The whole subject, in one place
How health practices get found online
A patient with a sore shoulder does not search for your profession. A participant looking for support does not know which provider is registered. This page sets out where those people actually look now, what each of those places reads before deciding what to show them, and which part of it is worth your attention first.
The starting point
Two different searches, and most practices only pass one
Search your practice name. You will almost certainly be there, at the top, with your address and your hours.
Now search what you actually do, in your suburb, without your name attached. That is the search a person makes when they need help and do not yet know who you are. It is the only search that brings you somebody new.
The gap between those two results is the whole subject. A practice that appears for its own name and nowhere else is visible only to people who already know it exists, which is another way of saying it is invisible to the people it needs.
Nobody telephones to say they could not find you. That is why this problem persists for years without being noticed.
Where people look
There are more places than there used to be, and none of the old ones left
A referral from a general practitioner still matters. Word of mouth still matters. A sign on the building still works on the person walking past it. None of that has gone away, and anyone who tells you it has is selling something.
What has changed is that several more places now sit alongside them, and a decision can be made in any one of them before you are ever contacted.
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Ordinary search results
The list of blue links. Still the largest single source of new enquiries for most practices, and still the thing everything else is built on.
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Maps and the local pack
The small block of three businesses with a map above the ordinary results. For a practice that people travel to, this is frequently more valuable than the website, and it is driven by a Google Business Profile rather than by the site.
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AI answers inside search
AI Overviews and AI Mode, which sit above the ordinary results and answer the question directly. A person who reads the answer often has no reason to scroll to the links beneath it.
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AI assistants outside search
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot. A person describes a problem in ordinary words and is handed a small number of options. These systems do not read your Google ranking, and some of them do not read Google at all.
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Third-party directories
Booking platforms, professional association listings, government provider directories. AI systems cite these heavily when answering health questions, and most of them are free and sitting unclaimed.
What those systems read
Four things decide whether you appear
The mechanisms differ from one surface to the next, but the inputs are broadly the same, and they are not mysterious.
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Whether the system is allowed in at all
A small text file at the root of your website tells automated visitors which of them may read the site. Some sites refuse the AI systems without anyone having decided to, because a setting was inherited from whoever built it. This is the first thing worth checking, because nothing else matters if the door is shut.
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Whether your pages describe the problem or the profession
A page headed with the name of a profession answers a question nobody asked. A page naming the body part, the condition and the words a patient would use answers the question they did ask. This single difference decides more outcomes than any technical setting.
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Whether the system knows you exist as a business
Separate from any page being cited. A system can quote your article on a topic while not reliably knowing that your practice is a real business at a real address with named practitioners. Those are two different problems and they need two different fixes.
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Whether anywhere else mentions you
Directories, associations, local listings, professional registers. A site nobody has ever referenced has no outside signal at all, and AI systems lean on outside signals more heavily than ordinary search does.
The constraint most agencies miss
Registered practitioners cannot use the standard playbook
Practitioners registered under the National Law cannot publish testimonials about clinical care, cannot make outcome claims, and cannot use before-and-after comparisons. That removes most of what a general marketing agency would ordinarily reach for.
The rule is also narrower than it is usually described. A comment is a testimonial when it addresses a symptom, a diagnosis or treatment, or an outcome including a practitioner's skill. A comment touching none of those is not caught. The blanket claim that registered practitioners can never have public comment about them is too broad, and acting on the broad version costs practices visibility they were entitled to.
Responsibility follows control, which means content produced by an agency on a practice's behalf is the practice's responsibility. Editing a comment is itself a breach. And the rules reach well past paid advertising.
NDIS providers sit under a different framework again, and unregistered providers face a sharper version of the same problem: they cannot receive agency-managed referrals at all, which leaves search as effectively their only channel for reaching someone new.
In detail
Each part of this, set out properly
Everything above is a summary. Each of the following goes into one part of it at length, with the working shown and the limitations stated.
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Can ChatGPT read your website?
The text file that decides whether AI systems are allowed to read your site at all, how to check yours in about a minute, and the distinction between the crawlers that train these systems and the ones that fetch a page to answer a live question.
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Why your business ranks for its own name but not for what you sell
The two-search gap in full: why almost every business passes the first search, what the second one is actually measuring, and what has to change on a site for the second to start working.
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AI SEO terminology: what AEO, GEO, AISO and AI searchability actually mean
The same service is sold under at least eight names and nobody has agreed which is right. What each term means, which of them carry more than one meaning, and the questions worth asking whichever word you are given.
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Two searches, one suburb: what AI systems actually say when somebody looks for help with shoulder pain
Original research. Two searches about the same suburb an hour apart, put through seven surfaces, signed out throughout. The systems disagreed on which profession to recommend, and naming the condition rather than the profession changed which practices appeared at all.
The quickest way to find out where you stand.
The free check runs both searches for your practice across Google, Google Maps, Google's AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity, and returns a short written answer. It costs nothing and it commits you to nothing.