Why ChatGPT Recommends a Different Osteopath Than Your Practice

🇫🇷 Version française

Your regular patients come back every season without a second thought, but the phone rings less and less for new appointments. What you don't see: when someone looks for an osteopath nearby, they no longer type "osteopath near me" into Google — they ask an AI, and it recommends a different practice than yours.

The signal most practices miss

Your patient base holds steady, follow-up visits keep flowing, and yet the number of first appointments has been quietly dropping for a few months. You've probably already looked at the usual suspects: your Google listing, your website, a new practice that opened nearby. Nothing really stands out. That's normal — the cause isn't necessarily where you're looking.

More and more people looking for an osteopath for the first time — after moving, a recent injury, a vague recommendation from a friend — skip the classic Google search step entirely. They open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask directly: "Which osteopath would you recommend in [city] for back pain?" The AI answers with a name — and that name isn't necessarily yours.

Why the AI recommends a different practice than yours

A generative AI doesn't judge the quality of your sessions, your technique, or your bedside manner — it has no access to that. It relies on what's written, consistent, and verifiable about you online: your Google Business Profile, your reviews (their number, date, and content), your website if it clearly answers the questions a patient has (specialties — sports, pediatrics, prenatal care —, service area, how urgent cases are handled), and mentions of your practice on third-party sources like healthcare professional directories.

This is exactly the territory of GEO — Generative Engine Optimization, the practice of being understood and cited by these AIs rather than by a classic search engine. An excellent practitioner whose information is scattered, whose reviews are several years old, or whose address differs between their website and their Google listing, can simply never show up in an answer — while a colleague nearby, better documented online, gets cited first.

What this actually changes for your practice

This isn't an abstract ranking problem: it's a tap of new patients quietly turning off. Loyal patients keep coming back — they already know you. But everyone who moves into your neighborhood, everyone dealing with a new injury, everyone chasing down a vague recommendation, increasingly turns to an AI to choose. If you're not cited there, that's several first appointments a month going to a colleague without the patient ever comparing your practice to theirs — they simply never saw you.

What you can check yourself in 5 minutes

1. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask the question a new patient would ask: "Which osteopath would you recommend in [your city/neighborhood] for [a common issue: back pain, sciatica, infant care]?" See if your practice comes up, and at what rank.
2. Try a variant closer to your positioning: "osteopath specialized in sports injuries in [city]" or "osteopath for infants in [city]" if that's your niche.
3. Compare your practice's name, address, and phone number across your website, your Google Business Profile, and professional directories: even a small inconsistency can be enough to make an AI hesitate.
4. Check the date of your latest Google reviews: an AI favors recent signals over excellent reviews that are several years old.