Ep. 257: What Does AI Say About YOUR Dental Practice?
When a patient searches for your practice through AI, the answer can be shaped by everything from your reviews to your social media and videos. In this week's episode, Jeff and Dan explain how to take control of your digital presence before AI does it for you.
Dan's email - Dan@blumbergdigital.com
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Questions From This Episode
How is AI search like Google's Gemini actually changing what happens when someone searches for a dental practice?
Instead of returning ten blue links a consumer has to sift through, AI search tools now pull together reviews, website content, social media, and YouTube content into a single summary, then invite the searcher to ask specific follow-up questions, essentially doing all the research the consumer used to have to do manually.
Why does a platform like Yelp matter more now, even for practices that have always ignored it?
AI search tools pull data from far more sources than a typical consumer ever checked manually, including platforms like Yelp that a practice may have neglected for years, especially outside major metro areas. A practice with strong Google reviews but a couple of bad, unanswered Yelp reviews can have those negative reviews surfaced anyway once AI starts aggregating everything.
What's the actual patient journey AI search is mirroring, and why does that matter for where a practice should focus?
Search term to organic ranking, to the Google Business Profile, reviews and photos, to the website, and finally to social media and YouTube, roughly in that order, since consumers checking a bigger case increasingly spend hours across a practice's YouTube and social channels before ever calling. AI search is simply compressing and automating that same journey, so a practice needs real content at each stage, not just a nice website.
What's the actual content strategy Dan recommends, and why does it work so well for AI search specifically?
Pick the services a practice wants more of, list the five most common patient questions for each one, then have the doctor personally answer them on video, five to eight minutes each, using plain language rather than clinical terms. That video gets uploaded to YouTube and transcribed directly onto a dedicated page on the practice website, since content spoken by a real doctor carries far more authority with AI search than generic written copy, and it can't be dismissed as AI-generated content.
Why does Google specifically avoid promoting AI-generated content for medical, science, and art topics?
Because inaccurate content in these categories can genuinely harm someone, Dan cites an early real example where an AI tool recommended a pizza recipe containing glue after pulling from an unreliable source. For a dental practice, this actually works in its favor, since content clearly coming from a real doctor's own mouth is treated as more authoritative and trustworthy than anything AI-generated or written by an anonymous copywriter.
Episode Transcript
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Jeff: If we skip past all the hype surrounding AI, everything from it's going to take everyone's jobs to some kind of robot apocalypse, it's plain to see AI is already making serious inroads into a lot of businesses, including dentistry. Right now we're already seeing it used to assist diagnosis, handle some front office functions, and marketing specifically. I want to focus on that last part today. If I were a betting man, and I am to a degree, I'd bet you're doing some form of digital marketing already, Google pay-per-click, Facebook, maybe Yelp or Zocdoc, and I'm assuming you have a website at minimum. So how is AI search, like Google's own AI search, going to affect your current marketing efforts?
Jeff: Case in point, my wife is a good example. She loves AI. Normally when I'm looking for a restaurant or a local business, I default to Google. She doesn't, she uses ChatGPT, and Claude for work projects. More and more people are doing this. I don't know the exact numbers, but it's genuinely happening. What if someone searches for your practice on Google right now? You'll notice an AI summary appears right at the top, that's Google's AI platform, Gemini. What does Gemini actually say about your practice? I've seen cases, since a lot of practices have similar names and similar branding, where someone searches for their own practice and an entirely different, defunct, poorly reviewed practice comes up instead.
Jeff: This is happening whether we like it or not, and I've always tried to front-run trends like this. If I see something coming, I want to be ahead of it. My wife and I joke that we're usually too early on these things, if you go back to episode from September of 2021, I was talking about inflation well before anyone else really cared, that one fell on deaf ears at the time. But in other cases it's served us well, we had all our streaming equipment set up back in February of 2020, which turned out to be genuinely useful once everything shut down that April. So this week I want to talk about what you should actually be doing right now to make sure your practice is properly positioned for how AI search is going to affect it.
Jeff: Joining me this week is Dan Brown. If you've listened to the podcast for any length of time, you'll recognize Dan, he's president of Blumberg Digital, and also a senior consultant and seminar speaker here at MGE. They're a premier digital marketing agency working with practices of all sizes, helping them get real control over their digital presence and marketing, both to bring in new patients and to put their best face forward publicly. Dan, are you all set up over there?
Dan: All good.
Jeff: Welcome back to the show.
Dan: Thank you, good to be back.
Jeff: So let's get into it. Give people a bit of an overview first, how pervasive is AI search actually right now, is it really happening at scale, and then what are you actually doing with clients to prepare them for it?
Dan: AI search is happening right now, far more broadly than most people realize. A lot of people are still traditional Googlers, and we've all learned to do that pretty proficiently, so some haven't shifted to AI search yet simply because it's new and they're not sure they can trust it yet. But Google itself isn't the Google we knew two years ago. Today when you search on Google, it's running on Gemini, their AI platform, and that little AI summary at the top is Gemini.
Jeff: So walk me through what that actually looks like for a consumer.
Dan: Take a consumer from two years ago: you'd search, then scroll through ten blue links beneath it, a few sponsored ads followed by the organic results, and if you were thorough you might click through to page two or three. Some people would even search within a specific results page for more detail. Google's been studying that entire behavior, since their whole goal is making the browsing experience as easy and successful as possible for the consumer. That AI summary at the top of a search is a sample of what I think becomes the new default Google experience within about a year. I don't think we'll be seeing those ten blue link results much longer at all.
Jeff: Do you think that meaningfully affects organic SEO?
Dan: It absolutely does, and for a dental practice already paying for SEO, this is exactly the conversation worth having. For the consumer, it just makes things easier, AI is now doing all that deep research on their behalf, so they don't have to dig through page three, four, or five themselves. If you search on Google today and click AI mode to the left of the regular results, it'll give you an overview of a specific practice, say ABC Family Dentistry, and then ask what you'd like to know more specifically. Do they offer dental implants? Yes, here's what we found, here are some reviews mentioning it, here's their social content, here are some YouTube videos about it. What specifically do you want to know about dental implants? How painless is the procedure? Based on their reviews, seventeen people described it as surprisingly painless. That's genuinely great for the consumer. It's not great for a business that hasn't prepared for it.
Jeff: That's Gemini specifically. What about ChatGPT and other platforms, does searching a business name there produce something similar?
Dan: Yes. Google has years of compiled data, and these other AI engines are actually pulling from Google, along with other sources, some of which consumers might never have checked directly on their own. A good example our clients have often ignored simply because they don't love the platform is Yelp.
Jeff: Well-founded dislike, in my opinion.
Dan: I won't disagree there. But as a consumer myself, I'll use Yelp, dropping into a new city and looking for a good Tex-Mex place, Yelp genuinely helps with that. As a business owner, though, and as someone co-running a marketing firm for dentists, Yelp has never been a great friend, largely because of how their review algorithm works. They won't post certain reviews, sometimes even from a fifteen-time reviewer, if their system flags some suspicious connection to the business.
Jeff: Unless you pay to advertise, or so the rumor goes.
Dan: That's the rumor, I won't say more than that. Fortunately, Blumberg Digital built a strong relationship with someone fairly senior at Yelp after I made about fifteen videos about their platform, and they reached out wanting to make things right and help our clients directly. But the platform itself has genuinely been neglected by a lot of our clients outside major metro areas. If you're in the Bay Area, LA, or the New York tri-state area, you've likely already had to stay on top of Yelp. If you're in a more suburban or rural area, it simply hasn't mattered as much, historically. But today, AI will still go check Yelp regardless of where you're located, and Yelp reviewers, as a lot of us have painfully learned, tend to be more vocal, especially when something goes wrong.
Jeff: So in theory, if I'm searching Google in a rural area and a practice has two genuinely bad Yelp reviews but plenty of strong Google reviews, the AI summary might surface that this practice is well reviewed overall, but note some patients have raised specific negative points.
Dan: That's exactly right.
Jeff: You actually asked something smart before we started recording, how much of this is genuinely new versus just reinforcing rules that have already applied to marketing for years.
Dan: It's really reinforcing what we've been saying for a long time: watch your reviews, respond to negative ones, use original content. Don't use AI-generated content, and this predates the current AI moment, don't use generic freelance copywriters either, since a copywriter working across dozens of dental clients can usually only phrase the same information so many different ways, fifteen or twenty times if they're genuinely skilled, before it starts repeating itself. All of that has shaped SEO for years already. Now, with AI, it's happening so fast and so precisely that if you're not handling the fundamentals, it can actively cast your practice in a bad light, or keep you from being discovered at all.
Jeff: So would it be fair to say that a year or two ago, you were essentially relying on an individual consumer to personally collate information about your practice, if you were well represented on Google specifically, you were probably fine, since that's what most people actually used, and they likely weren't checking Yelp or Bing too. Whereas now, since an AI platform is aggregating everything from everywhere, all the things you've been telling people to do for years finally start to genuinely matter, or come back to bite them if ignored.
Dan: That's accurate.
Jeff: One more question before we get into specifics. How does this affect a search like dentist near me specifically, since that's an expensive term to advertise against?
Dan: Substantially, and this is a fairly recent shift. Gemini and other AI engines aren't just reading your reviews and your website anymore, they're now pulling from your social media channels too, going through your YouTube channel, the video transcriptions, the comments, aggregating the general public perception of your practice. So it's combining what the business says about itself, what others say about it, and what's generally available in the area.
Jeff: Is that going to stay relatively neutral, say there are six practices within five miles of a given address, will it present all six fairly, or favor one?
Dan: I'd like to say it's fair, but it's really determined by volume and quality of available data. A practice that isn't well represented online simply won't be acknowledged as strongly. It's going to favor the practice with 1,100 reviews and a library of YouTube content answering what is a root canal or what is an implant, that's the one landing at the top.
Jeff: I do want to flag something here, because what we just described could genuinely send some listeners into a kind of paralysis, thinking, I'm so behind, I don't have a YouTube channel, I barely post on social media.
Dan: You have to start somewhere. When we started our own channel, our very first video with Dr. Winteregg had a background that looked like a 24-hour cable news set, we looked at it afterward and thought it looked terrible, so we changed it. That same channel now has thousands of views. You did what everyone listening right now should be doing. There's an old saying that the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is today. Start with what you've got.
Jeff: And fortunately, as of whenever you're listening to this, everyone's still in roughly the same boat, there's nothing stopping someone from genuinely committing to this five years from now and building a real library of content that eventually starts ranking.
Dan: Completely true, and there are specific, strategic things worth doing right now rather than trying to do absolutely everything. Focusing on the right few things gets far better traction than spreading yourself across everything and doing all of it inadequately.
Jeff: Let's break it down. Say someone's doing a bit of Google pay-per-click, has a website, maybe posts on Facebook once a week or occasionally on TikTok, but not much else. What would you tell that person to actually do right now?
Dan: I'll answer generally first, since it's the easiest framework to remember, and then get specific. Picture the patient journey, we've studied this closely, and it's genuinely how Google built its approach to AI and Gemini. The patient types in a search phrase, and from a business standpoint, you want to know what you're actually trying to be found for, dentist near me, emergency dentist, dental implants, veneers, that list varies by practice, but broadly the core terms tend to overlap. Then they find you, that's search engine optimization and organic ranking, you can also rank through a paid ad, which is smart in its own right, but organically, roughly seven out of ten people skip the sponsored results entirely and look for an organic one, so you want to show up on page one regardless.
Dan: From there they check your Google Business Profile, what most people know as Maps. They see the map, the reviews, your specific business name and profile, your website link, general information, hours, your review count and star rating, and any posts or photos you've added. That last part matters more than people think, since AI is now actually scanning and reading those photos and drawing data from them. It's also reading whether you're responding to negative reviews, and how, and whether you're responding to positive ones too, or simply leaving that blank, which isn't good.
Jeff: So the consumer looks at photos, reads reviews, checks whether negative ones were addressed, and whether it looks recent or years old.
Dan: Exactly, and from there they'll usually visit the website to see if what they're looking for is easy to find, and almost always check the social channels too, since that's what actually tells the consumer who these people really are. Not what the marketing company put together, not what you were told to say, but what the team is actually like. Is the dentist intimidating? Is the team condescending, or does it feel warm and approachable?
Jeff: I honestly wouldn't have assumed that mattered as much as it apparently does.
Dan: Consumers are doing this heavily, especially for a bigger case. Four to six veneers, that's thousands of dollars, or a full-arch implant case running into the tens of thousands. The bigger the treatment plan, or the more negative experiences someone's already had elsewhere, the more research they'll do. We track this journey with clients and can see it directly, some patients spend three to five hours across a practice's social media and YouTube content before ever calling, especially for larger cases. That's obviously an exaggerated version of the typical consumer's process, but it illustrates the pattern. So what AI search is really doing is mirroring that entire journey, aggregating all of it into an easy summary for someone who might not know how to dig through all of it themselves, then prompting, what else would you like to know, here's a direct link to it. Curious about the difference between Invisalign and traditional orthodontics? This practice actually covers that, want to watch the video? One click, and there it is. Genuinely great for the consumer, not so great if you don't actually have that content.
Jeff: So given that's the patient journey, what does someone actually need to do?
Dan: What we tell clients to do: first, have a website that ranks well from an SEO standpoint, then populate it with properly categorized content, without getting too technical, there are specific things that build real strength and reputation with Google so it recommends you. Those things still mirror the patient journey. One of the easiest starting points: pick the top three services you actually want more of. Clients often say cosmetic cases, implants, Invisalign, or large restorative cases and smile makeovers. Pick three, five, ten, whatever fits. Then, for each category, list the five most common questions patients actually ask, or should be asking.
Dan: Take veneers as an example. Will they look like my real teeth? Can the color be adjusted? How do I keep them from looking obvious? What should I know before choosing veneers if I grind my teeth, or chew ice? These are things you and I already know because we've been in this industry for years, dental professionals know all of this instinctively. But you have to think like a consumer, even if a question seems basic or oddly phrased. We've actually reverse-engineered this for every major service, down to root canals, and some of the most searched dental questions on Google are genuinely simple ones, but they rank extremely well, and you need to have the answer, ideally coming directly from the doctor, in a friendly, non-condescending way.
Jeff: So once I've got that list of common questions for, say, implants, what do I actually do with it?
Dan: Take the list, set up your phone with a small Bluetooth microphone for clean audio, read the question, look up from the page into the camera while recording, and just say something like, a lot of our patients ask what the difference is between traditional orthodontics, braces, and Invisalign or clear aligner therapy, then genuinely riff on the answer. Repeat the actual question people are asking first, that's the exact phrasing Google already has indexed.
Jeff: So I've got my camera and mic set up, first question is how long a clear aligner case typically takes, I say that out loud, then explain that it depends on the case and how misaligned the teeth are, using accessible language throughout.
Dan: Exactly, and don't try to keep it short and clipped, a lot of people instinctively want to trim their answer down to the fewest possible words. Don't. Be thorough and explanatory, not endlessly rambling, but genuinely substantive.
Jeff: How long should each video actually run?
Dan: Most of our clients land around five to eight minutes per question, broken into individual segments.
Jeff: And I assume you all handle the editing on your end for clients.
Dan: We do, but even without professional editing, simple cuts to remove an obvious flub or stumble go a long way, it doesn't need to be polished.
Jeff: So say I've recorded my video comparing clear aligners to traditional orthodontics, what happens with it next?
Dan: It gets uploaded to YouTube, since Google owns YouTube. So you need your own YouTube channel, which is free and genuinely easy to set up, often bundled right into an existing Gmail account. If you don't know how, just search it or ask ChatGPT, you can have a channel running in minutes, and hosting the video there costs nothing.
Jeff: How many videos does MGE's own channel have at this point?
Dan: Between public tip videos and shorts, probably three to five hundred, plus a large number of unlisted seminar-related videos, likely close to a thousand total, and it's cost us nothing to host any of it.
Jeff: So once the video's live on YouTube, would I then build a dedicated page for that specific topic, clear aligners for instance?
Dan: Exactly, we take the doctor's spoken answer, transcribe it, and code it directly into a dedicated page on the website, brief written answers alongside the embedded video, watch this for more. We take out filler words like uh and um, but the full transcript goes on the page specifically for search engine optimization purposes.
Jeff: That's smart, because it accomplishes two things at once, it creates genuinely original content that isn't AI-generated, and it's coming directly from the doctor's own mouth, which carries real authority, especially since a lot of AI platforms have gotten cautious about recommending medical-adjacent content that isn't clearly authoritative.
Dan: Exactly right. And beyond the SEO value, today's consumer, and this is genuinely where things are heading, I think within a year, maybe sooner, people simply won't be visiting websites directly at all anymore, AI search will just surface the answer for them.
Jeff: Really?
Dan: You'll still need a website, but I don't think people will actively browse it the way they do now.
Jeff: So to recap, I've cleaned up my SEO, maybe running some Google pay-per-click intelligently, I've got video content that becomes written content on my site. Should that same video also be repurposed for social media?
Dan: Absolutely. Here's a good real example: one of our clients kept getting patients backing out of implant treatment after finding a cheaper alternative advertised under a cleverly disguised name, they were actually mini implants marketed under different branding. Once we heard about this, I suggested the doctor record a video genuinely addressing it directly. He recorded a twenty-minute video, not aggressive or antagonistic, just informative, the way he'd naturally explain it to a patient in person. We had him start handing patients that link directly, share it with your spouse, or whoever else is asking questions. That video became his single most watched video on YouTube.
Jeff: Really?
Dan: People are searching that topic from all over the country, and because we transcribed it onto his website, his site ranks well for that exact question nationally, which helps his local visibility too. We also cut that same video into shorter clips and ran them across YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram, nothing paid, just organic. What we consistently find is that when a doctor is the one answering these questions directly, the authority and originality factor genuinely matters enormously to Google, and always has, even more so now.
Dan: There are really three categories Google treats with particular caution around AI-generated content: medical, science, and art. Google actively doesn't want AI-generated content in those categories, since someone could spin up a fake website today claiming to be the top implant specialist in a city, complete with fabricated testimonials and fake reviews, and it would look completely convincing.
Jeff: Right, and I remember an early, almost funny example of exactly this problem, someone had posted a joke pizza recipe on Reddit years ago that included glue as an ingredient, and an AI tool ended up recommending it as a legitimate recipe. Google clearly got serious after incidents like that, medical-type advice specifically has to come from a real authority, like a specific licensed doctor, not just any source.
Dan: Exactly, so now Google recognizes that a video genuinely came from Dr. Jones at ABC Family Dentistry, brought onto their own website, that's a true, identifiable authority, and it's original content. I could hand the exact same five questions to five different doctors and every answer would come out phrased slightly differently, that's genuinely original, and it's honestly one of the easiest ways to build out a website today. Once you've got your first video, before long you've got ten, then twenty, then fifty. Even one video a month adds up to over thirty after a few years, though I'd recommend a faster pace, especially early on.
Jeff: And you code the website so it actually surfaces that specific page rather than sending someone off to the YouTube channel itself.
Dan: Exactly, and once someone lands on that page, they'll typically watch the video rather than just read the transcript, which means they get their answer and get to meet the doctor at the same time, this person seems kind, seems approachable, I like them already. Or if it's been cut into shorts running on TikTok or Instagram, it drives them back to the website or YouTube from there. All of that is simply the patient journey you should already have been building toward, AI is just making that journey faster and more efficient for the searcher.
Jeff: That covers it well. One more question though, since I know you're just starting to test this. What about ChatGPT search specifically, and paid ads within it? I've wondered whether, since Gemini represents different businesses, running Google Ads on top of solid organic work might get some kind of favorable treatment inside Gemini's own recommendations. I doubt they'd ever admit to that, but I have to wonder.
Dan: I think we all wonder that, and the same question applies to ChatGPT. That's actually why we recently launched a multi-channel approach, covering Google Ads, Meta, meaning Facebook and Instagram, and ChatGPT together, testing across all of them. My take, similar to the Yelp situation, if paying a few hundred dollars a month to Yelp keeps competing practices from being recommended on your own Yelp page, and Yelp genuinely affects your business, that's worth paying for. Why wouldn't you want your own practice advertised there instead of a competitor?
Jeff: Right, assuming there's enough margin to actually support advertising in the first place, which circles back to why getting properly fee for service matters, since that's what actually creates the marketing budget to test all of this.
Dan: Exactly, and clients should be testing all of these channels rather than picking just one. We're not seeing a huge volume of patients coming directly through ChatGPT or OpenAI yet, but it's far better to already be positioned there than to catch up later. It reminds me of the early days of Google and Facebook advertising, genuinely simple and easy at first, before the platforms matured and things got considerably more complex.
Jeff: One more thing worth mentioning: if you have an iPhone and use Apple's native Maps app rather than Google Maps, and I actually use Google Maps through CarPlay myself, Apple Maps has historically pulled review data from Yelp specifically, not Google, since Google's a direct competitor.
Dan: That's right, and we've had clients where a patient literally got in the car headed to a scheduled treatment, searched the practice name through Apple Maps, saw unexpected Yelp reviews they'd never otherwise have checked, and canceled the appointment on the spot. That's actually shifting again, though, since Apple recently announced they're building their own Apple Business Profile and stepping away from Yelp specifically, along with launching their own Apple Ads platform. So now there's Google Ads, Meta, ChatGPT, and soon Apple Ads too, worth claiming your Apple Business Profile now regardless.
Jeff: So say someone listening genuinely doesn't want to manage all of this personally, but knows they need to have it handled. How would they get in touch with you?
Dan: I'll let you plug that.
Jeff: I'll put your contact information on the episode webpage. I'll admit some bias here, since I've watched what your team does directly and it's genuinely thorough, exacting, and honest, you don't misrepresent anything, and as you said earlier, it's far better to know all of this than not know it, even though it can feel overwhelming.
Dan: That's exactly why we start with a real sit-down analysis, looking at a practice's existing profile, their local area, competitor offerings, and where they're strong or lacking, along with what services they specifically want more of, since you genuinely can choose your battles here. Dental implants, for instance, is a highly competitive and expensive term to advertise for, and while a practice might still want that, they may prioritize a less expensive service to advertise for first, since it's easier and cheaper to get people in the door, and once someone's in the chair, you can talk with them about everything else you offer.
Jeff: So you're looking at the whole practice holistically, rather than someone deciding they need to do everything at once and spreading themselves too thin to understand what's actually working on any single channel.
Dan: Exactly, most clients come to us knowing they should have a website, and that's about the extent of it. From there we help them establish their first real external marketing channel beyond that, get some genuine early wins, then layer in another channel, and another. Some clients eventually run seven channels simultaneously and understand marketing deeply themselves, but that's genuinely rare, and it makes sense, you're a dentist, not a marketing specialist.
Jeff: Dan, this was genuinely great, thank you for being here. I think the AI conversation has felt so scattered and a little unsettling for a lot of people, this actually clarifies what someone should genuinely be doing right now. And I'll say this again, since we touched on it in a previous episode too: if you ever see AI marketing advertised as fully touchless, meaning it handles everything with zero involvement from you, run from that, don't walk.
Dan: Completely agree. I'd genuinely love the day when a full team isn't needed and AI handles everything behind the scenes while a small team just manages client relationships directly, we're nowhere close to that yet. Anyone claiming otherwise is putting a practice at real risk, since AI will happily promote a practice and describe procedures or promises that aren't actually accurate, painless dentistry claims and everything else, without anyone checking it. We've seen that happen more than once, which is exactly why I wanted to raise it.
Jeff: Fair point, and a good one to end on. Dan, thank you again so much for being here. Folks, that's everything we have for you this week. If you'd like to reach Dan directly, I'll put his email on the episode webpage, dan@blumbergdigital.com, and you can also check out blumbergdigital.com directly. If you have questions about MGE, you can find us online at mgeonline.com or call us at (800) 640-1140. Have a great week, and we'll see you at the next episode.