Getting Your Clinic Cited by AI Search

Someone types “is there a vet open near me right now” into an assistant rather than a search bar. They get a short answer naming two practices. There is no page of ten blue links to be seventh on. You are named or you are invisible, and the thing deciding that is not your ad budget.

This is the newest surface in local search and the one with the widest gap between the practices who have thought about it and the ones who have not. iVET360 put the share of practice websites not set up for AI citation at 94% in 2026, which is both a damning number and an unusually open door.

What actually changed

Three things, roughly at once:

1. Google began answering directly. AI Overviews now appear on a substantial share of queries, which pushes the first real link further down the page and takes the click entirely for simple factual questions.
2. Assistants became a starting point. People ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for local recommendations the way they used to ask a search engine, and an Authority Specialist study in 2026 found a meaningful minority of AI health responses name specific providers.
3. The unit of retrieval changed. Ranking a page is no longer the goal. The goal is having a passage that an assistant can lift and attribute — which rewards a very different kind of writing.

How an assistant picks a clinic

Nobody outside the labs has the exact mechanics, and anyone selling you a guaranteed method is guessing. But the observable pattern is consistent, and it is not mysterious:

• It needs a clear, machine-readable fact. “Open 24 hours” as structured data beats “we're always here for you” in a hero image.
• It prefers corroboration. A fact that appears on your site, your Google profile and a directory is treated as more reliable than one that appears once.
• It rewards specificity. “We see rabbits, guinea pigs and reptiles” is retrievable. “Comprehensive care for all your family's pets” is not a fact about anything.
• It quotes passages, not pages. A self-contained paragraph that answers one question completely is far more likely to be lifted than the same information spread over a page.

Write facts that can be quoted in one sentence without the surrounding page. That is most of the technique.

Structured data, properly

Schema markup stopped being a nice-to-have the moment machines started reading sites to answer questions. Borah Labs found 64.6% of veterinary sites publish some structured data in 2026, but “some” usually means a bare Organization block that says the practice exists.

What a clinic actually wants:

• VeterinaryCare or AnimalShelter, not a generic LocalBusiness. Schema.org has a veterinary type and almost nobody uses it.
• openingHoursSpecification, with real holiday overrides. This is the field most likely to be read back to a person at nine at night.
• areaServed and availableService, so “do they do dentals” has a machine answer.
• FAQPage on the pages that answer questions. The most directly quotable format there is.

llms.txt, and whether it matters

An llms.txt file at the root of your site is a short, plain-text summary of what the site is and where the important pages are — a robots.txt for language models. It is a proposed convention, not a standard, and no major assistant has committed to honouring it.

We ship one anyway, on the grounds that it costs twenty minutes, cannot hurt, and the downside of being early on a convention that sticks is nothing. Treat it as cheap insurance, not as a strategy. If someone quotes you a four-figure sum for “AI optimisation” and the deliverable is an llms.txt file, you are being overcharged.

Writing to be quoted

This is the part that actually takes effort, and it happens to make the site better for humans too.

1. Answer the question in the first sentence. Then explain. Not the other way round.
2. Put the fact in text. Hours inside a graphic, a phone number as an image, a species list in a PDF — all invisible.
3. Use the words people use. “Put to sleep” as well as “euthanasia”. “Fixed” as well as “neutered”.
4. Be concrete and checkable. “We hold two same-day slots until 4pm” is quotable. “Flexible appointments available” is not.
5. Date your pages. Assistants weight recency, and an undated page looks stale by default.

What does not work

Stuffing invisible instructions into your page aimed at language models. Keyword-loading a hidden div. Buying a package that promises a guaranteed ChatGPT ranking. None of these is a real mechanism, and the first is the kind of thing that gets a site penalised in the surface you do rank in.

What to do this month

In order: get VeterinaryCare schema with accurate opening hours on every page. Put your species list, your hours and your out-of-hours route in plain text above the fold. Add an FAQ block answering the ten questions your front desk gets most. Make sure your Google Business Profile says the same things as your site — see local SEO for veterinary clinics and the profile guide.

That is the whole list. It is unglamorous, it overlaps almost entirely with just writing a clear website, and it is why we think “AI optimisation” is mostly a new name for doing the basics properly.

Questions we get asked