AI Visibility of Phoenix 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: 87 dental practices across the Phoenix metro area — the city plus suburbs like Scottsdale, Mesa and Tempe — 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 "Phoenix", the AI answers with names from the whole metro, so a narrower sample would miss the actual competition.

From those answers, we counted 772 individual recommendations naming 331 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 5.6 practices — and in Phoenix, more tracked practices claim a spot on that shortlist than in most cities we've looked at.

Scores still tell a sobering story. Across the 87 practices we tracked, the average visibility score was 3.5 out of 100, and the median was 2.6 — meaning the typical Phoenix-area practice barely registered. Even the best-scoring practice reached only 17.5 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 12% of all recommendations, and the AI engines named 331 distinct practices in total. In plain terms: as of July 12, 2026, AI visibility in Phoenix 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 1,150 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 12, 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 87 practices, while the AI engines named 331 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 Phoenix 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.