AI Visibility of Dallas Dental Practices: What ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity Actually Recommend

Methodology

We wrote 30 prompts that sound like real patients, not marketers. They covered four kinds of questions: "best of" requests, comparisons between practices, specific needs (like a particular service or insurance), and urgent situations. We ran the prompts across three AI engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity — which gave us 138 valid answers.

Who is in the tracked group: 262 dental practices across the Dallas metro area — the city plus suburbs like Plano and Frisco — every practice we could confirm as a real, operating business, including every practice the AI engines themselves named in their answers. We measure the metro on purpose: when a patient asks about "Dallas", the AI answers with names from the whole metro, so a narrower sample would miss the actual competition. For scale: as of July 17, 2026, Google maps 6,033 dental listings across that same metro footprint (a raw figure that includes individual practitioner profiles and branch listings, not only distinct practices) — our tracked group is the verified core of that market, and it covers 100% of the twenty names AI recommends most often.

From those answers, we parsed 879 individual recommendations naming 340 distinct dental practices. Each recommendation is an exact quote from the answer text — no guessing, no interpretation. We store the raw answers in full, so every number on this page can be recomputed from the original data.

One thing we measure on purpose: frequency, not rank. AI assistants don't have a fixed ranking the way Google search results do — the same question can get a different answer tomorrow. So the honest metric is how often a practice gets recommended across many realistic questions — that is what the visibility score reflects.

A note for owners who already invest in SEO: this is a different measurement. SEO is about where you rank on Google. This benchmark is about whether AI assistants recommend you when a patient asks. A practice can do well on one and be invisible on the other.

Results

The first thing the data shows is that AI assistants are generous with names. An average answer recommended about 6.4 practices. There is room on that shortlist. Yet in our sample, most tracked practices never claimed a spot on it.

Scores tell the same story. Across the 262 practices we tracked, the average visibility score was 1.6 out of 100, and the median was 0.0 — meaning the typical Dallas-area practice in our sample scored exactly zero. Even the best-scoring practice reached only 27.0 out of 100. Nobody in this market is close to owning AI recommendations right now.

Mentions are also spread remarkably thin. The 5 most-mentioned practices together captured just 13% of all recommendations, and the AI engines named 340 distinct practices in total. In plain terms: as of July 7, 2026, AI visibility in Dallas dental is wide open. No practice has locked it up, and the gap between "invisible" and "most visible" is small enough that it can move.

Where AI gets its information

When AI recommended dental practices in this market, it cited 1,367 sources in total. Most were the practices’ own websites. These are the third-party platforms it cited most — the places worth being present and accurate on.

Limitations

• This is a snapshot from one day — July 7, 2026. AI answers change over time, and the same question can get different answers on different runs.
• We used 30 prompts. They cover common patient questions, but different wording could surface different practices. The numbers describe our sample, not every possible question.
• We tracked 262 practices, while the AI engines named 340 distinct names — including chains, businesses outside the metro, and names we could not verify as real practices. Our percentages apply to the tracked group, not to every dentist in the Dallas area.
• Visibility measures how often a practice is recommended by AI — it says nothing about the quality of care a practice provides.
• Nothing here is a guarantee. No one can promise that an AI assistant will recommend a specific business — anyone who promises that isn't being honest. Closing specific gaps raises the probability; it does not guarantee the outcome.