Try a small experiment tonight. Ask ChatGPT which practice in your area would be a good fit for a wrinkle treatment, or where you can get a short-notice appointment for a checkup. You no longer get ten blue links to click through. You get an answer. A few sentences, two or three names, a short rationale. And that puts a fairly uncomfortable question on the table: does your practice show up in that answer? Or does your competitor’s?

For twenty years, visibility online meant one thing: rank as high as possible in a list of results. Position one got the clicks, position eight got the scraps. That game is shifting. When an AI answers, there is no list anymore, just a selection. If you are not in it, you do not exist for that patient in that moment. That sounds dramatic. Viewed soberly, it is simply the new mechanics, and it affects precisely the people who already research long and carefully before a procedure.

Nobody can credibly tell you what share of patients already hand their search over to ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews. I distrust every statistic currently being passed around on this. The direction, however, is unmistakable, and it is not going to reverse.

What LLMO and GEO actually mean

Two acronyms are making the rounds for the new discipline. LLMO stands for Large Language Model Optimization, GEO for Generative Engine Optimization. At the core they mean the same thing: structuring content so AI systems can understand it and pass it along in good conscience. Sounds like a dark art. It is not.

An AI formulating a recommendation does something very human. It looks for sources that are clear and do not contradict themselves anywhere. What it has zero patience for is marketing prose. A sentence like “We accompany you with empathy on your individual journey” contains no usable information for a machine. “Office hours Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., consultations bookable online, specialists in surgery and dermatology at one location” does.

Run the same test on your own website. Can a stranger find your hours, your locations, and your services stated plainly within thirty seconds? Or do they have to decode them from welcome copy? Where a human fails, the machine fails too.

What actually works

Among other clients, we manage a practice group with seven locations, and I can tell you: the start of this work is wonderfully unspectacular. It comes down to five things.

  • Clear facts instead of prose. Write down services, locations, hours, and processes so they can be understood without interpretation.
  • Consistent business data. Same name, same address, same hours on the website, in the Google profile, and in every directory.
  • Structured data based on schema.org, so machines can read hours and specialties as data instead of guessing them from body copy.
  • Real answers to real patient questions. Whatever gets asked on the phone all the time belongs on the website, in plain language.
  • Well-maintained Google Business Profiles, because for many AI systems they are a central source on local providers.

None of this is glamorous. With seven locations, that means seven profiles, seven sets of hours, addresses in dozens of directories. Discrepancies creep in without anyone doing anything wrong. One location moves, the website gets updated, the industry directory from 2019 does not. For a human, that is a minor detail. For a system that ties trustworthiness to consistency, it is a reason to cite the competitor whose data all lines up.

And the patient questions? That is where many practice websites trip over their own ambition to sound professional. Patients ask: What happens at the first appointment? Do I need a referral? How long will I wait for an appointment? If you answer those questions on your website in calm, plain language, you deliver exactly the material an AI answer is built from. If you only write about your philosophy instead, you deliver nothing worth quoting.

Young discipline, honest expectations

Now for the part you rarely read in agency advertising. LLMO is a young discipline. There is no guaranteed placement in a generated answer. The systems change constantly, and part of their selection logic is simply not public. Anyone selling you “number one in ChatGPT” today or promising miracle rankings is lying. It is that simple.

Why I still recommend starting now: the fundamentals cost little and pay off twice. Everything listed above has helped in classic Google rankings for years. Consistent data and content that answers real questions were rewarded long before anyone talked about generative answer engines. So if AI search grows more slowly than expected, you have lost nothing. You end up with a better website and well-maintained profiles, which is not a bad outcome either.

What I advise against: tricks. Hidden text blocks for machines, or bloated FAQ pages with no substance. Patterns like that get noticed sooner or later, and then you are worse off than before. With Google, this kind of shortcut has never lasted long, and I see no reason why answer engines would treat it any differently.

In the end, the task is both simpler and more demanding than the acronym GEO suggests. It is not about outsmarting the AI. It is about being the source it can cite in good conscience: a practice whose information checks out everywhere and whose pages answer the questions patients actually ask. Answer engines are not looking for winners. They are looking for sources they can trust. You can become that kind of source. It is work, but it is not magic.