When a family asks ChatGPT for treatment in your city, are you in the answer?
A growing share of families and patients now ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI overview for recommendations instead of scrolling results. Those answers name three or four centers. We track whether you are one of them and fix it when you are not.
What changed
For twenty years being found meant ranking on a list. The list is now being replaced by an answer, and the engines that write it read your site differently from Google's crawler. They want clear entities, structured data, direct answers to direct questions, and facts about your center that agree with each other across the web. Most treatment center websites have none of that, which is why the same four names keep appearing.
What we track every month
The queries families actually type
Best rehab in your city, detox near me, IOP for a named condition in your state, and twenty more specific to your programs and levels of care.
Every engine that writes an answer
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. They do not agree with each other, and the gaps between them are usually the useful part.
Whether you are cited, and what is said
Not just presence. What the engine claims about your programs, whether it is accurate, and which competitors are named when you are not.
Month over month change
One report, the same queries each time, so a change means something rather than being noise from a reworded prompt.
What we fix
Schema an engine can read
MedicalOrganization, the services you actually deliver, and question and answer pairs. Engines quote structured answers far more readily than prose.
Entity consistency
The same description of your center on your site, your directories and your profiles. Engines resolve an entity by matching facts across sources, and disagreement makes you unciteable.
Content that answers the question
Pages built around what a family asks, answered directly in the first sentence, rather than around what a brochure wants to say.
Access and structure
llms.txt, crawler permissions for the AI engines, and an admissions page shaped so the part worth quoting is easy to find.
What it is not
It is not a replacement for your SEO agency, and it runs alongside them without touching their lane. It is not ads. It is the organic side of a channel that did not exist two years ago, and the honest position is that it is early enough that anyone selling certainty is selling something else.
How to get it
Included in Growth Partner, or as a standalone monthly report. Either way it starts with a baseline, so the first thing you get is an honest picture of where you stand today.
Questions
What is GEO?
Generative engine optimization: the work of getting cited in answers written by AI engines, rather than ranked in a list of links. Same goal as SEO, different mechanics.
What is AEO?
Answer engine optimization. In practice people use it interchangeably with GEO. Both describe being the source an engine quotes when it answers a question directly.
How is this different from SEO?
SEO earns a position in a list. This earns a mention inside an answer, where there is no list and usually three or four names. The structural work overlaps; the target does not.
How long until we see change?
Engines refresh at different rates, so the first report is a baseline rather than a result. Expect movement over two to three months, and expect it to be uneven across engines.
Can you guarantee we get cited?
No, and anyone who does is guessing. Nobody controls what a model returns. We can make you the most citeable center in your city and report honestly on whether it worked.
Do we need this if we already rank well on Google?
Ranking well helps but does not carry over automatically. Plenty of centers that rank on page one are absent from the AI answer for the same query, because the page was never structured to be quoted.
