If I Were a Physio, Here’s how ChatGPT Would Inform My Practice Software Purchase.

I took a step into a customer's shoes, pretending to be a physio clinic owner who was looking for practice management software. While admittedly subjective, this research aimed to understand how practice management software tools appear in LLM searches and the factors influencing their visibility. I’ve done a primer on AEO/GEO strategies if you want to check that out too.

Key TakeAways

• Use LLM Search to help inform the strategies you develop to improve your LLM visibility.

• Build content with specificity in mind, like your specific verticals, company size and regional nuances in your offering.

• Information sources will change for LLM citations, but the core principles of producing compelling content and authority in your category matters. 

The Process

1. Create a Category Query

   I started off by just entering the category into the query box “clinic practice management software”.  ChatGPT will list the things you should be thinking about when searching this category. Essentially, a proxy for what ChatGPT is looking for when searching the category. 

2. Create a Specific Use Case Prompt

   I then started to get more specific and used a prompt that is likely more how a person would actually search for software, using the prompt “I run a physiotherapy clinic, one location and 11 staff. We usually have 175 appointments per week. I am looking for practice management software for my clinic.”

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Side Note: ChatGPT Knows Where You Are and Uses Your History 

I discovered ChatGPT used my account's metadata to infer my location as Canada, regionalizing initial search results without explicit instruction. There are no settings to change this in the account settings. I reran the subsequent queries with the starting prompt to ignore all previous conversations and my location. But, your prospects likely won’t, so all their conversations will inform their results to some degree or another. So ChatGPT will regionalize the content for the user. As well as if they researched brisket recipes.

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ChatGPT Results for “Clinic Practice Management Software”

When searching a general topic like this, the LLM doesn’t really know your intent. But, when I ran this prompt several times it consistently assumed I was looking to purchase software. 

The results tend to break down into:

1. Description of what clinic practice management software is

2. Breakdown of key features

3. Vendor options 

4. Considerations for purchase the right software

5. An offer to compare vendors. 

Most software providers want to figure out how to be a top 5 vendor recommended with a generic prompt like this. You can use the hints ChatGPT is giving by the features and considerations it is playing back in its results. 

Let’s look at the key features it highlighted:

AINotebook.com built a really cool tool that takes the features outputted by ChatGPT and suggests areas on your domain that could be improved to align to those features. If you subscribe to the AINotebook you can find the tool in the note How to Rank in Chat GPT Deep Research. I inputted the features and added Jane.app and got the following results, pretty cool stuff that shows where they can improve. 

When you look at the Considerations ChatGPT mentions, it starts to tell a bit of a story. It is clearly indicating that use cases, budget, perceptions of the software, and company type matter. This is where providers have a hard decision to make: how much do you lean into your niche vs being available to everyone to not alienate a potential market?

If you say, “We’re the best practice management software for massage therapists in Upper NY State with under 20 employees”, you’ll likely nail that prompt, but limit your TAM. You need to be specific enough with your core website pages, but make sure you build very specific use cases and verticalized pages. 

ChatGPT Citations are Light for General Category Searches and Increase with Greater Intent

When you look at the volume of citations for a general prompt vs a detailed prompt, the citation volume is very different. My informal testing, involving multiple runs for each prompt, consistently showed similar citation volumes. In a detailed prompt like ““I run a physiotherapy clinic, one location and 11 staff. We usually have 175 appointments per week. I am looking for practice management software for my clinic.”, The results grew 4 - 5X in terms of citation volume and differentiated on the types of citations.

• General Prompts: 10 - 12 citations

• Specific Scenario Prompts: 40 - 50 citations

The amazing thing is where ChatGPT was sourcing the information from. In the General searches, Brand Content was the primary source with some third party review sites. Specific Prompts pulled from far more sources and a much wider variety. Much has been written about the amount that LLMs cite sites like Reddit and Quora, but in this case it seems that review sites and third party sites are very important, as well as having a very robust brand site. I did a similar evaluation of the Field Services category with a focus on AI Overviews (in Google), and the good news is that the trends seems to point in the same direction.

How Can Practice Management Software Adapt Marketing Strategies for ChatGPT

1. Start tracking LLM citation volume

   If you aren’t tracking you won’t know what is happening, but it is still early days in how different tools are tracking (sampling vs latent tracking vs other methods), so be curious in how things are being tracked and likely get a few sources for now. 

2. Monitor your results on an ongoing basis

   See where and how you are showing up and try to understand why your competitors may be showing up more. Use methods outlined above or adapt them over time.

3. Make adjustments to your brand presence

   Do the analysis and build hypothesis on what you need to do to build citation volume and start experimenting now on your own site.

4. Keep building your brand, authority and customer advocacy

   Yep, back to marketing 101. What seems to resonate is building quality content and having others speak on behalf of your company. Make sure you are building authority in your space, covering the key categories that ChatGPT is looking for and continue to get others to promote your brand. 

And here are some artifacts if you’d like them:

My ChatGPT interactions
The Citations, categorized and sorted by General or Specific