The Local AI Visibility Index
Philadelphia Ophthalmology (Refractive / Cosmetic)
We asked 5 AI answer engines 10 questions a prospective patient would actually ask, then measured which of the market’s 76 practices got named. 56 of them never came up once.
- Market
- Philadelphia, PA
- Practices
- 76
- Questions
- 10
- Engines
- 5
- Measured
- July 2026
Every practice in the market · one dot each · ordered by Google Maps rank · lit = named by at least one engine
73.7%
of Ophthalmology (Refractive / Cosmetic) practices in Philadelphia were named in none of the 50 AI answers we collected.
Finding 01
Does ranking well on Google mean AI recommends you?
It helps, and it is nowhere near enough. Of the 25 best-ranked practices in Philadelphia, 5 got named by an AI engine — 20%. Of the 26 ranked lowest, 11 did. The single most-named practice in this market ranked 23rd 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.
| Where they rank on Google Maps | Named by AI | Share |
|---|---|---|
| The 1st third — best ranked on Maps | 5 of 25 | 20% |
| The middle third | 4 of 25 | 16% |
| The bottom third | 11 of 26 | 42.3% |
Finding 02
How many local businesses actually appear in AI answers?
Very few, and the ones that do take most of it. Of 76 practices measured, 20 were named at least once and 56 were never named. The three most-named practices took 19.3% of every mention in the market.
The most-named practice came up in 44% of answers; the fourth came up in 44%; everything below that was 44% or less. A short shelf at the top, and a long floor underneath it.
Finding 03
Are the best-reviewed practices invisible to AI?
Often, yes. Take the 19 strongest practices in Philadelphia — the top 25% once you combine Google rank, star rating and number of reviews — and 15 were never named by any engine. That is 78.9% of the best practices in town, missing from every answer.
One of them ranks 3rd on Maps with 4.8 stars, and was named zero times across all 50 answers. One of them ranks 8th 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 Philadelphia the practices AI named average 4.15 stars, and the ones it never named average 4.49 stars. The better-rated practices are the ones getting left out.
20 practices here were named by at least one engine, rating between 2.4 and 5.0 stars. 50 were named by none, rating between 1.7 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 Philadelphia 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 80.6% of thepractices they named — and the furthest apart pair agreed on just 42.9%.
Each engine surfaced a different slice of the market: Gemini named 35, Perplexity named 28, Google AI Overview named 28, ChatGPT named 15, Claude named 15. Showing up in one does not mean showing up in the others, so checking yourself against a single assistant tells you very little.
| Engine pair | Agreed on |
|---|---|
| Perplexity & Google AI Overview | 80.6% |
| ChatGPT & Claude | 76.5% |
| Gemini & Perplexity | 61.5% |
| Gemini & Google AI Overview | 61.5% |
| ChatGPT & Perplexity | 53.6% |
| ChatGPT & Google AI Overview | 53.6% |
| Claude & Perplexity | 48.3% |
| Claude & Google AI Overview | 48.3% |
| ChatGPT & Gemini | 42.9% |
| Claude & Gemini | 42.9% |
How we measured it
We pulled every Ophthalmology (Refractive / Cosmetic) practice Google Maps returns for Philadelphia — 76 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
- 76 practices, from everything Google Maps returns for "eye doctor" in Philadelphia, PA. A practice with more than one listing is counted once.
- 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 Philadelphia 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.
For anyone who wants the statistics
The findings above are counts, which is how most people want to read them. Here are the same relationships as correlations, for readers who prefer them.
| What we measured | How closely it tracked | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Google Maps rank | +0.345 | A slight connection |
| Review count | −0.102 | No real connection |
| Star rating | −0.205 | A slight connection |
Reading the middle column: 0.0 means the two things had nothing to do with each other. 1.0 would mean they moved together perfectly. A minus sign means they moved in opposite directions. Anything under about 0.2 either way is noise.