The Local AI Visibility Index
Terre Haute Orthodontics
We asked 5 AI answer engines 10 questions a prospective patient would actually ask, then measured which of the market’s 13 practices got named. 10 of them never came up once.
- Market
- Terre Haute, IN
- Practices
- 13
- 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
76.9%
of Orthodontics practices in Terre Haute 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 4 best-ranked practices in Terre Haute, 3 got named by an AI engine — 75%. Of the 5 ranked lowest, 0 did. The single most-named practice in this market ranked 3rd on Maps, coming up in 28% 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 | 3 of 4 | 75% |
| The middle third | 0 of 4 | 0% |
| The bottom third | 0 of 5 | 0% |
Finding 02
How many local businesses actually appear in AI answers?
Very few, and the ones that do take most of it. Of 13 practices measured, 3 were named at least once and 10 were never named. The three most-named practices took 100% of every mention in the market.
Bar length is the share of all 50 answers, so a full bar would mean every answer named them.
Practice A is one organization — 2 Google Maps listings that share its website, counted once because AI engines cite the organization’s site rather than any individual listing.
Finding 03
Are the best-reviewed practices invisible to AI?
Not in this market. All 3 of the strongest practices in Terre Haute were named by at least one engine.
Finding 04
Do Google reviews affect whether AI recommends you?
A little, here. In Terre Haute the practices AI named average 4.93 stars against 4.34 for the ones it never named.
3 practices here were named by at least one engine, rating between 4.9 and 5.0 stars. 10 were named by none, rating between 3.5 and 5.0. The two groups overlap almost completely.
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 Terre Haute 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 100% of thepractices they named — and the furthest apart pair agreed on just 40%.
Each engine surfaced a different slice of the market: Perplexity named 7, Gemini named 5, ChatGPT named 4, Claude named 4, Google AI Overview named 3. 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 |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT & Claude | 100.0% |
| ChatGPT & Gemini | 80.0% |
| Claude & Gemini | 80.0% |
| Gemini & Perplexity | 71.4% |
| Gemini & Google AI Overview | 60.0% |
| ChatGPT & Perplexity | 57.1% |
| Claude & Perplexity | 57.1% |
| Perplexity & Google AI Overview | 42.9% |
| ChatGPT & Google AI Overview | 40.0% |
| Claude & Google AI Overview | 40.0% |
How we measured it
We pulled every Orthodontics practice Google Maps returns for Terre Haute — 13 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
- 13 practices, from everything Google Maps returns for "orthodontist" in Terre Haute, IN. A practice with more than one listing is counted once. 4 listings that share the websites of 2 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 Terre Haute 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 | −0.506 | A clear connection |
| Review count | +0.816 | A strong connection |
| Star rating | +0.338 | 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.