How do ChatGPT and Perplexity decide which dentist to recommend?

Which crawlers does a dental website actually need to let in?

Two, and they are not the ones most practices have heard of. Both OpenAI and Perplexity run a crawler specifically for search, separate from the crawler that collects training data, and both publish the distinction.

OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot as the crawler used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features, and states that sites opted out will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot is the separate one, described as crawling content that may be used in training its generative AI foundation models. The line that matters most is OpenAI's own: each setting is independent of the others, so a webmaster can allow OAI-SearchBot in order to appear in search results while disallowing GPTBot to indicate that crawled content should not be used for training.

Perplexity is structured the same way. PerplexityBot is described as designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity, it is not used for training models, and the documentation says that to ensure your site appears in search results they recommend allowing PerplexityBot.

There is a third category on both platforms. ChatGPT-User handles certain user actions when somebody asks ChatGPT a question, and OpenAI notes robots.txt rules may not apply. Perplexity-User visits a page to help answer a user's question and include a link, and Perplexity says that fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules. Those are user-initiated, so they are not the ones you control.

Did your agency block your dental practice out of ChatGPT by accident?

It is worth checking before anything else on this page, because it is common, it is invisible, and it is a two-line fix.

A lot of websites had blanket AI blocks added to robots.txt during 2023 and 2024, usually by a developer or agency acting on a reasonable instinct about training data. If that block was written broadly, it caught the search crawlers along with the training ones.

Read the consequence carefully against what the platforms say. Blocking GPTBot keeps your content out of model training and does nothing to your visibility in ChatGPT search. Blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from ChatGPT search answers. Blocking PerplexityBot does the same on Perplexity. And because both user-initiated fetchers largely ignore robots.txt anyway, the block does not even achieve the privacy outcome people imagine when a patient asks about you directly.

So the practical position for a dental practice is usually the reverse of what was implemented: allow the two search bots, and make a deliberate decision about the training bot separately rather than sweeping all of them into one rule.

Which third-party records describe a dental practice?

More than most principals realise, and all of them outrank the practice website as a description of the practice.

This is the part that makes dentistry different from a trade business. A plumber is described by their own site, their profile and their reviews. An English dental practice is described by a statutory register, a regulator's published assessment and an NHS service directory, none of which it owns and all of which are more authoritative than anything it publishes about itself.

• The GDC register, which carries the registration number and status of every dentist and dental care professional named on your site.
• Your CQC registration and any published assessment, which exists because providing the regulated activity without registering is an offence under section 10 of the Health and Social Care Act.
• Your NHS Find a Dentist profile, including whether you are accepting new NHS patients.
• Your Google Business Profile, which remains the most-read structured record of your opening hours and location.

Why is accepting new NHS patients the fact that decides the recommendation?

Because in England it is the question. A patient asking an assistant to find them a dentist is almost never asking which practice is best. They are asking which one will take them.

That fact does not live on your website in any form a third party can rely on. It lives on your NHS Find a Dentist profile, and keeping it current is a contractual obligation rather than a nicety. Practices must confirm their NHS website information every quarter, with deadlines falling on 30 June, 30 September, 31 December and 31 March. The confirmation covers whether you are accepting new NHS patients, along with contact details, opening times, services and facilities, and it traces back to regulations made by the Department of Health and Social Care in November 2022.

There is an enforcement tail, though a soft one. NHSBSA says that if you do not confirm your information each quarter, your practice may be contacted by your local commissioning team's contract manager.

Set the reminder four times a year and treat it as a visibility task rather than an admin one. A practice that quietly reopened its NHS list in February and has not touched the profile since November is invisible to the exact query it most wants to win, and no amount of website copy fixes that.

What does a CQC rating do that a dental practice website cannot?

It says something about you that you did not write, which is the entire currency of this problem.

CQC registration is not optional for a dental practice in England. Providers cannot lawfully carry out regulated activities without registering, and dental treatment falls under the regulated activity of treatment of disease, disorder or injury. CQC then monitors and assesses services and publishes what it finds, explicitly so that people can choose care, using the familiar four levels of outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate across whether a service is safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led.

Two things follow for a practice. The assessment exists and is retrievable whether or not you ever mention it, so there is no strategic value in silence. And if it is good, quoting it with the date is a far stronger sentence than any adjective you could write, because it is attributable to somebody other than you.

The same logic runs through the content on your own site, where the GDC's required items are already a list of checkable facts. We worked that through in how a dental practice should structure its website so AI Overviews can quote it, and it applies here for the same reason.

What should a dental practice actually change?

In rough order of how much difference it makes per hour spent.

• Read your robots.txt today and confirm OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot are not disallowed, directly or by a wildcard.
• Diarise the four NHS profile confirmation dates and put them on somebody's job description, not a sticky note.
• Make the NHS patient position explicit on your own site too, in a sentence, with the date you last reviewed it.
• Put the GDC registration number beside every clinician you name, and check each one still resolves on the register.
• State your CQC status and the date of the assessment, and link it.
• Make the practice name, address and phone number identical everywhere, since a mismatch is how an assistant ends up unsure you are one business.
• If you run several sites, decide where each location's authoritative page lives before you do any of the above, which we covered in whether a multi-location dental group should use one website or several.

What separates a recommendable dental practice from an invisible one?

How do you check what assistants say about your practice?

By asking them, repeatedly, and writing down what comes back. There is no Search Console for this. Neither platform gives a practice an impressions report, so the honest method is manual and the discipline is in doing it the same way each time.

Ask the same handful of questions a patient would actually ask, from a logged-out session, and record the answer verbatim with the date. Whether anyone nearby is taking NHS patients. Who does emergency dental appointments in your town. Which practice a nervous patient should try. Then check what the answer was built from, because both platforms link their sources and those links tell you which record is describing you.

Expect to be named rarely, and do not read a blank as a verdict on your practice. The general picture of how seldom assistants name any specific local business, and what genuinely moves it, is in how to get your business recommended by ChatGPT.

One scope note. The GDC register, CQC and NHS Find a Dentist are the English and UK framework. A practice elsewhere should work out which public registers and directories describe it, because there will be some, and they will be doing more of the talking than the homepage.