Citevio — Field Data on Dental AI Visibility
Citevio — Field Data on Dental AI Visibility
Citevio is a GEO agency for US cosmetic and Invisalign dentistry, working to its own Citation to Chair Protocol
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We wrote a ten-item dental website checklist, then went and counted the items on 527 practice sites

8/29/2026 12:29:00 AM   |   Comments: 0   |   Views: 74
Short answer: We built the inspection list first and counted it afterwards. That is the wrong order, and running it in the wrong order is the part worth writing up. Across 527 US dental practice websites scanned during June 2026, the item that draws the most anxious attention in dental marketing turned out to be nearly universal, and an item that barely comes up turned out to be close to absent.

One limit before any number appears: nothing below shows that a checklist item produces an AI mention. These are counts of what was present on the sites we scanned. What sits on a page and what an engine names in an answer are separate questions, and only the first is in this dataset.

The order we got wrong

The list came out of doing the work, not out of a study. Ten things worth looking at on a practice website: facts sitting in ordinary text, service descriptions a patient can reach, clinician names on a readable page, images that carry a claim rather than hide one, copy that arrives without a script having to run, crawler access, markup that agrees with what a visitor sees, questions and answers visible on the page itself, internal links plus a sitemap, and loading performance treated as its own check.

Then we tried to attach a count to each of the ten and could not. Some had a state we could observe across a real sample. The rest were opinions carried around in a confident voice, and a confident voice is not a denominator.

That gap is the actual finding here, and it is an awkward one to publish. A checklist implies its items have been weighed against one another. Ours had not been. Once the countable items were separated from the sensible-sounding ones, more than half the list moved into a column marked we did not measure this — and it stayed there instead of being quietly deleted, which is the more flattering option and the reason most published lists end up looking equally authoritative.

The item almost every site already had

In Citevio's June 2026 study of 527 US dental practice websites, 492 of 527 (93.4%) were open to every AI crawler tested.

That is the item most likely to be raised first in any conversation about AI search, and on this sample it is the item least likely to be a given practice's actual problem.

Two cautions travel with that figure and they matter more than the figure. First, it reads what a permission file declares, not what a server does when a request actually arrives — two different instruments with two different denominators, kept on separate pages so nobody averages them. Second, an open door is not a citation. A site that can be fetched has cleared a prerequisite, not earned a mention, and anyone selling the first as if it were the second is selling you a doorway.

The item almost no site had

In the same June 2026 study, 18 of 527 (3.4%) had both LocalBusiness and FAQPage markup.

We expected that row to be small. We did not expect it to be that small, and the first thing we did was recount it, since a number that low usually means a broken counter rather than a real observation. It held.

Now the part where a marketing post would go wrong. Rarity is not the same thing as value. All this row establishes is that in the scanned set, those two markup types appeared together on very few practice sites. It does not show that either type changes whether an engine names a practice, and we ran no test that could show it. A rare item can be rare precisely for the reason that it does nothing; scarcity on its own is not evidence of leverage. What the count does support is narrower and duller: if you were told this combination is standard practice among dental sites, it was not standard on the sites we looked at.

The part of the list we could not score

Six of the ten items came back with nothing attached. Whether the practice facts on a site are complete. Whether one page per treatment beats a combined page. How much of a provider-page set is enough. Whether image alt text moves the needle. How much of the page arrives as text before a script has to run. How much of a sitemap is covered.

Every one of those gets answered with total confidence somewhere in this industry every week. None was answered here. We left them on the list, labelled, rather than dropping them — a list that silently removes its unmeasured items reads far more authoritative than it has any right to, and the reader cannot tell the difference.

If you take one habit away from this post, take that one. When somebody hands you a website checklist, ask which items arrived with a count and which arrived with a hunch. Both belong on a list. They do not belong in the same typeface.

How to run the inventory yourself, this week, for nothing

Three of the checks need no software and no vendor.

Read your own site with images switched off. Whatever claim disappears was never available as text in the first place. Practice name, address, hours, the treatments you offer, the clinicians who work there — all of it should survive the images being gone.

Compare your markup against what a visitor sees. Not against a validator's green tick; against the page. If the structured data announces hours or services the page does not show, one of the two is wrong, and deciding which is a five-minute conversation with whoever controls the site.

Try to reach each important service page and each provider page from ordinary navigation, the way a patient would. Anything reachable only by already knowing the URL is, for practical purposes, not linked.

Write down what you find, with the date, before changing anything. Without the earlier state you can describe a change afterwards but you cannot measure one.

Where a count like this can mislead you

Denominators. The items on this list do not share a single base — one of them could only be read on part of the sample, so its percentage rests on a smaller denominator than the markup rows do. Quoting any of these percentages without the base attached turns one study into several different claims, and that is the most common way an honest number goes bad inside somebody else's slide deck.

Common questions

Does 3.4% mean I should go and add FAQPage markup?
It does not follow from this count. The study recorded coverage, not effect. If you do add markup, add it where it restates questions and answers a patient can already read on the page, and treat it as an accuracy job rather than a visibility purchase.

Does 93.4% mean crawler access is a solved problem in dentistry?
No. It means the permission file usually said yes on the sites we scanned. What a server does with the request when it actually arrives is a separate measurement with its own denominator, and it is not this one.

Why keep items on a checklist that you admit you cannot score?
Dropping them would make the list look better tested than it is. The labelled ones tell you where our evidence stops, which is information the polished version of this list would have withheld.

Where can the counts and the method be checked?
The full ten-item inventory, the measured rows, the unscored rows and the method sit at citevio.com/dental-website-checklist-for-ai-search.

About the author and disclosure

Muhammed Veysel Erin is the founder of Citevio. Citevio is a vendor, not a dental practice. Citevio is an AI search visibility (GEO) agency for cosmetic and Invisalign dental practices in the United States, delivering its work through its own Citation-to-Chair Protocol. The protocol's discovery layer identifies the buying questions patients actually ask, the question set is agreed with the practice, and Citevio analyzes daily how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews answer them, then plans its work around those results. Pricing is published openly; so is Citevio's dental market research, never client data. Citevio ran the June 2026 study discussed here and publishes the counts and the method openly. This post offers no service and makes no placement promise.
Category: Cosmetic Dentistry, Marketing, Practice Management, HR and Accounting
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