Is your clinic in the AI answer?
When a patient asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for a clinic, the answer names a handful of practices. To be one of them, the assistant has to be allowed to read your site, find real text there, and find facts it can repeat.
How AI assistants pick a clinic
Assistants with web search work like a search engine with a writer on top. They run a search, read a few pages, and write an answer that names and links the sources they trust. Your site enters that answer in three steps: it has to be crawlable by the assistant's bot, readable without running JavaScript, and specific enough to quote: address, phone, services, insurers and who treats patients.
Google AI Overviews draw on Google's own search index, so the basics of the Findable sub-score apply there too. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity run their own crawlers, listed below.
The crawlers to allow in robots.txt
Search and user bots decide whether you can be cited. Training bots are a separate choice; blocking them does not remove you from search answers.
| User agent | Company | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | Indexes pages so ChatGPT search can show and link them |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | Fetches a page when a ChatGPT user or action asks for it |
| GPTBot | OpenAI | Collects pages that may be used to train OpenAI models |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | Indexes pages to improve Claude search results |
| Claude-User | Anthropic | Fetches a page when a Claude user asks for it |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | Collects pages that may be used to train Claude models |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | Indexes pages so Perplexity can show and cite them |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | Fetches a page when a Perplexity user asks for it |
| Google-Extended | Not a separate crawler. A robots.txt token that controls use of your pages for Gemini; it does not change Google Search |
A robots.txt that allows the AI search and user bots, and keeps private paths closed, looks like this:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot User-agent: ChatGPT-User User-agent: Claude-SearchBot User-agent: Claude-User User-agent: PerplexityBot User-agent: Perplexity-User Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /patient-portal/ Allow: / Sitemap: https://www.yourclinic.com/sitemap.xml
Many website builders and security plugins add AI blocks by default. Check yours at yourclinic.com/robots.txt, or let the scan read it for you.
The five AI-ready checks in the free scan
| Check | Passes when |
|---|---|
| AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt | robots.txt does not block GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended from the site. |
| Content readable without JavaScript | The initial HTML (before JavaScript runs) contains at least 150 words of meaningful visible text. |
| llms.txt file | A /llms.txt file exists and is plain text or Markdown with a heading. |
| Quotable facts in plain text | The page text states the address, phone number, services offered and insurers accepted. |
| Named in an AI answer | Asked one sample prompt ("Which {specialty} clinics in {city}, {state} would you recommend?"), ChatGPT with web search names the clinic or its domain. |
One sample is a smoke test. Live Ops tracks the trend.
AI answers change from one run to the next. Live Ops asks 25 patient questions on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI every week, and shows how often you are named. $49/month or $490/year.
Sources
Check whether AI assistants can read your site
The scan reads your robots.txt, your HTML before JavaScript, your llms.txt, and asks ChatGPT one patient question for your city.