Hickory Occupational Therapy

Finding 01

Does ranking well on Google mean AI recommends you?

It helps, and it is nowhere near enough. Of the 6 best-ranked practices in Hickory, 3 got named by an AI engine — 50%. Of the 8 ranked lowest, 2 did. The single most-named practice in this market ranked 26th on Maps, coming up in 44% of answers.

Google rank and AI answers are decided by two different systems looking at different things. Your map position comes from how close you are, what category you are in, and how people engage with your listing. Whether an AI names you depends on whether it can find, read and trust a description of your practice in the sources it pulls from. Ranking first buys you better odds. It does not buy you the answer.

Finding 02

How many local businesses actually appear in AI answers?

Very few, and the ones that do take most of it. Of 20 practices measured, 7 were named at least once and 13 were never named. The three most-named practices took 65.3% of every mention in the market.

The most-named practice came up in 44% of answers; the fourth came up in 21%; everything below that was 20% or less. A short shelf at the top, and a long floor underneath it.

Finding 03

Are the best-reviewed practices invisible to AI?

Some are. Take the 5 strongest practices in Hickory — the top 25% once you combine Google rank, star rating and number of reviews — and 2 were never named by any engine. That is 40% of the best practices in town, missing from every answer.

One of them ranks 4th on Maps with 4.8 stars, and was named zero times across all 50 answers. One of them ranks 11th on Maps with 5.0 stars, and was named zero times across all 50 answers. Their patients rate them highly and Google ranks them well. The AI engines do not know they exist.

Finding 04

Do Google reviews affect whether AI recommends you?

Not the way you would expect. In Hickory the practices AI named average 4.44 stars, and the ones it never named average 4.78 stars. The better-rated practices are the ones getting left out.

7 practices here were named by at least one engine, rating between 3.0 and 5.0 stars. 10 were named by none, rating between 4.1 and 5.0. The two groups overlap, and the better-rated group is the one being left out.

Reviews do real work in the map pack and in how patients choose. This measures something narrower: whether they are what makes an AI say your name. In Hickory the answer is what the numbers above say it is, and it is not the same answer in every market we measured.

Finding 05

Do ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity recommend the same practices?

No. Asked the same questions about the same market, the closest any two engines came to agreeing was 80% of thepractices they named — and the furthest apart pair agreed on just 20%.

Each engine surfaced a different slice of the market: Gemini named 10, Perplexity named 8, Google AI Overview named 8, ChatGPT named 4, Claude named 2. Showing up in one does not mean showing up in the others, so checking yourself against a single assistant tells you very little.

How we measured it

We pulled every Occupational Therapy practice Google Maps returns for Hickory — 20 of them, after combining duplicate listings of the same practice — then asked 5 AI answer engines the same 10 patient questions and recorded which ones each engine named.

Who is in it

20 practices, from everything Google Maps returns for "occupational therapist" in Hickory, NC. A practice with more than one listing is counted once. 8 listings that share the websites of 4 organizations are counted as those organizations, because AI engines cite the organization's site rather than any individual listing.

What we asked

10 questions a patient would actually ask, kept identical across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview. 50 answers in total, July 2026.

How we scored it

The share of answers that named or cited a practice, weighted by how many people use the engine that named it.

How we ranked reputation

Google Maps position, star rating adjusted for how many reviews back it up, and review count on a sliding scale that levels off around a thousand.

Scope

One market, one category. Every number on this page describes Hickory and comes from that market alone — results differ between markets and we do not carry them across. We never name individual practices. AI engines change over time; this describes July 2026.