The Dental AI Visibility Index.

Source: KKV Labs, Google AI Mode answers captured September 8, 2026 in 40 cities.

Page builders are read on WordPress sites and reported as a share of every site we read: Gutenberg blocks 52%, Elementor 18%, Divi 10%, WPBakery 5%, Beaver Builder 1%. A site can carry more than one.

Source: KKV Labs crawl of 366 of 435 dental practice homepages, September 11, 2026.

How the homepage lets a patient book

Source: KKV Labs crawl of 366 of 435 dental practice homepages, September 11, 2026.

Source: KKV Labs crawl of 366 of 435 dental practice homepages, September 11, 2026.

Source: KKV Labs crawl of 366 of 435 dental practice homepages, September 11, 2026.

This is the one place on the page where the two groups read the other way round. A provider credential appears on 44% of the practices the answer named and 54% of everyone else, and DDS or DMD after a name on 37% against 48%. Board certification is stated on 3% of all the sites we read. Credentials are worth showing a patient. On this day, in this market, they are not what told the two groups apart.

Source: KKV Labs crawl of 366 of 435 dental practice homepages, September 11, 2026.

Source: KKV Labs crawl of 366 of 435 dental practice homepages, September 11, 2026.

Source: KKV Labs crawl of 366 of 435 dental practice homepages, September 11, 2026.

Named practices are the 84 crawled sites Google AI Mode listed in their own city answer three days before the crawl. Everyone else is the other 282. The top of this table is a list of treatments and a blog, which is to say it is about what the homepage writes down rather than what it runs.

The checks that read the other way round

These are the most useful rows on the page, because they are the ones the category would bet against. The credential rows move together, since DDS and DMD are two readings of the same check, so read them as one. A dental practice earns its credentials and should show them to patients. What this run can say is that on September 11, 2026 they did not mark out the practices the answer named.

The checks that did not tell the two groups apart

Two of the checks a patient cares about most sit on the same number in both halves of the comparison: a price appears on 15% of the named sites and 15% of everyone else, and a new patient page is linked from 44% against 44%.

Business schema is the check where the two groups sit closest together while still leaving room: 65% of the named practices carry it and 58% of everyone else does. That makes it open ground rather than catching up.

Source: KKV Labs crawl of 366 of 435 dental practice homepages, September 11, 2026.

A robots.txt was reachable on 95% of the sites we read, which is the base for the rows above. About half of those files disallow some path for every crawler, which is what a default admin rule looks like. We did not keep the rule text, so we report only the outright blocks and leave the rest alone.

32% of the sites we read serve an llms.txt file, at 116 sites. The shape of that number is the finding: every Duda site we read has one, 17 of 17 and every Wix site we read has one, 9 of 9. That is 26 of the 116 llms.txt files in this market, written by the builder rather than chosen by the practice.

Source: KKV Labs crawl of 366 of 435 dental practice homepages, September 11, 2026.

What the homepage tells a patient before they call

Words and weight are counted from the HTML our crawler downloaded, not from a browser that ran the page. A site that builds its text with JavaScript therefore reads thinner here than it looks to a visitor. Both halves of the named comparison were measured the same way on the same day, which is what makes that gap the useful part.

Source: KKV Labs crawl of 366 of 435 dental practice homepages, September 11, 2026.

Source: KKV Labs crawl of 366 of 435 dental practice homepages, September 11, 2026.

Readiness runs from New Mexico at 60 down to Pennsylvania at 20, across 22 states with at least 8 sites read. Several of those states rest on 8 or 9 sites and several are a single city, so a state row here is often really a city row. Read the row before you read the ranking.

Source: KKV Labs crawl of 366 of 435 dental practice homepages, September 11, 2026.

Source: KKV Labs screening and Google AI Mode answers captured September 8, 2026. 40 cities, 134 practice names. 29 cities had three or more practices named, 8 had two and 3 had one. Download the city data (CSV). What we do for dental practices.

The city sample

40 US cities across 23 states. We found 396 dental websites in them and screened 310. This is not a random sample of all US dentists: it is the markets we were looking at, which lean toward small and mid size cities.

The AI answers

One question per city, asked in Google AI Mode from a fresh logged out session on September 8, 2026, with the practices recorded in the order they were given. Answers change. This is a dated snapshot, not a ranking and not an endorsement of any practice on it.

The technology crawl

On September 11, 2026 we opened 435 dental practice homepages and read 366 of them. 38 answered and turned the crawler away, and 31 did not answer at all. Detection reads the homepage HTML for known scripts, links and markup, so a practice can use a tool without it showing here. Every share is a floor.

Named versus unnamed

The named set is the 84 crawled sites Google AI Mode listed in their own city answer three days before the crawl. The other 282 are everyone else. Comparing the two shows what the named group happened to have that day. It does not show that any of it is why they were named, and we do not claim that anywhere.

How a city was coloured

The answer column is the count itself: 29 cities had three or more practices named, 8 had two and 3 had one. No city was coloured by hand. Read the practice list, not the label.

What we are not claiming

Nothing here says a practice with better markup will be named, or that a named practice is better at dentistry than one that is not on the list. It says what this market looked like on two days in September 2026, and which of the cheap signals are still open.

A same day comparison, not a cause

The named practices were named for many reasons this crawl cannot see, including reviews, how long they have been open and who links to them locally. Nothing on this page is a ranking factor.

42 named practices have no website we could resolve

Google AI Mode gave those practice names with no link, and no first-party record we hold maps the name to a site. They are counted in the city table, which is built from names, and left out of the named versus unnamed comparison, which is built from websites. We resolved 91 sites and read 84 of them, so that comparison rests on 63% of the practices the answer named.

9 guessed websites were thrown out before we published

A guessed hostname can land on a business that shares a town name and nothing else. Every guessed match now has to pass three tests: a distinctive word of the practice name in the title or the markup, address shaped evidence for the city it was named in, and at least five dental words on the page. 9 rows failed and lost their website, including one that turned out to be an insurance broker and one in a different state. Three weak rows were kept with the evidence written down, and two of those are group homepages rather than the single office the answer named.

Homepage only, so every share is a floor

A credential on an About page, a price on a fees page or a booking tool behind a request an appointment click is not counted. Detection is by known scripts, links and text, so a new or self built tool reads as nothing at all.

No speed numbers, on purpose

The crawl ran from India. Response times were recorded and are not reported here, because from that distance they measure the length of the wire rather than the speed of the site.

Walled sites are counted apart from broken ones

38 sites answered and refused the crawler, and 31 did not answer at all. Only the first group is a blocked number. Bot walls cluster on certain hosts, so their absence could tilt the platform mix.

Small bases on some rows

The named side is 84 sites, so several rows in the comparison rest on a handful of practices, and the site counts are printed next to every share. Quote the counts. Never say twice as likely.

The state table runs on small bases too

22 states had at least 8 sites read. Four of them sit on exactly 8, and several are a single city, so a state figure there is really a city figure.

A partial robots.txt rule is not an AI block

About half of the robots.txt files we read disallow some path for every crawler, which is what a default admin rule looks like. We did not keep the rule text, so we report only the outright blocks and leave the rest alone.

Forty cities, not a census

This index covers 40 cities, not the whole country. Every one of them returned an answer naming at least one practice, so no city was dropped for want of a capture.