Guides
When a patient asks AI for a dentist, how does it decide who to name?
The engine builds a candidate set from what it can read about your area, then keeps the practitioners whose facts are consistent. Location, specialty and a working booking route weigh most.
A patient types something like "a dentist near Daan who does clear aligners and has evening hours". The engine turns that into a search, reads the results it trusts, and assembles a short answer with a few names. Nobody ranks you by quality; the engine keeps whoever matches the question and whose details agree across pages.
That is why the same three facts decide most answers: where you practise (a machine-readable address per clinic), what you do (specialty and services stated plainly) and when you are there (hours per location). A practitioner with two clinics and hours listed for each will be named for either neighbourhood; one whose pages disagree about hours will often be skipped.
Google's answers add one more filter: its AI Overviews now appear on about 89% of healthcare searches, and they are built from pages Google already indexes well. Being indexed, fresh and structured therefore matters as much as being written well.
The practical order is: be readable, be consistent, be current. Quarphin's free check reads your page the way an engine does and lists what is missing, in that order.
Related questions
Does the number of reviews matter?
Reviews are one of several signals engines read, but they cannot replace missing practice facts. A page with clear hours and a booking route and few reviews is still nameable; a page with many reviews and no address often is not.
Can I pay to be named?
No engine sells placement in these answers. Paid ads are labelled separately and are not what patients are reading here.