What the patient actually asks
Nobody abroad asks an assistant "what do you think of Clinic X?". They do not know your name yet. They ask which clinics to look at in the first place:
- "Which hair transplant clinics in Istanbul have good reviews from UK patients?"
- "Is it safe to get veneers in Turkey? How do I choose a dental clinic in Antalya?"
- "Rhinoplasty in Turkey: what should I check before booking a surgeon?"
If your clinic appears in the answer to a question like this, the assistant brought you up on its own. That is the visibility that matters. Your clinic showing up when someone types your name proves very little.
Why checking it yourself is misleading
The obvious first test is to open ChatGPT on your own phone, in Turkish, from Turkey, and ask. That test answers the wrong question in four ways.
- Country. Your patient is in the UK, Germany or the Gulf, not in Turkey. The check has to be run for the patient's country.
- Language. A Turkish question and an English question can bring up different clinics. Ask in the language the patient writes in.
- Engines (the AI assistants). Your patient may use Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews rather than ChatGPT. Being named in one says nothing about the others.
- Repetition. Ask the same question twice and the list can change. One answer is a snapshot, not where you stand.
Who might fill the answer instead
Our earlier field note on local businesses found that ChatGPT built its shortlist from names that are already written about widely: national brands and large platforms. Clinics are a different sector and we have not published any measurement for them, so treat the following as a checklist of what to look for, not as a finding:
- Other clinics. These are your real competitors: same treatment, same patients, same city.
- Medical tourism platforms, comparison and review sites. They are not rivals. They are where the assistant sends the patient. If one keeps appearing, a complete profile there may be a way into that answer.
- Large hospital groups. Well-known names that can come up in answers to general questions, even when they do not compete with you on a given treatment.
- Articles, blog posts and forum threads. The sources an answer may lean on. If you know which ones, you know where your clinic needs to be described.
What you can control
None of these guarantees a result. Make each change, then measure what happens.
- One clear page per treatment in the patient's language: what is done, by whom, how long the stay is, what is included. An assistant can only repeat what it can read.
- Name your doctors, their specialty and their certificates on the site. Patients ask about the surgeon, so give the assistant something to find.
- Use the same clinic name everywhere: website, Google Business Profile, platform listings. Three spellings look like three different clinics.
- Earn real reviews from international patients on independent sites, in their own words.
What to avoid
Do not buy reviews, write them yourself or have someone else write them; platforms can remove them and put your clinic's listing at risk. Before publishing results, success rates or patient testimonials, check the rules: promoting health services is regulated in Turkey and in many of the countries your patients come from. And do not pay anyone who promises to "get you into ChatGPT". Nobody controls what the assistants say.
Where to start
SOV Tracker's free scan asks ChatGPT five questions that leave your clinic's name out. The free scorecard then shows whether you were named and who was named instead. No signup is needed.
The questions are asked in the language of the page you start from: English here, Turkish on the Turkish version of the site. For UK patients, run it from this English page and enter your clinic's city as the service area. Today we can only ask in English and Turkish. For patients who write in German or Arabic, try the question yourself in that language. The free scan runs once every 30 days for the same business, so start it from the right page.
The questions are not sent from a phone in the patient's country, so the result may not match exactly what a patient there sees. The free scorecard is a first step: one engine (ChatGPT), one look. The other engines and repetition are what the paid plans cover.
The paid plans ask your chosen questions every week on all five engines. They track your SOV Score, your share of mentions against the clinics you choose as competitors. Where an engine shows its sources, they also track the sources cited in the answer. You can then see how the numbers move in the weeks after a change. That alone does not prove the change caused it.