims to earn a click from a search results page, while AEO aims to have the content itself quoted in featured snippets, voice results and AI-generated answers.
Generative engine optimisation is the work of making a business more likely to be cited by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. It relies on neutral, factual language, verifiable claims, consistent business details across every source, and backing from reviews, directories and press, because AI tools often cite sources other than a business’s own website.
Yes. AI assistants name specific businesses when answering local recommendation questions, drawing on the practice website, Google Business Profile, review platforms, directories and local press. Practices with consistent business details, structured data, clear factual content and a strong presence on other sites are more likely to be named. There’s no paid placement and no guaranteed inclusion.
Not necessarily. A large share of the sources AI assistants cite don’t appear in Google’s top ten results for the same question. Ranking and citation depend on overlapping but different factors, so a practice can rank well on Google while rarely being named in AI answers, particularly if it has little coverage on other sites.
