What is documented is mostly familiar: crawlable, indexed, useful pages, accurate business details, named qualified authors for health claims, and consistent information across your site, structured data and Google Business Profile. What is hype is any promise that a file, a markup type or a review count will make AI search tools cite you. No AI-specific markup trick is documented, and a citation is neither a clinical endorsement nor proof that the generated answer is correct.
What does Google document for AI Overviews and AI Mode?
Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode use Google Search systems and query fan-out. To appear as a supporting link, a page has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet, and inclusion is never promised.
Health is YMYL (your money or your life), Google's category for topics where mistakes can cause harm. Google says trust is the most important element of E-E-A-T and that E-E-A-T is not a single ranking factor. In practice that favors clear authorship, visible sourcing, accuracy and consistency with expert consensus.
What is documented for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot?
OpenAI separates OAI-SearchBot, which supports ChatGPT search, from GPTBot, its training crawler, so allowing one does not allow the other. Perplexity documents PerplexityBot for search and Perplexity-User for fetches a person triggers, and does not publish how it selects sources. Copilot is grounded on Bing results and weighs relevance, quality and credibility, and freshness, so Bing indexing matters. Access makes a page eligible. It does not secure a mention. The Gemini app is not the same thing as AI Mode or AI Overviews.
What still drives local visibility?
Google local ranking rests on relevance, distance and prominence. For a clinic, the unglamorous work matters most: a verified, complete Google Business Profile with accurate categories, hours and attributes, and the same name, address, phone number and services on your site, in structured data and in your profile. Reviews contribute to local ranking, but nobody has shown that a number of reviews wins an AI citation. Reviews you mark up on your own site are ineligible for Google star results.
A group with many locations should resist cloning a template page per town. For dental practices, each location page needs its own real content: the clinicians who work there, services actually offered, directions and how to book. UK aesthetic clinics have an extra rule. ASA guidance says prescription-only medicines cannot be advertised to the public, including on websites and in paid search, so a page built to rank for a branded toxin name is an advertising problem before it is an SEO one. Promote the consultation.
Which claims should you reject?
None of these has documented support:
- Medical schema makes AI trust us. Use the most specific accurate type, describe facts visible on the page and model the real entity. There is no dedicated medical rich result for AI citations.
- FAQ markup restores rich results. Google ended FAQ rich results for everyone on 7 May 2026, including health and government sites. FAQ content still helps people; it is not a tactic.
- llms.txt makes engines cite us. It is a proposal. Google said in June 2026 that Search ignores such files, and an SE Ranking analysis of about 300,000 domains (7 November 2025) found no correlation with AI citation frequency.
- Enough reviews will get us recommended by AI. No evidence supports that.
- An AI citation verifies the answer. A link shows a source was used, not that the answer is right.
- Hundreds of near-identical local pages are GEO. Google does not ban AI-assisted content, but scaled content abuse, meaning many low-value near-duplicate pages, is spam however it was made.
What do studies of AI citations really tell you?
Two data points are useful, and both come with limits. A May 2025 poster put 30 consumer-health questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity and examined 580 references. NIH, Mayo Clinic, CDC, Cleveland Clinic and WHO were cited most often, which describes those prompts only. SE Ranking's snapshot of 50,807 German-language health queries (December 2025) found YouTube was the largest single domain in Google AI Overview citations, at 4.43%, and only 36% of cited URLs ranked in the organic top 10. It covers German queries in Germany at one moment, and it counts citations rather than checking accuracy. Use such studies as a reason to check what AI answers cite for your own queries, not as a recipe.
How do you measure visibility without fooling yourself?
Google Search Console added a generative AI report on 3 June 2026, rolling out worldwide by 31 August 2026. It reports link impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report (preview since 10 February 2026) that reports citation counts. Neither is a quality score. Pair them with referrals, inquiries and booked appointments by source, because local SEO and GEO only matter commercially if they bring in consultations.
What are the risks of AI answers about your services?
Press investigations in January 2026 documented misleading Google AI Overview health answers, including decontextualized liver test ranges and pancreatic cancer diet advice, and Google removed some. An AI answer can misstate clinical advice even when it links to good sources. Monitor your highest-stakes queries, fix ambiguous wording on your own pages and give every page a clear route to a clinician.
What about B2B healthcare companies with no local angle?
Billing companies, health technology vendors and consultancies have no Business Profile to optimize, but the same basics apply. Buyers ask task questions: how a product handles a referral fax, what a security review needs, how onboarding works. Pages that answer them, with a named author and reviewer for consequential claims, give search engines and people something to cite.
Checklist for this quarter
- Confirm key pages are indexed, snippet-eligible and not blocked by robots.txt or a CDN, in Google and in Bing.
- Decide which AI crawlers to allow, knowing search and training bots are separate.
- Verify and complete your Google Business Profile, and match name, address, phone and services everywhere.
- Build service, clinician and location pages around real tasks: what it is for, who provides it, where, preparation, limits, how to book and when to seek urgent advice.
- Name a qualified author or reviewer on consequential health content.
- Track Search Console and Bing reports alongside inquiries and booked appointments, and review AI answers for your top services regularly.
Frequently asked questions
Can we make sure our practice appears in AI Overviews?
No. Google documents eligibility, not inclusion: a page must be indexed and snippet-eligible to be a supporting link, and nothing more is promised.
Should we add an llms.txt file?
There is no documented benefit. Google said in June 2026 that Search ignores such files, and a large SE Ranking analysis found no link to AI citation frequency. Spend the time on indexable pages and accurate profiles.
Does Google penalize AI-written health content?
Not for the method. Google does not ban AI-assisted content, but scaled content abuse is spam however it is produced, and consequential health claims need named expert review.