First Five

AI Visibility · Dermatology Practices

AI visibility for Dermatologists

When someone asks an AI engine for a recommendation, one to five names come back. We measure whether yours is one of them, then build the presence that puts it there.

Dermatology Practices specifically

What is different about medical and cosmetic dermatology practices

The method below is the same whichever industry you are in. These are the parts that are not — and they are usually what decides whether the programme works.

The condition query is the real front door

Acne, eczema and psoriasis treatment searches each run to 673,000 a month — more than the entire category of people looking for a dermatologist. Those answers are currently assembled from WebMD, Healthline and the AAD. A practice that is cited inside them is reaching patients weeks before they search for a doctor.

Engines must be able to tell your two businesses apart

Medical dermatology is insurance-gated; cosmetic is cash-pay. Published as one undifferentiated service list, they collapse, and the engine answers the wrong question — sending a Mohs patient to your laser page. Separating the lines in structured data is unglamorous and it is the highest-leverage fix here.

Insurance data decides the follow-up

After a recommendation, the next question is whether you take the patient's plan. 'Does insurance cover dermatologist' is a live search in its own right. An engine that cannot answer it for you answers it for whoever published their panels.

The method

How ai visibility works, in any category

01

The work is mostly not on your website

Brands are around six times more likely to be cited through third-party sources than their own domain. For local businesses the split is starker still: engines resolve recommendations from Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Foursquare, Yelp and review platforms, then rank what they find by review quality and recency. A site redesign does not move any of it.

02

Four engines, four different levers

ChatGPT resolves through Bing and Foursquare. Gemini and AI Overviews weight Google Business Profile. Perplexity leans heavily on community discussion. Copilot draws on Bing plus editorial coverage. An agency optimising only for Google is working on one surface out of four, and its reporting will look perfectly healthy while three of them fail.

03

Why the same query gives different answers

Because the four engines are not reading the same internet. A practice can be named in three quarters of Gemini answers and almost none from ChatGPT — which is not a content problem, it is an unclaimed Bing Places listing. Diagnosing that requires measuring each engine separately, which is why we never report a single blended number.

04

Reviews are a ranking input, not reputation management

Every engine ends up weighting reviews, because reviews are the closest available proxy for the question being asked: which of these is actually good. Observed practice puts the entry point near thirty reviews at 4.3 stars, and above a hundred in competitive metros. Recency counts about as heavily as volume — two hundred reviews with nothing in six months loses to sixty updated weekly.

05

A score that compounds

Every month we re-run your prompt set across all four engines and report the First Five Score, the per-engine breakdown, your share of voice against named local competitors, and the citation source behind each mention. The number moves, and you can see exactly what moved it. That is the difference between a programme and a campaign.

Category specifics

What this looks like for dermatology practices

The method does not change between industries. The questions your patients actually ask, the sources the engines trust, and the rules you have to advertise inside all do.

Prompts we run for this category

  • best acne treatment in Austin
  • eczema treatment near me Scottsdale
  • dermatologist that takes my insurance Tampa
  • top rated dermatologist Charlotte

Rules this category advertises inside

  • State medical board advertising rules
  • Before/after imagery restrictions vary by state
  • Claims substantiation for outcome language

Citation layer

Where the engines look for a dermatology practice

Each engine resolves a local recommendation through a different set of sources. These are the ones that decide whether a dermatology practice gets named — and most of them are not your website.

  1. Gemini / AI Overviews Google Business Profile
  2. ChatGPT / Copilot Bing Places
  3. All engines AAD Find a Dermatologist
  4. All engines Healthgrades
  5. All engines Zocdoc
  6. All engines Vitals
  7. Perplexity Reddit

Scope

What the engagement covers

Specifics rather than adjectives — and an equally specific list of what it does not cover, because unclear scope is the most common cause of a bad first quarter.

Included

  • Baseline across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot — 50 prompts, three runs each
  • Structured data for the organisation, each practice and each service
  • Listing claims and NAP consistency across Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Foursquare and Yelp
  • Category-specific directory profiles
  • Review velocity system with a monthly target per practice
  • Third-party and editorial presence work
  • Monthly scorecard with the citation source map
  • robots.txt and AI-crawler access audit on the live domain

Not included

  • Guaranteed placement in any AI answer — no platform publishes source selection, and anyone promising it is overselling
  • Buying or incentivising reviews in any form
  • Astroturfed community posts
  • Website redesign — we will flag genuine blockers, but a rebuild is rarely the fastest path to a better score

What to expect, when

Timeline

  1. Week 1 Baseline measured, gaps prioritised by effort against impact
  2. Weeks 1–4 Listings claimed, structured data shipped, crawler access confirmed
  3. Week 2 onward Review velocity system live and reporting against target
  4. Weeks 4–12 Third-party, editorial and community presence built
  5. Month 2+ Monthly re-measurement — the score starts moving

5 questions

Common questions

How long before the score moves?

Directory and structured-data fixes can register within two to four weeks. Review velocity and third-party presence compound over three to six months. We report monthly either way, so progress is visible before it is complete.

Can you guarantee we get recommended?

No, and treat anyone who does with suspicion. No AI platform publishes how it selects sources. We work from measured output and correlations documented across the industry, we report honestly, and we re-baseline the source map quarterly because these systems change fast.

How is this different from SEO?

Traditional SEO gets a page ranked. This gets a business named. The inputs barely overlap — most of the work sits in directories, review platforms, community and editorial coverage rather than on your site.

What if we have Dermatology Practices in several states?

Each location is measured separately, because engines resolve them separately. Multi-location groups get per-location scoring, and the common failure is a group whose brand is strong nationally but whose individual locations are not resolved as distinct entities.

What happens if the number goes down?

We report it and explain what changed. These systems shift underneath everyone — community content is weighted differently quarter to quarter, and engines change retrieval without notice. A report that only ever contains good news is not a report.

Also for dermatology practices

Start with the number.

Before any retainer, we run fifty prompts across four engines and show you exactly where you stand against the operators being named instead.

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