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To know whether ChatGPT recommends your practice, ask it the questions your patients ask every week and record whether the answer names you and cites your site. Curve Compliance's AI Visibility shows how often ChatGPT and other AI assistants name and cite your practice for those questions, and ties AI answers to the visits and bookings they bring you. AI Visibility is a feature in Curve Compliance, and Curve also offers it as a managed service. This guide is about measuring whether ChatGPT names you; for the wider playbook on earning citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, see answer engine optimization for healthcare.
Next step. Want to see what ChatGPT tells patients about your practice, and which competitor it names when it skips you? Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.
Why ChatGPT matters for healthcare
OpenAI's January 2026 report says “More than 5% of all ChatGPT messages globally are about healthcare” and “Of our more than 800 million regular users, one in four submits a prompt about healthcare every week.” It adds that “seven in 10 healthcare conversations in ChatGPT happen outside of normal clinic hours” (OpenAI, AI as a Healthcare Ally). That is when your front desk is closed and a patient is deciding where to book.
KFF's tracking poll finds “about a third (32%) of adults are turning to AI for health information and advice,” and lists “wanting to look up information before seeing a provider (41%)” among the top reasons people give (KFF). Some of those questions are about which clinic, therapist or telehealth service to choose. If ChatGPT names a competitor in that answer and not you, you will not see it in your analytics, because no click ever happened. For the wider picture, see how patients use ChatGPT to find a doctor.
How ChatGPT finds the pages it cites
OpenAI's help page says “ChatGPT can search the web to answer questions with current information and links to relevant sources,” and that it “may search the web automatically when your question would benefit from current information.” Responses that use web search “may include citations” (OpenAI Help Center). Those citations are what a patient clicks.
OpenAI runs separate crawlers for separate jobs, and its crawler page says “Each setting is independent of the others” (OpenAI crawlers). Here is what each one does, in OpenAI's words:
| Agent | What OpenAI says it does | What blocking it means | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | “OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features.” | “Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links.” | OpenAI crawlers |
| GPTBot | It “is used to crawl content that may be used in training our generative AI foundation models.” | “Disallowing GPTBot indicates a site's content should not be used in training generative AI foundation models.” | OpenAI crawlers |
| ChatGPT-User | “When users ask ChatGPT or a CustomGPT a question, it may visit a web page with a ChatGPT-User agent.” | “ChatGPT-User is not used to determine whether content may appear in Search.” | OpenAI crawlers |
To be eligible for ChatGPT search, OpenAI says to “allow OAI-Searchbot to crawl the site and confirm that the website host or content delivery network allows traffic from OpenAI's published searchbot IP addresses.” It also says “ChatGPT ranks search results using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information,” and that placement is not assured (OpenAI Help Center). After a robots.txt change, “it can take ~24 hours from a site's robots.txt update for our systems to adjust” (OpenAI crawlers). For a crawler-by-crawler policy across assistants, see which AI crawlers to allow on a healthcare website.
Named versus cited: track both
An answer can name your practice without linking to your site. It can also cite your page as a source and recommend someone else. Those are different results, so measure them separately:
- Mention rate. How often AI answers name you.
- Citation rate. How often they cite a page on your site.
- Share of voice. Your share of the mentions among the brands you compete with. See AI share of voice.
- Visits and bookings. The visits from people who clicked a link in an AI answer, and the bookings those visits led to.
The gap between the first two numbers is useful. When ChatGPT cites your page but names a competitor, your content is already trusted and your name is missing from it. When it names you but cites other sites, those sites are shaping what ChatGPT says about you, and they are worth reading.
Answers with and without web search
Not every ChatGPT answer searches the web. OpenAI says it searches “when your question would benefit from current information” (OpenAI Help Center). When it doesn't, the answer comes from what the model already knows, and a new page on your site cannot change that quickly. Answers that search the web and cite sources are the ones a new or corrected page can reach soonest.
Answers from memory still matter for accuracy. OpenAI itself says “Search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect” (OpenAI Help Center), and an answer without search can repeat an old fact just as easily. If ChatGPT gets your services, locations or insurance wrong, see how to spot and fix wrong AI answers about your practice.
Local questions depend on location
OpenAI says “ChatGPT may use an approximate location based on your IP address to provide relevant local results” (OpenAI Help Center). So a question like best pelvic floor therapist near me can get a different answer in Tampa than in Orlando. When you check by hand, put the city in the question itself, such as best pelvic floor therapist in Tampa, and ask one version for each city you serve, so the answer reflects what a patient there would see rather than where your office is.
What to publish when ChatGPT names a competitor instead
Start with the evidence in the answer. Read what ChatGPT says about the practice it names, and open the sources it cites. That tells you what ChatGPT found persuasive and where it found it. Then publish clear pages that answer the questions patients ask, in their words, with your practice name and your clinicians' expertise on the page.
Curve Compliance's AI Visibility shows where competitors are named and you aren't, who leads each topic, and which sources AI cites. It turns what it finds into a weekly roadmap sized to what your clinicians can publish, with medical topics flagged for clinical review, and it measures what each published piece changes. See a content roadmap clinicians can keep up with and where AI gets healthcare answers.
How Curve Compliance helps
AI Visibility is a feature in Curve Compliance, and Curve also offers it as a managed service. AI Visibility shows how often AI assistants, including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, name and cite your practice for the questions your patients ask. It shows your mention rate (how often AI answers name you), citation rate (how often they cite your site) and share of voice (your share of the mentions among the brands you compete with), and it ties AI answers to the visits and bookings they bring you, so you can see whether being named in ChatGPT turns into appointments. Every week you get a plain-language summary of what changed, and a one-page report to share.
With the managed service, Curve's team sets up your questions, competitors and topics, writes the pages on your roadmap, and makes the technical fixes that help AI assistants read your site. Your clinicians review and approve anything medical before it goes live. If your developer manages your site, Curve's team hands them the exact fixes. Each month, Curve's team walks you through your results on a call and sends a one-page report. AI Visibility is available on request: book a call to get started.
In one AI Visibility program we've run, for a HIPAA-focused healthcare software brand, AI assistants named or cited the brand in more than half of their answers to its 40 core buyer questions about five weeks in. Across 184 buyer questions, its site was cited in more AI answers than any competitor's, more than 2.5 times as many as the nearest one.
AI Visibility is built for healthcare: only the marketing question you track is sent to AI assistants, screened for PHI first, and never anything about a patient. Curve is SOC 2 Type II and signs a BAA on every plan. Curve Compliance also works inside ChatGPT, and the HIPAA side of ChatGPT is covered in is ChatGPT HIPAA compliant.
Sources, checked November 2, 2026: OpenAI Help Center, Searching the web with ChatGPT; OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers; OpenAI, AI as a Healthcare Ally (January 2026); KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust: Use of AI for Health Information and Advice.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if ChatGPT recommends my practice?
Ask ChatGPT the questions your patients ask, every week, and record whether the answer names your practice and cites your site. Curve Compliance's AI Visibility shows how often ChatGPT and other AI assistants name and cite your practice, and tracks it over time.
How do I get ChatGPT to mention my practice?
No one can promise a mention, and OpenAI says it ranks results “using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information” (OpenAI). Allow OAI-SearchBot, publish clear pages that answer the questions patients ask, and keep your practice name and services clear on the pages you publish. AI Visibility shows where competitors are named and you aren't, and which sources AI cites.
Does blocking GPTBot hide me from ChatGPT search?
No. OpenAI says GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot are independent: disallowing GPTBot signals that your content should not be used for training, while sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers” (OpenAI). To appear in ChatGPT search, allow OAI-SearchBot.
How often does ChatGPT change its answers?
Often enough that one check tells you little: the same question can get a different answer from one week to the next. Track the same questions every week and read the trend. With Curve Compliance's AI Visibility, every week you get a plain-language summary of what changed.
Can I see the sources ChatGPT cites?
Yes. In ChatGPT, OpenAI says you can “Select Sources, when available, to view cited sources and other relevant links” (OpenAI). Across all the questions you track, Curve Compliance's AI Visibility shows which sources AI cites.
Does ChatGPT give different answers in different cities?
It can. OpenAI says ChatGPT may use an approximate location based on your IP address for local results (OpenAI). When you check by hand, name the city in the question, such as best pelvic floor therapist in Tampa, and ask one version for each city you serve.
Does tracking ChatGPT send patient data to OpenAI?
No patient data is sent. AI Visibility is built for healthcare: only the marketing question you track is sent to AI assistants, screened for PHI first, and never anything about a patient.
Is AI Visibility a Curve feature or a managed service?
Both. You can use AI Visibility as a feature in Curve Compliance, or Curve's team can run it for you as a managed service. AI Visibility is available on request: book a call to get started.
Talk to Curve Compliance
Next step. Curious whether ChatGPT names your practice or a competitor for the questions your patients ask this week? Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.