What You’ll Learn
- Why traditional SEO strategies are failing dental practices as patients shift to AI search tools
- How AI evaluates your practice differently than Google’s traditional algorithm
- The difference between commoditized messaging and brand meaning (and why AI cares)
- How to use the Brand Appreciation Pyramid to differentiate your practice emotionally
- A free prompt that instantly audits your website for AI search readiness
The Dentist Who Named His Practice “Dentist Near Me”
There is a dentist somewhere in Texas who thought he had cracked the code. He named his practice “Dentist Near Me.” His website was dentistnearme.com. His Google Business Profile said Dentist Near Me. Everything was optimized for that single keyword phrase because that is what patients search for, right?
For traditional dental SEO, this was brilliant. When someone typed “dentist near me” into Google, his practice name matched the query almost perfectly. The algorithm loved it. But AI search doesn’t work that way.
Reid Holmes, a brand strategist with 30 years of experience in advertising and author of “Appreciated Branding,” recently joined the Byte Sized Podcast to explain why strategies like this are becoming obsolete. When AI encounters a practice named “Dentist Near Me,” it does not see clever optimization. It sees a practice with nothing meaningful to say about itself.
“AI is going to look for something deeper than that,” Reid explained. “If your top value is location, maybe it would get surfaced. But it’s going to look for meaning.”
The Fundamental Shift: From Keywords to Meaning
Traditional SEO operated on a simple principle: match keywords in the search query to keywords on your website. For 25 years, dental practices optimized their sites by stuffing in phrases like “dental implants,” “teeth whitening,” and “family dentistry.” The algorithm found those matches and served up links for humans to browse.
AI search works completely differently.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Google Gemini for a dentist recommendation, the AI is not scanning for keyword matches. It is synthesizing meaning. It analyzes what your practice actually stands for, cross-references that against what others say about you, and determines whether you would genuinely serve the person asking.
“With AI, it’s looking for meaning,” Reid said. “It’s going to look at your website and not search for keywords. It’s going to look for combinations of words or things that say, ‘Oh, this is what my user I think cares about.’ And I’m going to surface them as one of my top three.”
This happens in seconds. The AI reaches across your website, your social media, your reviews, forums where patients discuss you, and assembles a picture of who you actually are. Not who you claim to be. Who you actually are.
The Plateau of Indifference
If you’re in dental marketing you probably know that most practices sound exactly the same. Sorry.
“We provide quality dental care for the whole family.” “Our experienced team is dedicated to your smile.” “We offer comprehensive services in a comfortable environment.”
Reid calls this commoditized messaging. And he has a term for what happens when an entire category sounds identical: the plateau of indifference.
“When you’re in this crowded category like a dentistry category, it really becomes something I call the plateau of indifference,” Reid explained. “It’s just like, well, I don’t care which one. I just need this problem solved right now.”
When patients hit that plateau, they make decisions based on price or random chance. Neither is good for building a sustainable practice.
But here is where it gets worse for AI search. When an AI model synthesizes your website and finds the same generic language that appears on thousands of other dental sites, you dissolve into averages. You become statistically indistinguishable from everyone else.
“AI models synthesize patterns,” Reid said. “If your point of view as a company or as a brand is vague, you just dissolve into averages. If it’s sharp and repeated, you become more referenceable.”
The Brand Appreciation Pyramid
Reid developed a framework called the Brand Appreciation Pyramid that explains how practices can escape commoditized messaging. The pyramid has layers, and most dental practices get stuck at the bottom.
| Level | Focus | Example |
| Functional Benefits | What you do | “We offer cleanings, fillings, and crowns” |
| Buying Incentives | Why choose now | “We accept all insurance” |
| Unique Selling Proposition | Rational differentiator | “Painless injection technology” |
| Unique Appreciated Solution | Emotional differentiator | “Anxiety-free dental experiences” |
| Brand Values | What you stand for | “We believe dental care should feel like self-care” |
The bottom layers are rational and expected. Every dentist offers cleanings. Many accept most insurance. Some have newer technology. These are functional benefits, and while they matter, they do not differentiate you.
The top layers are emotional and appreciated. They answer not what you do, but why you care about the people you serve.
“The simpler way to think about this is you’re either talking about the product or the service and talking about why people should care about it,” Reid said. “Or you’re talking about the customer and why you care about them. And that’s the big shift.”
Applying This to Dental Practice Anxiety
Let’s bring this directly into dentistry. Dental anxiety affects well over 50% of the population. Many people avoid the dentist entirely because the experience feels threatening.
Most practices address this with functional benefits. “We offer sedation dentistry.” “We have nitrous oxide available.” “Our injections use numbing technology.” These are all rational solutions to an emotional problem.
Reid walked through what an emotionally differentiated approach might look like.
“The emotional and more appreciated benefit would probably be that anxiety side, not how it’s delivered,” he said. “I can remember there was a dentist I used once called Gentle Dental. But what I’m saying is you’d have to find that unique appreciated solution.”
What would that look like in practice? Reid improvised an example during the conversation:
“We’re freakout-free dentistry. We play really soothing music in the room. You can choose the scent that you would like pumped into your room. Everything is very clear, very well known, there’s no surprises. We’re going to be incredibly caring in how we deliver that care. At the end, you’re going to feel like you just went to the spa.”
The functional benefits still exist. The sedation is still available. The numbing technology still works. But the brand message has shifted from “here’s what we do” to “here’s how we make you feel.”
And that is exactly what AI search is looking for.
The Concentric Circles of Brand Verification
Here is where AI search gets really interesting. It doesn’t just read your website and take your word for it.
Reid described a model of concentric circles that AI uses to verify whether your brand claims are authentic.
Circle 1: Your Website What you say about yourself. Your values, your mission, your service descriptions.
Circle 2: Your Content Blog posts, social media, videos. Does the content you create align with what you claim on your website?
Circle 3: Influencers and User-Generated Content What are others saying about you? Patient testimonials, social media mentions, video reviews.
Circle 4: Customer Experience Reddit threads, Yelp reviews, Google reviews, Facebook comments. Are real patients confirming or contradicting your brand claims?
“Your website is the center of four or five concentric circles,” Reid explained. “What you say about yourself on your website then gets checked by AI with what your content says about who you are. That has to line up. You have to be walking the talk.”
If your website says you provide anxiety-free dentistry but your Google reviews are full of patients describing rushed, impersonal experiences, the AI will not recommend you. The claims do not match the evidence.
“If you’re not lining up, you will not be surfaced,” Reid said.
The Prompt That Audits Your AI Readiness
Reid developed a ChatGPT prompt that analyzes any website for AI search readiness. He spent considerable time asking ChatGPT how it evaluates sites for surfaceability, then refined the questions into a comprehensive audit tool.
The prompt examines several dimensions:
Machine Comprehension Can AI actually read and understand your site structure?
Machine Trust Does your site demonstrate credibility signals that AI recognizes?
Brand Meaning Differentiation Are you saying something distinctive, or dissolving into averages?
Technical Extractability Can AI pull relevant information efficiently from your pages?
When Reid ran this prompt on various dental practice websites, the results were revealing. The tool identified specific commoditized language that practices should eliminate. It suggested questions to ask that would help shift messaging from product-centric to patient-centric. It scored readability and flagged areas where meaning was vague.
“It said, ‘Look, this is the commoditized language that you are using in your site that you should not use,'” Adrian confirmed after running the prompt. “It was showing me how to move from this product-centric unique selling proposition stuff to an emotional presentation.”
Why Social Proof Matters More Than Ever
One of the challenges dental practices face is the discomfort of self-promotion. Dentists generally do not want to be the person beating their chest about how great they are.
Reid offered a practical solution: let others do the talking.
“Reputation is not what you say about yourself. It’s what others say about you,” he said. “If there’s a way to empower people to do that, you know, if you say to them, ‘Hey, if you go on your socials and you just say, hey, I just was at the dentist and these guys are great, tag us so that we can thank you.'”
This matters for AI search because user-generated content is one of those verification circles. When patients post genuine experiences on social media, those posts become evidence that AI can reference when evaluating your practice.
The old question about social media ROI (“How am I getting patients from this?”) has a new answer. Social content feeds the AI verification system. It provides the external evidence that your brand claims are real.
Starting the Brand Meaning Journey
Building brand meaning is not a weekend project. Reid acknowledged that transforming a commoditized business into a differentiated brand requires deep work.
“I can’t tell you how hard it is to take a business that’s a commoditized type business and like rethink from the ground up the message architecture of how you should present a dental practice to their community,” he said.
But there are starting points.
Run the AI Readiness Audit Use Reid’s prompt to understand how AI currently perceives your practice. Identify the commoditized language you need to eliminate.
Ask the Emotional Questions What do your patients actually feel when they come to you? What are they afraid of? What do they hope for? What would make them tell their friends about you?
Examine Your Reviews What language do patients use when describing your practice? That language reveals the emotional truth of your brand, not your marketing copy.
Align Everything Make sure your website, your content, your social media, and your actual patient experience all tell the same story. AI will check.
Dental practices have spent decades describing what they do. The ones that thrive in an AI-driven future will be the ones that articulate why they care.
That shift, from functional to emotional, from claims to meaning, from keywords to brand, is the difference between being ignored by AI and being recommended by it.
In This Episode:
Reid Holmes, Creative Director, Author, and Speaker
Reid Holmes is a brand expert, award-winning speaker, executive creative director & strategist, and a #1 best-selling author with over three decades in major American ad agencies. His expertise comes from his understanding of how to frame a message to communicate real value and make an impact.
Adrian Lefler, CEO and Co-founder of My Social Practice
Adrian Lefler, CEO of My Social Practice, is a seasoned expert in the dental marketing industry with 14 years of experience. He is widely recognized for his engaging and informative presentations. Based in Suncrest, Utah, Adrian shares his life with his wife, four children, and a lively mix of pets. My Social Practice is a leading dental marketing company, and Adrian is passionate about helping dental professionals succeed in this dynamic field.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is traditional SEO becoming less effective for dental practices?
Traditional SEO matches keywords in search queries to keywords on websites. AI search tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini work differently. They synthesize meaning by analyzing your entire online presence, including what you say about yourself, what content you create, and what patients say about you in reviews and social media. Practices optimized only for keywords are being outperformed by practices that communicate genuine brand meaning.
How does AI verify that dental practice brand claims are authentic?
AI cross-references what you say on your website against multiple external sources. It examines your content and social media for consistency, checks patient reviews on Google and Yelp, looks at forum discussions and user-generated content, and evaluates whether your claimed values align with demonstrated patient experiences. If your website promises anxiety-free care but reviews describe rushed appointments, AI recognizes the discrepancy and may not recommend you.
How can dental practices audit their website for AI search readiness?
Reid Holmes developed a ChatGPT prompt that analyzes websites for AI surfaceability. The prompt evaluates machine comprehension, machine trust, brand meaning differentiation, and technical extractability. It identifies commoditized language that should be eliminated and suggests questions to help shift messaging from product-centric to patient-centric. The prompt is available through Reid’s website and newsletter signup.
