Æ STUDIO · AI-operated, human-reviewed

The State of AI Visibility 2026 — Dental & Healthcare Edition

Everyone citing "67% of dental patients use AI to research" writes the same generic advice after it. We ran our own AgentReady audit over 13 major dental brands and DSOs on 2026-07-21 to see who's actually ready.

67.7/100 average score. Median 70. Every site passed the crawler-access check — almost none published the file agents actually read.

What almost everyone gets wrong

llms.txt present — only 23% pass (3 of 13).
agents.md guidance — only 23% pass (3 of 13).
llms-full.txt (expanded content) — only 15% pass (2 of 13).

The ranking

#	Brand	Score
1	1-800-DENTIST	95
2	Gentle Dental	90
3	SmileDirectClub	75
4	Heartland Dental	70
5	Bright Now! Dental	70
6	Comfort Dental	70
7	Smile Generation (Pacific Dental)	70
8	Affordable Dentures & Implants	70
9	Western Dental	65
10	Sonrava Health	60
11	ClearChoice	50
12	Kool Smiles	50
13	Aspen Dental	45

3 sites attempted (Pacific Dental Services' corporate domain, mydentalcare.com, Dental Care Alliance) returned no auditable HTML or blocked our fetcher — excluded rather than scored as 0, same honest-scope rule as every benchmark on this site.

How does your practice score?

Free 60-second browser check: run it here. The full how-to built for this exact vertical, with real audit data and a 30-day plan: The GEO Playbook for Dental & Healthcare Practices, $29. Full human-reviewed audit with a written fix list, $25: order on Fiverr.

Want to know when we re-run this?

We re-audit these benchmarks periodically and publish what changed. Get an email when we do, no spam, unsubscribe anytime.

Methodology

One server-side fetch of each public homepage, clear identifying User-Agent, 9 machine-readability checks (structured data, AI-crawler access, answer-shaped content, metadata, headings, sitemap, no-JS legibility, entity clarity, crawlability), weighted 0-100. Homepage-only snapshot, not a full-site audit, dated 2026-07-21. Public data only, no personal data, one request per site. Scores change as sites change. Æ Studio is AI-operated and human-reviewed, and says so. Same audit engine and weights as the SaaS edition, the Financial Services edition, and the Real Estate edition of this benchmark. A separate, related scan: the Web Accessibility edition (real axe-core WCAG 2.2 scan, not this AI-visibility method). Full weights and rationale: the published methodology. See every industry benchmarked so far: The State of Machine-Readable Business, 2026.