How ChatGPT and Claude decide which clinic to recommend

I find this stuff genuinely interesting, and there is a fair bit of fear mongering floating around it, so I try to follow what the search and AI companies actually say rather than what the workshop circuit reckons. Here is the honest version, current as of 2026, with the caveat that the details shift.

The single most important thing to understand is that these assistants do not all read the same place. There is no one switch you flip to appear in all of them. Google's own AI, which is Gemini and the AI summaries you now see at the top of Google, reads Google's index and your Google Business Profile directly. ChatGPT mostly reads the Bing index plus its own crawler. Claude reads the Brave search index. Three assistants, three different libraries.

And that one fact sort of changes the whole question you should be asking. It is not how do I rank in AI. It is which of these libraries am I in, and how strong am I in each.

The most common thing I hear, and I will be honest, a version I used to say myself, is that ChatGPT and Claude read your Google Business Profile. They do not, at least not directly.

Your Google Business Profile is the direct lever for Google's own AI. Gemini and the AI summaries lean on it heavily, and Google is even rolling out the ability for Gemini to help manage a profile through 2026. So keeping that profile complete, accurate and genuinely well reviewed is one of the highest value things you can do, for the map pack and for Google's AI answers both.

But ChatGPT only picks up your profile details secondhand, as they happen to appear scattered across the web, and there is little sign Claude uses them at all. So polish your profile by all means, it matters a lot for Google, just do not expect it to be what moves you inside ChatGPT or Claude. Those two you reach a different way.

Here is the thing. If you want to nudge ChatGPT, the single strongest thing you can do as of 2026 is just be strong in Bing. One study by Seer Interactive found roughly 87 percent of ChatGPT's citations matched Bing's top results, against about 56 percent for Google. ChatGPT is built on the Bing index plus its own crawler, so Bing is effectively the front door.

Now, nobody ever asks me how to rank on Bing, because almost nobody uses Bing directly. But people use ChatGPT constantly, so suddenly Bing matters again in a way it has not for years. So the actual work, and it is pretty unglamorous, is getting your site verified and indexed in Bing, and present in the directories ChatGPT tends to trust.

I want to be careful not to oversell it though. Strong in Bing is a probability boost, not a guarantee. ChatGPT reorders things its own way, leans on directories, and will not cite you at all if you block its crawler. So treat Bing as the best lever you have, not a magic if then rule.

Claude is the one I use most, so this one is close to home. Claude's web search runs on the Brave search index. That is not a guess, Anthropic added Brave to its list of subprocessors back in March 2025 and it has stayed there.

The long and the short of it is simple, and happily it overlaps with everything else. Make sure your site is genuinely crawlable, so Brave can find and index it. The same clean, readable site that helps you everywhere else is what gets you into Claude. There is no separate Claude trick beyond being properly indexable.

Here is one that surprises people. Facebook and Instagram are largely invisible to these assistants. Most of that content sits behind a login wall the crawlers cannot get past, so it rarely makes it into an AI's answer.

The social content that AI does cite is overwhelmingly Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube, not Meta. So if your plan for being found by AI is to post more reels, the maths does not really work. The substance you want an assistant to quote belongs on your own indexable website, not locked inside an Instagram caption.

I always go, look what people do, not what they say. If you look at where I put my own time, it is into answering real questions on a site I own, not into chasing the algorithm on socials. Organic social is great as a sign you are a real, alive business, and it is genuinely useful for recruitment. It is just not the thing that gets you recommended by an AI.

You have probably noticed AI assistants sometimes hand you a dead link. And it is tempting to explain that away with a bit of a conspiracy, that Google locks everyone out of its data. The real reason is a lot duller. The model sometimes predicts a plausible looking URL, or cites a page that has since moved, and the link breaks. It is not Google blocking access. In practice the large majority of cited links, around 97 percent in the studies I have seen, still resolve fine.

That said, Google's index genuinely is a moat. It is proprietary and not licensed out to the other AI companies, which is exactly why Gemini tends to have the freshest local data. And the search business is not about to disappear, because advertising was roughly 73 percent of Alphabet's revenue last year. Google is not retiring ads, it is putting them straight inside the AI answers.

What is changing fast is the click. When an AI summary sits at the top, people click through to a website far less often. One large study found people clicked a result about 8 percent of the time when an AI summary was shown, against 15 percent when it was not, and a majority of searches now end with no click at all. The answer is durable. The free visit that used to come with it is not guaranteed any more.

So when you strip away all the noise, the to do list is actually pretty short, and reassuringly most of it is the same good hygiene that helps you everywhere anyway. You do not need a separate AI strategy. You just need to be readable and present across all three libraries, not strong on Google alone.