How Desert Hills Dental turned a free dashboard into 481 patient calls
An established Las Vegas practice with 700+ reviews scored 22 out of 100 on AI visibility and was cited zero times by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Four months later Google's own panel had logged 481 calls off the Business Profile, up 37.4% on the same four months a year earlier.
481
patient calls from their Google Business Profile between April and July 2026, with no ad spend
The Challenge
Desert Hills Dental had already done the hard part. More than 700 Google reviews at a 4.9 average, a real patient base, a working website. By every measure a practice uses to judge itself, nothing was wrong.
The audit in April 2026 scored their AI visibility 22 out of 100. Asked to recommend a dentist in Las Vegas, ChatGPT named them zero times. So did Perplexity. So did Google AI Overviews. Three engines, thousands of monthly searches, and a practice with one of the strongest review profiles in the city was absent from all of them.
The reason was not quality and it was not reputation. It was that the machines could not read them. Their Business Profile categories did not match the treatments they actually sold. Their name, address and phone number appeared four different ways across the directories these engines pull from, so the engines treated one practice as several weaker ones. There was no schema on the site telling a crawler what a visitor could book.
None of that is visible to an owner. It does not show up in a report, it does not show up in the phone log, and it does not show up in reviews. The practice was being handed to competitors by systems it had never been set up inside, and there was no dashboard anywhere that would have said so.
The Solution
Google Business Profile rebuilt, categories first
Categories decide which searches a profile is eligible for at all, and get changed less often than anything else on a profile. We reset the primary and secondary categories against the treatments that actually pay, then rebuilt services, attributes and the Q&A section underneath them.
Citations across 40+ directories
Claimed and corrected Foursquare, Bing Places, Apple Maps and 40 more of the sources AI engines read as corroboration. The goal is not the backlink. It is that every record agrees, because a machine treats disagreement as two different businesses.
One canonical NAP
Name, address and phone standardised to a single form everywhere, including the variants buried in old listings nobody had touched in years. This is the least interesting work in the engagement and the piece most responsible for the result.
Schema for a dental practice, not a generic business
LocalBusiness, Dentist and Service schema across the site so a crawler can read which treatments are offered, where, and by whom, instead of inferring it from marketing copy.
Monthly re-testing across every engine
The same prompts a patient would type, run every month against ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, recorded as named or not named. It is the only way to know whether any of the above worked.
The Process
What we actually did for Desert Hills Dental, in the order we did it.
Week 1
Audit, and a number nobody liked
Ran the practice through four engines and scored AI visibility 22 out of 100, with zero citations. That number is what made the case for everything below.
Weeks 1 to 2
Business Profile overhaul
Categories, services, attributes and Q&A rebuilt. This is the fastest-moving lever on the list and the reason the first fortnight moved at all.
Weeks 2 to 6
Directory foundation and NAP cleanup
40+ listings claimed, corrected, and standardised onto one canonical name, address and phone. Slow, unglamorous, and the load-bearing part.
Weeks 4 to 8
Schema and on-site structure
LocalBusiness, Dentist and Service markup shipped so the site states plainly what the profile claims.
Month 3 onward
Re-test, and act on the misses
In July a Gemini test omitted the practice from a query naming the road they sit on, and on another gave out a phone number that was not the one on their Business Profile. Both went straight back onto the fix list. A monitoring habit that only records wins is a habit that stops finding problems.
The Results
481
Calls from the Business Profile, April to July 2026, no ad spend
+37.4%
Against the same four months a year earlier
+463%
Phone calls in the first 14 days, 53 new patient calls
22 to 100
AI visibility score at the April 2026 audit, out of 100
+300%
Website clicks from the profile
+365%
Search impressions
Key Takeaway
None of this required new software, an ad budget or a website rebuild. The 481 calls were counted by a free dashboard the practice had always had access to and had never opened. What changed was that the categories, the directory records and the schema finally agreed with each other, so the engines could tell what the practice was and where it was. The work that makes a business legible to AI is the same work that makes it legible to Google, which is why the local channel lifted at the same time.
All figures verified from client reporting. Individual results vary by market and competition.
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