AI assistants disagree sharply on which dentists are best, Dental.me study finds

A Dental.me study of ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude found that AI assistants often give different dentist recommendations in the same city, with little overlap across the 50 largest U.S. markets. The results raise questions about whether patients can rely on AI for consistent local health care guidance.

Why it matters: - AI assistants are becoming a front door to local health care decisions, including dentist searches. - The study found that answers vary widely by assistant and can change from one query to the next. - That inconsistency matters because patients may treat AI recommendations like trusted local referrals.

What happened: - Dental.me asked ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude the same question in each of the 50 largest U.S. cities: “Who are the best dentists there?” - The assistants named 560 different “best” dental practices in total. - Only 30 practices appeared on all three lists. - The study was run on Oct. 16, 2026. - Researchers used fresh sessions for each assistant and compared picks by name and phone number.

The details: - Across the 50 cities, 76% of the recommended practices were named by only one assistant. - In 28 of the 50 largest cities, all three assistants failed to agree on a single practice. - Dallas, Tucson and Virginia Beach had no overlap at all among the three assistants’ recommendations. - When researchers repeated the same question in the 10 largest cities, 38% of the recommended practices changed. - In Chicago, Gemini’s second answer replaced all five of its first picks. - In Dallas, ChatGPT and Claude each kept only one recommendation from the first round. - In Baltimore, Gemini named “5 highly-rated dental practices,” including one with a 3.1-star Google rating from 24 reviews. - Dental.me’s data lists 49 Baltimore practices with ratings of 4.8 stars or higher and more than 100 reviews. - ChatGPT and Claude cited Dental.me as a source in 11 cities: Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Miami, Sacramento, San Diego and Washington, D.C. - In Boston, Claude described its picks as “the top-ranked Boston offices on Dental.me.” - Researchers also asked Claude with web search enabled eight times in each of the 50 cities and recorded every website it used as a source. - Star ratings and review counts were checked against public Google listings the same day. - The study measured recommendations, not the clinical quality of any dental practice. - The full results and methodology are published on Dental.me.

Between the lines: - The findings suggest AI search tools may be useful for discovery, but they are not yet consistent enough to replace a stable local ranking system. - A recommendation can depend on the model a patient uses, the timing of the query and whether the assistant relies on live web sources. - The study also shows that AI-generated local health guidance can surface practices that do not obviously match independent review data. - Spencer Whiteclaw, Dental.me’s head research analyst, said patients are turning to AI like they used to turn to a neighbor for a recommendation, but the answers can shift from one assistant to the next and even from one minute to the next.

What’s next: - Dental.me says it will continue publishing city-by-city results and its scoring methodology. - As more patients use AI for local service searches, pressure may grow for clearer sourcing and more repeatable recommendation systems. - Dental.me also says its AI citations are up 2,525% in the last 30 days.

The bottom line: - AI is influencing dentist choice, but the study says its local recommendations remain fragmented, inconsistent and difficult to verify.