To find out what ChatGPT tells patients about your hand surgery practice, open a fresh chat (logged out or in an incognito window, so past history doesn't skew results) and ask it the same questions a prospective patient would ask: who treats trigger finger near me, is this surgeon good for carpal tunnel release, what are the reviews like. Read the answer for accuracy, currency, and whether it names you at all. If it doesn't, or gets your services wrong, you have a specific, fixable problem rather than a vague worry.
This is different from wondering why a competitor gets recommended over you. This is about knowing, in plain terms, what the AI is actually saying right now when your name comes up — or checking why it never comes up in the first place.
Why this audit matters more than guessing
A hand surgery practice cannot manage what it hasn't seen. Patients increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity questions before they ever call an office, and those tools answer from a mix of your website, directory listings, review platforms, and general medical content. If that mix contains outdated hours, a discontinued procedure, or the wrong location, patients act on it before you know there's an issue.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) — the practice of shaping how AI tools describe and recommend a business — starts with knowing your current baseline. Skipping straight to fixes without first reading what's actually being said is like renovating a waiting room you've never walked through. The audit is the only way to know if the problem is visibility, accuracy, or both.
The prompts to test as if you were a patient
Run a short list of prompts written the way patients actually type, not the way you'd describe your own practice. Ask about specific conditions (De Quervain's tenosynovitis, Dupuytren's contracture, distal radius fracture), specific procedures (carpal tunnel release, trigger finger injection versus surgery, wrist arthroscopy), and comparison questions ("best hand surgeon for a musician's tendon injury near your city").
Also test insurance and logistics questions, since these drive as many calls as clinical ones: "does your practice name take your insurance carrier," "how soon can I get a hand surgery consult in your city," "do I need a referral to see a hand surgeon." Ask each prompt in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity separately, since each pulls from different sources and will often give different answers about the same practice.
Reading whether answers are accurate or outdated
An answer can sound confident and still be wrong, so read each response against three checks: is the clinical information current (does it list procedures you actually perform, or ones you stopped offering), is the practical information correct (address, phone number, insurance participation, hospital affiliations), and is the tone accurate (does it describe your actual specialty focus, like pediatric hand trauma or sports-related hand injuries, or a generic description that could apply to any orthopedic office).
Outdated answers usually trace back to old directory listings, a former associate still listed as staff, or a website page that hasn't been touched since a procedure list changed. If the AI repeats a stale detail, it is very likely pulling from a source you have control over and haven't updated. That is the easiest category of problem to fix, because the correction is entirely in your hands.
Spotting where competitors are named instead
Sometimes the more telling result isn't a wrong answer about you — it's no answer about you at all. Ask a prompt like "who are hand surgeons in your city who treat trigger finger" and see whether your practice appears in the list, and if not, look at which practices do. Note what those competitor listings emphasize: specific conditions treated, same-day appointment availability, patient-reported wait times, or credentials like fellowship training in hand surgery.
This isn't about matching a competitor's marketing. It's diagnostic. If every competitor answer mentions fellowship training and yours is absent from the response entirely, that's a signal your own site and profiles may not state your credentials clearly enough for the AI to surface them. If competitors are named for conditions you also treat but rank lower, the AI likely found stronger, more specific content elsewhere describing that exact condition.
Fixing the gaps you find
Once the audit turns up a wrong fact, an outdated procedure list, or an absence where a competitor appears instead, the fix is almost always the same: make the accurate version of that information easy to find in the places AI tools already pull from. Update your website's service pages to name specific conditions and procedures rather than broad categories like "hand and wrist care." Correct your practice's listings on Google Business Profile, Healthgrades, and any hospital directory so hours, insurance, and staff are current everywhere at once, not just on your own site.
If the gap is about credentials or specialty focus, add a clear, plainly worded page or section describing fellowship training, years of experience with a specific procedure, or the age groups and injury types you specialize in. AI tools tend to quote specific, clearly stated facts more readily than marketing language, so a sentence like "performs wrist arthroscopy for scapholunate ligament injuries" will surface more reliably than "committed to excellent hand care."
The one thing to do this month
Of everything covered here, running the audit itself — the actual prompts, in the actual tools, read with a critical eye — outranks every other action because it turns a guess into a list. Without it, any fix you attempt is aimed at a problem you haven't confirmed exists. With it, you know exactly which fact is wrong, which page needs updating, or which credential needs to be stated more plainly, and you can act on that specific gap instead of rewriting your whole web presence on a hunch.