33 : What Should a Dentist Do to Get Recommended by AI Search? It’s Not What You Think!

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is rapidly replacing traditional SEO as the primary way patients discover dental practices online. In this episode, digital marketing expert Kasim Aslam shares 18 months of hard data on exactly how AI engines like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity decide which dental practices to recommend — and the findings contradict almost everything the SEO industry has been saying.

EPISODE OVERVIEW

Kasim Aslam spent nearly two years running a structured data study with a five-person team, analyzing tens of millions of data points across major AI platforms to answer one question: what makes an AI engine cite or recommend a business? In this episode, he breaks down what he found and what it means for dental practices competing for patients in 2026 and beyond. Dentists will walk away understanding why schema markup is the single most important technical factor for AI search visibility, why personal authority now outranks brand identity in AI recommendations, and how to begin building the kind of multimodal, deep-expertise content that AI engines actually trust. This is not theory. It is research-backed strategy that any dental practice can begin implementing today.

ABOUT KASIM ASLAM

Kasim Aslam is a serial agency founder who built and sold the number one ranked Google Ads agency in the world, exiting in October 2022 to a SoftBank-backed martech company. With nearly $100 million in managed Google Ads spend across his career, Kasim understands search traffic value at a level few marketers can match. After his exit, he launched a long-form research initiative into Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), studying how large language models (LLMs) source citations, culminating in one of the most comprehensive independent datasets on AI-driven search behavior ever compiled. He is a partner at Pareto Talent staffing agency, a co-creator of AEO training content alongside Perry Belcher and Molly Pittman, and is launching a dedicated AEO agency in March 2025 alongside Smart Marketer partners Molly Pittman and Ezra Firestone. He is also the author of the AEO Blueprint. Kasim has direct experience marketing dental practices, including working with Dr. Ginger Price (creator of Coconut Toothpaste) and the Arizona Pediatric Dentistry Organization.

AI AND TECH COMPANIES MENTIONED

ChatGPT (OpenAI): https://chat.openai.com

Google Gemini: https://gemini.google.com

Perplexity AI: https://www.perplexity.ai

Claude (Anthropic): https://www.anthropic.com

Grok (xAI): https://grok.x.ai

Answer the Public (Neil Patel): https://answerthepublic.com

Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com

SEMrush: https://www.semrush.com

Search Atlas: https://searchatlas.com

Schema.org (Schema Validator): https://schema.org

Pareto Talent: https://www.paretotalent.com

Smart Marketer (Molly Pittman / Ezra Firestone): https://smartmarketer.com

The Hoth (Link Building): https://www.thehoth.com

PosiRank: https://www.posirank.com

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com

Google My Business: https://business.google.com

Better Business Bureau (BBB): https://www.bbb.org

MapQuest: https://www.mapquest.com

Yellow Pages: https://www.yellowpages.com

PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Bing (Microsoft): https://www.bing.com

Amazon Web Services (AWS / Anthropic): https://aws.amazon.com

AEO Blueprint (Kasim Aslam's Book): https://www.aeo.agency

ADDITIONAL EDUCATION

• https://mysocialpractice.com/2026/02/zero-click-ai-overviews/

• https://mysocialpractice.com/2026/02/diy-dental-marketing-byte-sized/

• https://mysocialpractice.com/2026/02/ai-search-dental-website/

Host: Adrian Lefler

Website: https://mysocialpractice.com/dental-marketing-expert/

Phone: 877-316-7516

👍 Subscribe for more on dental marketing, AI in dentistry, and practice growth.

#AEO #DentalAI #AISearchForDentists #DentalMarketing #ArtificialIntelligenceInDentistry #DentalPracticeGrowth #AnswerEngineOptimization

TERMS & TRANSLATIONS (FOR SHOW NOTES)

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

The practice of optimizing a dental practice's online presence so it gets recommended or cited by AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity when patients ask questions. Think of it as the AI-era version of ranking on Google — except instead of appearing as a link, your practice becomes the answer the AI gives to a patient's question.

Schema Markup / Schema Validation

A layer of structured data added to a website that acts like a table of contents for AI and search engines. It tells AI tools exactly what a site contains — services, locations, providers, hours, and more — so they can understand and trust the content without having to guess. Kasim's research found that over 90% of all AI-driven citations come from websites with validated schema, yet only about 12% of websites on the internet have it. For dental practices, this is the single highest-leverage technical improvement available.

Citation (AI Context)

When an AI tool like ChatGPT references a specific source — a website, social media post, review, or directory listing — while generating its answer to a patient's question. Being cited by an AI is the new version of ranking in Google search results, but it is more powerful because it is embedded directly in the answer a patient reads. Kasim's research focused entirely on understanding what causes AI tools to choose one source as a citation over another.

LLM (Large Language Model)

The technology engine behind AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. LLMs read and analyze enormous amounts of internet content, then generate conversational answers to questions. For dental practices, LLMs are increasingly the first stop for patients researching symptoms, comparing dentists, or looking for a specific type of care — which is why understanding how they work matters.

Knowledge Graph

The internal map of facts, relationships, and authorities that an AI or search engine builds to understand how information connects. Google has spent years building its Knowledge Graph from search data. Kasim's research suggests that Google's Gemini is actually rebuilding this graph from scratch — which is why Gemini currently overlaps less with traditional Google search results than ChatGPT or Perplexity do.

Personal Authority vs. Brand Authority

Kasim's research found that AI engines overwhelmingly prefer individual people over brand names or practice names when deciding who to recommend. A named dentist with a documented area of expertise — pediatric care, implants, holistic dentistry — is far more likely to be cited by AI than a practice with a strong logo and a professional website. This means dentists who create content as themselves, not just under their practice brand, will have a significant advantage in AI-driven patient discovery.

Multimodal Content

Content that exists in multiple formats — video, audio, written articles, social posts, and images — all communicating the same ideas. AI engines assign more authority to subjects that appear consistently across many types of content and platforms. For a dental practice, this means a single podcast episode can be repurposed into YouTube videos, short-form social clips, blog posts, and graphics, each reinforcing the dentist's expertise across the web.

Social Proof / Social Mentions

Online reviews, comments, and references to a dental practice or dentist made by other people across the web. Kasim identifies this as the number one mistake dental practices are making in AI search: not capturing enough social proof. AI tools treat third-party mentions — Google reviews, Yelp ratings, BBB listings, social media comments — the same way traditional SEO treated inbound links. The more people say good things about a practice in public, the more trustworthy the AI judges that practice to be.

Context Indexing

The way AI engines personalize recommendations based on the full history and profile of the person asking the question. Unlike Google search, where 90% of results are similar for everyone, AI engines factor in age, lifestyle, prior conversations, health context, and personal preferences when generating recommendations. For dental practices, this means it is possible to optimize for a specific type of patient — families, athletes, seniors, implant candidates — by consistently creating content that speaks to that patient's specific context and concerns.

K-Shaped Economy

An economic model Kasim uses to describe what AI is doing to competitive markets. The letter K represents a split: roughly 20% of businesses that establish genuine authority and embrace AI-driven visibility will see accelerating growth, while the remaining 80% — those who treat themselves as interchangeable — will steadily lose relevance. For dental practices, this is a direct argument for differentiation: become the recognized expert in a specific area of care, or risk being invisible to the AI tools patients increasingly rely on.

Perplexity

An AI-powered search tool that acts as a faster, more synthesized version of Google — pulling from roughly 70-80% of the same web sources as traditional Google search and summarizing them into direct answers. Kasim's research places Perplexity's search graph closest to Google's among the major AI tools, making it a strong second priority for dental practices optimizing for AI visibility.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

Another term for AEO. Refers to the practice of optimizing content so it is selected, summarized, and cited by generative AI tools when answering patient questions. GEO, AEO, and AI-SEO are often used interchangeably to describe the same strategic shift away from traditional link-based search ranking toward authority-based AI recommendation.