How AI Is Changing How Patients Find Your Practice in 2026

Gary Takacs: This is The Thriving Dentist Show with Gary Takacs, where we help you develop your ideal dental practice—one that provides personal, professional, and financial satisfaction.

Gary Takacs: Welcome to another episode of The Thriving Dentist Show. I’m Gary Takacs, the Thriving Dentist Show podcast founder and co-host. We have a great episode for you today. I know the topic is gonna be on everyone’s mind, and so we’re going to share some very useful information with you today. The title of the episode is How AI Is Changing How Patients Find Your Practice in 2026. So, if you’re curious about what’s happening in the role of AI as it relates to your practice, you’re in the right spot.

But before we get to that episode, two announcements to make. First announcement is coming up—we have a Thriving Dentist Virtual Summit. Many of you know that we routinely put on virtual events for our listeners. We do webinars, we do summits, we do interviews, we do conversations, we do panel discussions.

Gary Takacs: Well, coming up shortly after we publish this episode, Tuesday, March 24th, we have a Thriving Dentist Summit, three hours long, 6:00 to 9:00 PM Eastern. It’s all done virtually from the comfort of your home or office. The title of the summit is Stress-Free Dentistry 2026: Balancing Growth and Performance. If you’re interested in reducing stress, creating growth, balancing growth and performance, that’s the right summit for you.

6:00 to 9:00 PM Eastern Time—go ahead and do the time translation to realize what time it’s gonna be in your time zone. I will be doing an opening keynote, and then we’ll have panelists—we’ll be moderating panelists that are experts in this area. Lots of useful ideas, information.

Here’s the best news: you’ll get three hours of CE at no cost. We do these virtual events as a courtesy to our listeners, in appreciation for your listenership.

Gary Takacs: So come join us. You do have to register. Go to thrivingdentist.com/events, thrivingdentist.com/events, so that you can grab your seat. No tuition, but you do have to register to attend. Look forward to seeing you then.

The second announcement is we have a Thriving Dentist Clinical Tip from a new guest contributor. I’d like to welcome Dr. Andrew Adly. Dr. Adly is very articulate, lots of useful information. He’s gonna talk about simple techniques to make local anesthesia more comfortable.

Well, with no further ado, here’s Dr. Andrew Adly with our Thriving Dentist Top Clinical Tip.

Dr. Andrew Adly: Hi, I am Dr. Andrew Adly of Monmouth Dental Arts in Oakridge, New Jersey, and I just wanted to give clinical tips to help other providers make their life that much easier. So my tip will be on anesthesia. You know, people are afraid of the dentist for multiple reasons—whether it’s fear of the sound, fear of the needles, fear of post-op pain, fear of the bill, whatever, you know, may have it. But I’d say the biggest phobia is anesthesia, especially with the needle. So these are just my tricks that I’ve learned over time to make that experience that much easier.

So, this way, if a patient needs any subsequent injections, that anticipation is really that much less moving forward. So, first thing I’ll do is I’ll actually warm my carpules of anesthetic. I’ll use a composite warmer. The one that we use is by VOCO, but there’s multiple—Bioclear has one as well.

Dr. Andrew Adly: This way, it brings the temperature of the anesthesia closer to body temperature. That change in the temperature, you know, it’s like a shock to the body. So that’s part of the discomfort right there in and of itself. Another thing that I like to do, too, is I like to buffer my carpules of anesthetic with sodium bicarbonate. We use Buffer Pro. Buffer Pro is really simple—it literally just clicks onto the carpule, and then you’ve got instant buffering at the right ratio.

What buffering does is it makes the pH of the anesthesia also closer to body temp. So that’s, again, another thing that’s less uncomfortable to the patient—that change in the acidity and things like that with the anesthetic. Lastly, I will use topical Benzacaine. Now, you cannot use this for pregnant patients or obviously anyone with a known allergy.

Dr. Andrew Adly: So I will dry the area and apply topical Benzacaine to the area for 60 to 90 seconds. Even if it really doesn’t help much—which it really does with the pinches, I’ve been told by a lot of patients, especially coming from providers that don’t do this step—the placebo also helps too, ultimately.

So I will do that while we’re buffering. And at that point, also, the carpule is warm enough to body temperature. And then while I’m injecting, I’ll do what’s called the distraction technique. Distraction technique is where we’ll take the lip or the cheek—obviously, you just want to with the opposite hand of the one that you’re injecting with. Obviously, being careful not to injure yourself with a finger stick.

And what it does by moving the lip or the cheek simultaneously while giving the injection is you’re actually fighting for the same receptors in that pathway.

Dr. Andrew Adly: So these are the proprioceptors and the pain receptors. An example is when you bump your knee and then you immediately rub it really hard—you’re fighting for those feeling-of-movement receptors with the rubbing, in addition to the same ones that are fighting for pain. So it distracts the brain. It’s literally called distraction technique in layman’s terms.

And it just prevents the brain from just thinking about the pain. It’s like it’s fighting to think about pain and the movement at the same time, which really helps a lot. And so, again, that is to warm the anesthetic carpules, to buffer your anesthetic carpules—again, I like Buffer Pro for that, ’cause it’s quick and easy and, you know, there’s no guessing. You don’t have to worry about using a single-use vial of sodium bicarbonate for that—using topical Benzacaine in a dry field to help with the initial pinch, and then using the distraction technique on their lip or their cheek.

Thank you for joining me.

Gary Takacs: Well, I hope you enjoyed Dr. Andrew Adly with his top clinical tip. You know, we enjoy reaching out to clinicians to provide these top clinical tips, and we appreciate the time and effort that they put into it. I’m sure you got lots of useful information there.

Excited about today’s topic. Naren, we’re gonna talk about how AI is changing how patients find your practice in 2026. AI, Naren, is the topic on everyone’s mind in so many different areas of our lives. AI is influencing things and is making things happen. And in some cases, they’re great advancements—in other cases, not so much.

But, you know, dentists keep hearing about AI, and they’re hearing about search—like, what if people start going to ChatGPT instead of Google? You know, stuff like that.

Gary Takacs: But many dentists aren’t sure what any of this means for the practice today. So we’re gonna try to unpack this today and help our listeners understand more about the way AI can be used very favorably in marketing—and why many of the tried-and-true things, like organic search engine optimization, are still extremely valid.

So today, I want to talk to you about how AI is changing how patients find and choose a dentist in 2026. Very timely as we’re publishing this near the beginning of the year.

Naren, let me start with the first question—and it’s really what the topic of this episode’s all about: How is AI changing the way patients choose a dentist?

Naren Arulrajah: That’s a great, great question, Gary. I think when Sundar Pichai, who’s the CEO of Google, came and talked about—I believe in 2017—that Google is gonna be AI-first, nobody understood the word AI. They’re like, "Whatever." The average human being never paid attention. Even the investment community didn’t pay attention. But then two to three years ago, when ChatGPT came along, all of a sudden, AI becomes something that every single human being can put their hands around.

In other words, you’re talking to the machine, and the machine is talking back to you, right? And you can ask it anything and everything you want, and it’s getting smarter and it’s getting smarter. Of course, when AI first came along, the biggest issue was hallucination. In other words, the way large language models work is—they’re putting words together. They don’t know if the words they’re putting together are correct, incorrect, will it harm somebody, will it help somebody—they don’t know. They’re just putting words together. And over time, somehow, this AI large language model learns, "Hey, they like it, so I’ll do more of it," right?

Of course, you can talk back to it. And if it gives you a wrong answer, you can say, "You gave me the wrong answer." And that’s called hallucination. But Google didn’t want to come out, because remember—Google is built on trust. Nobody signs a contract, or Google doesn’t sign a contract with, I guess, the billions and billions and billions of people who use Google daily—can use it, cannot use it. So if Google gives some incorrect information, it dies, right?

Naren Arulrajah: So one thing that is for sure, Gary, in 2026 is—AI is for real, and AI has become mainstream. Now, the reason I want to tell you the Google story is—finally, at the end of 2026… sorry, end of 2025, starting around August of 2025, Google has become the company to beat in AI.

They always were the company to beat. But then ChatGPT came, and everybody thought that’s the company to beat. And fundamentally what happened is—they integrated AI into regular Google Search, into regular Google Maps, Gmail… you know, every part of Google product now has AI built in. And it’s free, of course. How do you compete with free, especially for the people who are already using Google?

The stat I heard is Google Search is used 12 billion times a day. And Google Maps is used 5 billion times a day. And totally, it’s more than 30 billion times a day we use a Google product—Gmail, Google Calendar, you name it. And AI is getting built into everything.

Naren Arulrajah: So, for example, if you’re on an email, Google will summarize a thread for you, so you don’t have to read 17 emails on a thread. You will get the executive summary. Before you even start typing, Google will write the response for you—because, you know, 80% of the time, it’s simply, yeah, somebody’s asking about an appointment, yes or no, and then, you know, it’s really simple, right? We do the same thing.

So Google is embedding this into what we do. So AI is changing the way patients choose a dentist. For example, if I go to Google today and I type in "dentist near me," usually I’ll see a dentist in the Google Map section, right? And I could also do that on my Google Maps product or my Google Search product on an iPhone or any kind of a smartphone. Or if I type in, you know, "Invisalign [zip code]," again, I’ll see it on SEO—meaning the regular search part—and Google Maps part. No changes.

But if I start using Google like the way I would use ChatGPT and ask it a question like, “How much does dental implants cost in Phoenix?”…

Naren Arulrajah: In Phoenix, what I, as the user, am expecting is—I want Google to do the homework, right? I want Google to go and study multiple websites in Phoenix, figure out how much people are charging for different types of implants, and give me a quick, one-page executive summary. That’s called AI Overview.

So Google is looking at the intention of the searcher and deciding whether to use Google Maps, whether to use Google Search as the response, or whether to use Google AI Overview. Immediately, it gives you a blurb about, “Hey, here are the different kinds of implants you can have—single tooth, etc.—and here is the range.” And at the bottom of it, there is a button called AI Mode. So I can click on that, and I can get a full detailed, you know, like a ChatGPT-type response.

Naren Arulrajah: Now, that’s what Google is doing as part of regular search—which is the 800-pound gorilla, right? You know, 12 billion times a day. And with Google Maps, a total of 17 billion. So Google is doing that. And what we are noticing is the number of people using Google Search has gone up 15%. So 12 billion is now, you know, 13.5 billion. In other words, massive numbers—an extra billion and a half.

And then obviously people are using ChatGPT. But the problem that ChatGPT and most startups have is—they need a way to make money, right? So of course they have this premium product and so forth. And even though they claim they have 800 million users, 700 million of those are outside of North America. In other words, they’re in India, they’re in Africa—and we all know the money is in North America.

Naren Arulrajah: If you look at the amount of money Facebook or Google makes per user in North America versus, you know, any of these other countries, it’s 10 cents on the dollar—or 5 cents on the dollar. So anyway, it’s kind of really interesting.

And of course, Google has its own ChatGPT, which is called Gemini. Then you have Perplexity, you have various other players building their own models. So what my advice is—you can’t dig your head in the sand and say, "AI may or may not impact me." No. AI is part of search. AI is built into search. And Google owns 90-plus percent of the US market share when it comes to search. So you have to take it seriously.

And I know as we go through this episode, we can talk more about that, Gary.

Gary Takacs: Yeah, that’s a great—so I have a trivia question for you, Naren.

Naren Arulrajah: Who owns ChatGPT? So again, there’s a whole story. It’s like a soap opera. So the genesis of OpenAI, which is the company that started ChatGPT, was that supposedly there was a conversation between Larry Page and Elon Musk. Elon Musk got ticked off about how the only company investing in AI was Google, and he wanted an alternative. So he said, "I’ll create this nonprofit called OpenAI." And he wrote the first check—I don’t know what the check is—38 million, 40 million, whatever it is. Of course, he was worth billions even back then. This was, I think, several years ago. And then that grew and grew and grew. And then it became now a, I don’t know, for-profit company. And there’s—I think Elon is…

Gary Takacs: OpenAI is still a nonprofit.

Naren Arulrajah: No.

Gary Takacs: However…

Naren Arulrajah: I believe they…

Gary Takacs: However, they have a—it’s called capped profit. They have a capped profit subsidiary that’s allowed for commercial activities so they can fund future investment, right? But the little-known fact is that Microsoft is a major investor. Now, that’s neither good—I’m just sharing the information.

Naren Arulrajah: No, I understand. And Elon Musk is suing them for $138 billion, saying, “If I didn’t give you the $38 million, you wouldn’t have got started.” Anyway, just a whole interesting…

Gary Takacs: What would you say—little sidebar for just a minute—what would you say the most common AI engines are? It’s gotta be ChatGPT number one?

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah. I mean, if you ask the average person… so of course Google is building AI into everything, and so is Microsoft, right? Of course, Microsoft doesn’t have a search product, but they have Microsoft Word and so forth. So all these big companies that have a consumer business—Google, Microsoft—they’re embedding AI into day-to-day use. So it’ll do more and more of the work for you, right? It kind of anticipates, it thinks what you want, and it does it for you.

So these are called the hyperscalers—Google, Microsoft, right? The big guys. And of course, Amazon. Amazon has a consumer business, which is the Amazon store. Again, they’re embedding AI into it.

When it comes to what they call the model companies—the ones who create their own models—the top three, I think, are Gemini, which is owned by Google. But then Google is using Gemini as part of all the other technologies. So Google sells Gemini as a separate thing—you can download the app, just like you can download ChatGPT or go to ChatGPT. You can go to gemini.google.com.

And then obviously ChatGPT. And then the third one is called Anthropic, which is a competitor of OpenAI. When OpenAI came out, there were some complaints around—they’re not focused on safety, the hallucination piece. So some of the guys quit and started this thing called Anthropic. Anthropic is focusing more on the enterprise market. In other words, they’re not necessarily focused on the consumers—they’re focused on businesses using AI. So they’re specifically focused on that piece of the segment.

Naren Arulrajah: But I know we can talk for hours about this. But the thing is—it’s very, very expensive to do this. You’re talking tens of billions of dollars just to even get into the game, you know? So really, it’s like two or three companies that are…

Gary Takacs: Would you put Grok up there with the ones?

Naren Arulrajah: Yes, yes. I’m sorry, I think you’re right.

Gary Takacs: So those four?

Naren Arulrajah: Those four. I would definitely put Grok—only because you don’t bet against Elon Musk. That’s the only reason. You know, they were the last to the game—only like a year into it. I think they’re a little more than a year into it. But when Elon Musk wants to do something, you just don’t bet against the guy. So I agree—it should be in that list.

Gary Takacs: We’ll come back to the theme of our podcast. So that’s fun trivia for our listeners. Yeah. So, what does Google look for when deciding which practices to feature?

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah.

Gary Takacs: So let’s unpack that.

Naren Arulrajah: Absolutely, Gary. Remember I talked about hallucination and the way LLMs work—they’re putting words together. They don’t know what they’re saying. And I’ll give you a classic example. I was in Ireland, I was using—Gemini was not really popular at that time, this was a year ago—and I asked it a question. It told me specific restaurant names, specific things—they didn’t even exist. In other words, they never existed. It just puts words together. It doesn’t even know what it’s talking about. It’s a fantasy. It’s just putting words together.

Like, classic—another example. I asked it a question to help my daughter with a speech. "Hey, can you give me an actual example of the impact of colonialism in this particular country?" It made up words. It said there’s a woman called Jenny, and Jenny had a father, and it was blah, blah, blah. And the way I caught it is—I said, instead of Kenya, I put Nairobi. Now Jenny became Jamie, and the same story. It’s putting words together, right? So that is the downside—it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

Gary Takacs: It’s—remember—AI: artificial intelligence.

Naren Arulrajah: Intelligence, yeah. Just putting words together. I mean, I’m sure you know this—there are six lawsuits against OpenAI because people have committed suicide. OpenAI was telling them crap when the person was depressed. And of course, for it, it’s just words, it’s things on a screen. But I mean—six people killed themselves. Literally. One is in Texas—23-year-old computer science student—and the parents are, of course, suing them and stuff.

So what Google realized is—Google had a lot to lose, right? Remember, we use it 30 billion times. If Google does something like that, people will be up in arms. So it was very slow in letting the technology come out. So the way Google did it is—they said, “Okay, we don’t want to make up anything. We want to have references. And we want real humans to be the references.”

Naren Arulrajah: So for example, if I type in "dental implants cost in Chicago" in Google Search, if you’ll notice, it will have three links on the right-hand side next to the AI Overview answer. And it’ll literally say, “I’m summarizing what I read on these three pages,” right? So you blame the human. If the human was wrong, you don’t blame me. I’m just summarizing. I’m just a summarizer—I’m not creating new knowledge. I’m not making up stuff. Because AI doesn’t know what is real and what is not. So that’s the game that Google played.

So the reason I’m saying that is—now, as a practice owner, EEAT becomes really important. I’m sure you and I have talked about EEAT for a long time, Gary: Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Now, you need to embed that even more. Why? Google is against AI. So it says—it’s human-first content.

Gary Takacs: So your website design and content becomes ever more important.

Naren Arulrajah: Ever more important. And they don’t want you to use AI content. And they want you to mention who’s the boss or who’s in charge of this content. So—Dr. Smith, DDS, etc., etc. All of those qualifications should be included on that page. Right now, Google knows if something goes wrong, they can always point to Dr. Smith, who’s board certified, and so forth and so forth. They’re not liable. Nobody can blame Google for—

Gary Takacs: Well, especially in healthcare.

Naren Arulrajah: Especially in healthcare.

Gary Takacs: Well, you know, the internet’s the Wild West. And in healthcare, we’re dealing with what could potentially be very impactful decisions involving health and life.

Naren Arulrajah: Exactly.

Gary Takacs: They can’t just have anyone saying, “Hey, this is how you prevent a heart attack.” You know—they gotta have some credentials.

Naren Arulrajah: Exactly. Exactly. So that is one key thing, Gary. And the next thing is—Google realized, the world we are moving towards, Google wants to be a link between us and our decisions. And the more they know about you, the more they know about the truth—whatever the truth is—from these billions and billions of pages, from all kinds of people putting it all out there, the more they can help you get the right information, make the right decisions.

So instead of saying, “Okay, I’m going to look at things page by page,” I’m going to look at things across the entire website.

So, for example, CRUX—it’s Chrome UX. In the old days, it used to be Google Lighthouse Score, which is a page-by-page score. Now it’s CRUX—across the website. So one of the things we focus on as a company is—we scrub you through CRUX on a regular basis. And anything Google is telling us that is good, bad, ugly—we fix it. Why? Because Google is thinking from the perspective of—people are going to your website on a small device, big device, using Chrome as the primary browser. How does it come across? Is it easy? Hard? All of that stuff.

Naren Arulrajah: So we are spending a lot of time on that. I think I can go into a lot more detail. Now, our approach is—don’t ignore ChatGPT or Perplexity. Make sure you’re also ranking. So we are making sure our clients are ranking on Gemini. We are making sure our clients are ranking on ChatGPT. We are making sure our clients are ranking on Perplexity.

Keep in mind—it’s small numbers, right? Google is 95%, 97% of the market. These guys are 1%. So the challenge is—if Google grows 10%, they have to grow 10x or 20x to keep up, because they’re so tiny in the Google scheme of things. Of course, they’re still big—hundreds of millions—but compared to 30 billion, it’s nothing, you know what I mean?

So I really think Google will win. And that’s why their stock price right now—outside of Nvidia—they’re the most valuable company in the world. Google, $4 trillion. I think Google will win. However, I don’t want to take a chance. I want to make sure our clients are paying attention to ChatGPT, paying attention to Perplexity, Gemini, and Google.

Gary Takacs: I mean, the simple explanation is—you just want to be wherever they’re searching.

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah. You don’t know. The future could change. You want to be everywhere.

Gary Takacs: So this is kind of a continuation question. Some of our listeners might be wondering—is organic SEO still relevant, or has AI, and the various AI engines, have they replaced it?

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah, there’s a new buzzword called AEO, Gary, which is like search engine optimization. This is AI Engine Optimization—AEO. And the way monopolies control the world—we saw this, you know, with Internet Explorer. Those of us who are 50-plus know, when Netscape came along in the mid-90s, Microsoft created something called Internet Explorer, and they just gave it for free as part of Windows. And Netscape couldn’t survive. They died.

But Google is doing the same thing. Google has people using Google 30 billion times a day. They’re incorporating AI into their search, into every product, right? So I think what I’m saying is—AEO, as far as Google is concerned, is part of search. Whether you are looking for directions or maps, or a local business with reviews, or whether you want Google to summarize and give you an AI answer, like a summary answer, or whether you want SEO—they don’t care.

Naren Arulrajah: They’re using intention to decide which part you are gonna show up. As a business owner, you could show up in all three—but they’re using the user’s intention to decide which kind of an answer to show. Is it an AI Overview answer, or is it a Map/SEO answer?

So the way to think about it is—think of it as part of search. One is AI search, one is regular search, and one is map search. Everything is called search. This is all integrated.

But at the same time—don’t ignore the other up-and-comers: the ChatGPTs, the Perplexities, and the Geminis. Because, you know, you don’t want to take any chances. Even though it’s 1%, you want to dominate all of them. I believe in owning—owning, dominating everything, right? So I do think that’s the way to think about it.

Naren Arulrajah: So to answer your question very bluntly—is SEO still relevant, or has AI replaced it? We can throw around buzzwords about AEO and SEO and stuff—who cares? At the end of the day, search is search. People still need information. And that’s not changing. That’s only increasing.

Because now Google can not only just give you a webpage to go and read—they can summarize it for you. So the volume of people asking questions is going up like crazy. And how the answers are being given—you don’t care. As long as you are showing up in all these three areas: Maps, in regular Search, and in AI Search—or AI Overview, or whatever you want to call it.

Gary Takacs: I said it before—you want to be wherever they are.

Naren Arulrajah: You don’t really care.

Gary Takacs: There’s gonna be something down the road that we don’t know about right now, and you’re gonna wanna be there. You want to be wherever they are when it comes to potential patients looking for dental information and a dental office. You want to be wherever they are.

Kind of a simple question, but one that is evolving—and it’s something I think a lot of dentists don’t really think about: What matters more—ranking first? We all know how important it is to be on page one of a Google search.

There’s a joke—a kind of nerdy joke these days—where do the bad guys hide the dead body?

Naren Arulrajah: Second page of Google.

Gary Takacs: On the top of page two of a Google search—’cause nobody ever goes there, right?

So what matters more today—ranking first or being trusted?

Naren Arulrajah: That’s an excellent question, Gary, and I think the answer is a third answer—and I’ll explain this. Right?

So, for example, let’s be very practical. Five, seven years ago, a lot of people went to websites, right? Because Google Maps was not very strong, the phone wasn’t showing up as often, and so forth.

Gary Takacs: Yeah, geolocation’s become really, really dominant.

Naren Arulrajah: Really big. Exactly. Even driving directions, right? I don’t need to go to the website. Right off of Google, I can pull up your address and get to your office. I don’t need to go to your website. The website has become more of a tool to communicate with Google, but not necessarily, like, important for the user.

Gary Takacs: It’s kind of like—well, let’s actually give you a qualitative answer. So if all you’re looking for is location, then location’s fantastic. But if you’re looking for qualitative—what’s the right dentist for me to choose?—then Maps isn’t gonna do it.

Naren Arulrajah: No, I understand. I totally understand. Think of it like this: Amazon—what made Amazon explode? One-click buying and the Prime membership. Two things, right? People who had Prime were like, “I’m already spending money on Prime, let me buy all of my stuff on Amazon.”

So when you look at people who had Prime vs. non-Prime, it’s 3x. One-click buying—meaning I don’t need to think. I press one click. And they even patented it so other people couldn’t use it. They made it easy.

So what Google is realizing is—the more I can understand you and what you want, I can give you what you want faster and make it easy for you. So if I have to go to your website and find directions or your phone number—it’s four steps.

Naren Arulrajah: Versus—I’ve been Googling all kinds of things. You show up because you dominate search—all search. Now I’m ready. Show me the reviews. I’m ready. Show me the phone number. I don’t have to go find it. And while I’m looking for the phone number, my daughter calls me—and I forget about it.

Google is trying to create that same one-click mindset. Reduce the amount of friction between people buying things and not buying things by giving them what they want in all kinds of places—in every Google product, in every Google device.

And then they’ll even follow you, right? That’s where the ads come in. They know you went to the website, or they know you’re interested in a business. All of a sudden, you start seeing ads for that business.

Naren Arulrajah: So I guess to come back to your point, I think the real answer to the question—what matters more today, ranking first or being trusted?—the metric that matters most today is ROI. ROI, ROI.

How many new patient calls are you getting? How many leads are you getting? How many people went to your website—not as relevant, right? Even keyword rankings—they’re still important, Gary—but one of the funny things we’re noticing is websites that are ranking on page two in regular search are showing up as number one in AI Overview.

So we used to think page two was useless, but now—maybe not. Because Google is finding there’s more depth in some of those other pages that weren’t very targeted. Maybe they’re writing detailed answers and so forth. So in regular search, they don’t show up. But in the AI Overview, they are showing up.

Naren Arulrajah: So it’s very, very interesting. And I think I would focus on ROI. One of the things we do is—we track the phone calls and we’ll tell you all those stats. Like, how many are you answering, and so on. I think that’s key. Now you need to insist your marketing company tells you exactly what’s going on with the dollars—all the way down to the number of new patient calls you’re getting.

Gary Takacs: I personally think—I have a strong, strong, strong opinion about this. Yes, there’s room for disagreement, but I have a strong opinion that a very important marketing metric is: how many calls did I get from potential new patients?

Naren Arulrajah: How many calls—100%.

Gary Takacs: Because if you’re getting the calls, then your marketing is working. But that doesn’t mean it’s successful yet, because we’ve got to go to step two—we’ve got to be able to convert those calls to scheduled new patients.

Exactly. So in some cases, if you look at it from a big-picture view, you say, “I just need more new patients.” Well, we have to get the calls first.

And I’ll be blunt—if your office is not getting enough calls, that’s a marketing problem. And you either need a new marketing company, or you need your marketing company to make that happen. You’ve got to get the calls. You can’t convert them if you don’t get the calls.

But if you are getting the calls and not converting them—that’s an internal problem of training and working with your team members on how to handle those calls.

Gary Takacs: So that’s where it’s a one-two. It’s a one-two thing. And it is a moving target—especially now that AI enters into it.

That question—"What matters more today—ranking first or being trusted?"—I’m actually gonna say both are important. It is important to be ranked—you don’t want to be on page 17. Maybe you’ve changed my thinking a little bit, Naren. Maybe an occasional presence on page two isn’t all bad.

Naren Arulrajah: Yes.

Gary Takacs: So yeah, I get that now. But being trusted—no matter where you are—is very important.

Let me move on to the next question. It’s related.

So, in the world of AI—which we’ve agreed is becoming more and more and more prevalent—in the world of AI, how do you know if your marketing’s actually working?

Naren Arulrajah: That’s a great, great, great, great question, Gary. And I think it’s a very, very important question, right?

So I think number one comes mindset. Step one—understand that AI is not different from search. It’s all one and the same. So make sure you are committing yourself to search, which now includes AI Search, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity.

You have to now commit to, "I want to show up everywhere." And that’s kind of the way I look at search. And again—not through ads, but organically, right?

We already talked about the cost difference between Google Ads and SEO. Even Google will tell you—SEO is a fraction of the cost of Google Ads. So again, Google AI Overview and AI Mode will tell you—you want to make sure you are dominating search, because the 5% of you who can be in that top 5% will have a five-to-one advantage in terms of your marketing cost and marketing quality.

Naren Arulrajah: Now, it’s not for everyone. But if you can get into the top 5%—and that’s what we focus on—one of the things I would focus on is: find out, are you in that top 5%? Are you showing up on AI? Are you showing up on regular search? Are you showing up on these other platforms?

And the golden number—even though I said keyword rankings have become less important compared to ROI metrics—I really think you want to make sure you’re ranking for 100+ keywords, because it’s like a baseline metric.

Now, some of our clients, especially after AI, are ranking for 400–500. In other words, the number of keywords you’re ranking for—when you do really well or you do what Google wants you to do—is going up. Of course, the ones who are not doing well, they’re crashing and burning and dying.

So you have to not cheat Google—do everything they want.

Naren Arulrajah: So I really think the number one metric you have to focus on is:

• How many new patient calls are you getting (like Gary mentioned).
• Number two is things like how many keywords you’re ranking for, even though they’re not as important as before—you still need to know, are you doing well?

And also start looking at:

• Are you ranking on ChatGPT?
• What is ChatGPT saying about you?
• Or Perplexity?
• Or Gemini?
• Or regular search?

You need to really start paying attention to it.

And one of the things we talk about, Gary, is what we call a Marketing Strategy Meeting, where we do a complete review of all of this. I know I gave you general counsel about how things are doing, but you don’t know if you are doing well or not, right?

Naren Arulrajah: But I really, really think you need to sit down with an expert. We spend six hours studying you, your competition, and really diving deep and understanding how well you are doing—or not doing.

And once you know the root cause—like, okay, my CRUX scores are low, or my E-E-A-T scores are low, or I’m not showing up on ChatGPT, or I’m showing up on Perplexity but the information they’re showing is all wrong—once you know what’s really going on, now you can make a decision on how do you go from: "I’m nowhere to be seen on search (whether AI or otherwise)" to "how do I dominate?"

That’s the way I would think about this.

Gary Takacs: Well, you know, Naren, as we kind of start to head toward the finish line here today, one of the things that’s apparent to me—now we’re adding the AI to the equation of marketing—marketing just became geometrically more complicated.

Naren Arulrajah: Yes.

Gary Takacs: Dentists have a complicated life being a quality dentist, right? It’s complicated. There’s a lot of moving pieces, a lot of things that you need to know, a lot of things that you need to become mastery of. You know, if you own the practice, you also have to master the business side of the practice—HR, you have to master. There’s a lot of things to master.

And what’s apparent to me is that effective marketing today really does need to be in the hands of the experts. And my experience has been that if you find the right marketing company to work with, you can outsource that to the experts and allow yourself—you know, we’re talking about this event coming up, this Thriving Dentistry event, Stress-Free Dentistry—and you can reduce your stress because now you know you have something taken care of.

And I know that I have confidently referred our clients to your marketing company because I get to see the results, and I’ve experienced them in my own practice.

Naren, how would any of our listeners set up a marketing strategy meeting with Ekwa?

Naren Arulrajah: Thank you, Gary. I totally agree with everything you said.

The best way to book a Marketing Strategy Meeting is go to ekwa.com/td. That’s the link. Once you go to that link, you can book that Marketing Strategy Meeting, and our team will spend six hours studying everything—and it’s our gift to you: ekwa.com/td.

You can also get that in the show notes. So that’s the best way to do it. It’s no cost. You get a lot of value, and whatever you learn based on our six hours of research, you take it and you decide what you want to do with it next.

But I do think—just to kind of summarize my thoughts—AI is for real. AI is part of search. You have to take it seriously, and take an all-of-the-above approach. Focus on the most important metric: ROI. ROI.

How many new patient calls am I getting? Is it going up? Is it going down? All the other things—pay attention—but that’s the gold standard.

Gary Takacs: Yeah, and as we wrap up today, if you would like help in terms of truly developing your practice to full potential—maybe you want to reduce some insurance dependence, maybe you want to get a good systems-driven practice instead of being person-dependent—but ultimately you want to develop a practice that provides personal, professional, and financial satisfaction…

We are accepting new clients at Thriving Dentist Coaching. There are times where we have a waitlist. However, we are currently accepting new clients, because we’ve had some clients successfully hit the finish line and transition their practice at the end of their career—by design.

So it has created some openings. If you’d like more information about that, you can schedule a Coaching Strategy Meeting with me: go to thrivingdentist.com/csm. It opens up my calendar. You schedule a one-hour Zoom meeting—that’s with me—and I’ll have a chance to talk with you, learn more about your practice, learn more about your goals, and determine if working together in a coaching capacity would be beneficial.

Please know, I’d welcome seeing you on a Coaching Strategy Meeting.

On that note, Naren, thank you for your passion around marketing. Thank you for sharing all this great information about AI. AI is definitely impacting our lives—and in many cases, it’s making a positive impact. And it is in marketing as well.

So on that note, Naren and I thank you for the privilege of your time today, and we look forward to connecting with you on the next Thriving Dentist Show.