Why ChatGPT Recommends a Different Speech Therapist Than You

🇫🇷 Version française

Your recurring patients show up every week without fail and your therapy schedule stays full, but the number of new evaluation requests has been quietly dropping for months. What you're not seeing: when a parent looks for a speech therapist for their child, they no longer type "speech therapist" into Google — they ask an AI, which recommends a different practice than yours.

The signal most practices miss

Your recurring patients stay loyal, your sessions run on schedule as usual, and yet the number of first calls for an initial evaluation is slowing down. You've probably already looked at the usual suspects: a new practice that opened nearby, a waitlist people consider too long, a Google Business Profile that needs updating. Nothing really stands out. That's normal — the cause isn't necessarily where you're looking.

More and more parents and patients skip the classic Google search step entirely. They open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask directly: "Which speech therapist would you recommend in [city] for a child, with a reasonable wait time?" 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 care, your rapport with children, or your rehabilitation outcomes — it has no access to any of 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 parent has (specialties covered, age range of patients, wait time for a first appointment, care for language disorders or swallowing disorders), and mentions of your practice on health directories or local parent groups.

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

What this actually changes for your practice

This isn't an abstract ranking problem: it's a stream of new evaluations quietly drying up. Your recurring patients stay — they already know and trust you. But every worried new parent, every patient referred after a move, every person looking for post-stroke care increasingly turns to an AI to pick a practice. If you're not cited there, that's several potential new evaluations a month going to a colleague without the parent ever comparing your practice to theirs — they simply never saw you show up.

What you can check yourself in 5 minutes

1. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask the question a parent would ask: "Which speech therapist would you recommend in [your city/neighborhood] for a child?" See if your practice comes up, and at what rank.
2. Try a variant more specific to your practice: "speech therapist specializing in stuttering in [city]" or "speech therapist for adults after a stroke in [city]" if that's one of your areas.
3. Compare your practice's name, address, and phone number across your website, your Google Business Profile, and health 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.