Ithaca Cosmetic / Implant Dentistry

Finding 01

Does ranking well on Google mean AI recommends you?

It helps, and it is nowhere near enough. Of the 5 best-ranked practices in Ithaca, 4 got named by an AI engine — 80%. Of the 7 ranked lowest, 1 did. The single most-named practice in this market ranked 3rd on Maps, coming up in 53% 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 17 practices measured, 7 were named at least once and 10 were never named. The three most-named practices took 80.6% of every mention in the market.

The most-named practice came up in 53% of answers; the fourth came up in 20%; everything below that was 10% 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 4 strongest practices in Ithaca — the top 25% once you combine Google rank, star rating and number of reviews — and 1 was never named by any engine. That is 25% of the best practices in town, missing from every answer.

One of them ranks 6th on Maps with 4.8 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 Ithaca the practices AI named average 4.37 stars, and the ones it never named average 4.58 stars. The better-rated practices are the ones getting left out. The stars come from real patients; whether an AI repeats a practice’s name turns on what the engines can find and trust about it, and that is a different signal than the rating itself.

7 practices here were named by at least one engine, rating between 3.8 and 4.9 stars. 10 were named by none, rating between 2.8 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 Ithaca 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 the practices they named — and the furthest apart pair agreed on just 40%. Each engine reads its own mix of sources, so showing up in one assistant says little about whether the others will say your name.

Each engine surfaced a different slice of the market: Gemini named 10, Perplexity named 9, ChatGPT named 8, Claude named 6, Google AI Overview named 6. Checking yourself against a single assistant therefore tells you very little about the rest.

How we measured it

We pulled every Cosmetic / Implant Dentistry practice Google Maps returns for Ithaca — 17 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. Every question was kept identical across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overview, and every number on this page comes from this market alone.

Who is in it

17 practices, from everything Google Maps returns for "implant dentist" in Ithaca, NY. A practice with more than one listing is counted once. 14 listings that share the websites of 7 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 Ithaca 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.