How do ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity decide which clinic to mention?

Some patients now ask an AI tool which clinic to visit, instead of typing a search and scrolling a list of links. This guide covers how ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity actually decide what to say about a clinic, what is genuinely in your hands, and what to leave alone.

None of these tools have a phone number for your clinic or a form you fill in. They read what already exists about you on the web and repeat what they find most consistently. That is the idea behind everything below.

How do ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity find out about a clinic?

Each tool pulls from ordinary listings and pages, not a special medical directory. Your Google Business Profile, your Practo or JustDial listing, your own website and any other page that names your clinic are the raw material. When those sources agree, a tool has a clear fact to repeat. When they disagree or say nothing, it usually leaves your clinic out rather than guess.

This is also why fixing your Google Business Profile, your Practo listing and your website is not four separate jobs. It is one job: make the same true facts appear everywhere a tool might look.

How are the four tools different?

The four names get used loosely, but they are not built the same way. What follows is only what each company says about itself, kept plain.

AI Overview and AI Mode are not the same feature. For how they differ from each other and from an ordinary Google search, read our post on Google AI Overviews and AI Mode for clinics.

Could your website already be blocking the bots that make you visible?

Sometimes a clinic's website is blocking the exact bot it needs. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google each publish more than one bot, for different jobs, and a website can block one without blocking the others. A developer who added a "block AI scrapers" rule to protect content can end up blocking the same bot that would have shown the clinic in an answer.

To check your own site, type yourclinic.com/robots.txt into any browser. A line disallowing OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Googlebot means that tool cannot read your pages at all. A line naming only GPTBot or Google-Extended affects training, not whether a patient sees the clinic in an answer.

Where do these tools actually get their facts about your clinic?

Five places hold almost everything an AI tool could say about your clinic. Three of them you can claim and edit directly, for free.

What can a clinic actually control?

Everything you can fix costs time, not money, and none of it is a trick. This is the short version; each item links to the fuller guide.

Google's own advice on local ranking says relevance, distance and prominence decide what a patient sees, and that there is no way to request or pay for a better ranking. See Google's page on local ranking (opens in a new tab). What is not in your hands: any tool's exact formula, and any paid way to sit inside an answer. OpenAI says ads shown in ChatGPT are labelled, kept separate from its answers and do not influence what ChatGPT says.

What is the step-by-step way to become visible?

There is no shortcut that skips these steps, only an order that gets the biggest, free fixes done first.

1. 1

   Step 1: Fix your facts once

   Decide the exact clinic name, address, phone and services you will use everywhere, starting today.
2. 2

   Step 2: Claim your Google Business Profile

   Add or claim it at business.google.com, then verify it. Free.
3. 3

   Step 3: Claim Practo and JustDial

   Both offer a free basic listing. Match every detail to your Google profile.
4. 4

   Step 4: Make your website state the facts as text

   Services, fees, timings and address, readable without opening an image or a PDF.
5. 5

   Step 5: Build genuine outside mentions

   Ask patients for reviews the honest way. Local press, associations and directories help too, but only if the mention is real.
6. 6

   Step 6: Test, then recheck monthly

   Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and Perplexity the questions a patient would, and note what changes.

The website and directory steps above each deserve more detail: our checklist of clinic website must-haves in India and our comparison of a Practo or JustDial profile vs your own clinic website go through each in full.

How do you check what these tools currently say?

Open each tool on your own phone and ask what a patient would: the name of your specialty and area, your clinic's name directly, and a common service. Note whether you are named, whether the details are right, and which websites get cited. Answers change with location and the day, so treat one check as a snapshot, not a verdict.

We built a full walkthrough for this, with six ready-made questions and a worksheet to fill in: read is ChatGPT recommending your clinic? A 5-minute check.

What should a clinic never try?

Each shortcut below breaks a real, written rule, and tends to backfire rather than help.

Do schema markup and llms.txt actually matter?

Not on their own. Google's own developer documentation for AI features says plainly that no special schema.org markup and no new AI text file are needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The requirement is the same as ordinary Search: your page has to be crawlable and readable as plain text.

• Crawlability and plain text beat markup. If a bot cannot fetch your page, or your services sit only inside an image, no tag fixes that.
• Consistency beats a clever file. The same name, address and phone everywhere does more than any single addition to your website's code.

We took this question further in its own post, including what Google, OpenAI and Perplexity each say about llms.txt and the specific FAQ-schema change in Google Search: read does schema markup help a clinic show up in ChatGPT?