Anaks Labs
Article 02

Ask an assistant about your practice

This is the cheapest diagnostic available to a clinic owner and almost nobody has run it. It costs ten minutes and nothing else. What follows is how to ask, six kinds of reply you might get back, what each one is a symptom of, and the several ways to over-interpret a single answer.

Published · Anaks Labs

Three questions, asked cold

Open whichever assistants your patients are likely to be using, and start a fresh conversation in each — not one you have already been talking to about something else, because it will remember and the memory will flatter you. Then put three things to it.

First, your practice by name, together with the town: tell me about and then the name over your door. Second, the way a stranger would arrive at you, with no name in it at all: somebody describing what they need and where they are. Third, one question you know a patient asks at the desk every week — what something costs, whether a plan is taken, how long a recovery runs, whether anyone can be seen today.

Write down what comes back, verbatim, including anything it gets wrong. That transcript is the whole exercise. It is worth more than an opinion about your website from anybody, including us.

Read it as a symptom, not as a score

Before the six patterns, one caution that governs all of them. An answer is not a rank and it is not a grade. It is a single observation of a system that is inconsistent by design, and the mistake practice owners make is to treat one good answer as an all-clear or one bad answer as a crisis. What you are looking for across several attempts is which of the six shapes below keeps recurring.

Six answers, and what each one points at

  • It named you, and everything it said was right

    Hours, address, the services it listed, the tone of the description. If a cold assistant can produce an accurate paragraph about your practice, then somewhere in what it can reach, those facts exist in a form it could pick up and carry. That is a genuinely good sign and it is the least common of the six in our experience.

  • It named you, and some of the details were wrong

    The old hours. A suite number you moved out of three years ago. A service you stopped offering. A partner who left. This is the most instructive result of the lot, because it tells you the answer is being assembled out of something stale and that the correct version either is not reachable or is not winning. Note precisely which facts were wrong — that list is the finding.

  • It described your kind of practice accurately but never named yours

    A careful, sensible answer about what to look for in a clinic, with no practice in it. Read this as the assistant declining to name anybody rather than as a judgement on you. Then ask it again with the name, and see whether it knows you when it is told who you are. The gap between "cannot name you unprompted" and "does not know you at all" matters.

  • It named somebody else in your neighbourhood

    The practice two streets away, described warmly and at length. This is the result that stings and the one most likely to be misread, so it has an article of its own. The short version: it is not a penalty, it is not a judgement of your clinical work, and it is not something your competitor bought.

  • It could not find you, or found a different business with a similar name

    Occasionally it will confidently describe a practice that is not yours — same name, different state — or say it has nothing. Check the obvious thing first: whether the name you trade under is the name that appears on your own site, your listings and your signage. Practices that renamed, merged or added a partner's name are heavily represented in this category.

  • It answered from a directory, a review site or a social page

    Where an assistant shows its sources, look at what it leaned on. If your own website is not among them, that is the single most useful line in the whole transcript. Everything the patient is being told about you is then coming from somewhere you do not control and cannot correct.

Three ways to read too much into this

We would rather this article made you sceptical than confident, so here is where it stops being evidence.

  • The answer you get is not the answer a patient gets

    Replies vary with the wording, the product, the day, the account and whatever the person asked five minutes earlier. Your transcript is a sample of one, taken from a device that has been reading your own website all morning.

  • A confident sentence is not a checked sentence

    Assistants state incorrect things about businesses in exactly the same tone they state correct ones. If it says something flattering about your practice that is not true, that is a defect and not a compliment.

  • One test is a story; a fortnight of tests is a finding

    If you intend to do anything at all with the result — including hiring somebody — run it several times across several days first, and keep the transcripts. It is also the only baseline you will ever have, and it stops existing the moment anyone changes your website.

What this exercise cannot tell you

It cannot tell you why. An assistant will not explain which of the things it read about you it believed, and it will not tell you what it failed to obtain from your own pages. The transcript tells you there is a discrepancy between what is true about your practice and what is being said about it. Locating that discrepancy is a different job, and it starts with what your website hands over rather than with what any assistant replies.

The other half of the diagnosis: what your own site currently hands over →

Questions

  • Does a wrong answer mean my website is broken?

    Not on its own. An assistant can be wrong about a practice whose site is perfectly readable, because it also draws on directories, map listings, review sites and pages other people wrote about you. A wrong answer tells you the question is worth pursuing. It does not tell you where the fault lives.

  • Should I ask more than once?

    Yes. The same question produces different answers on different days, in different assistants and for different people. One reply is an anecdote. Six of them, spread over a fortnight and written down, begin to look like a pattern — and a pattern is the only thing here worth acting on.

  • Does asking about my own practice change what patients are told?

    No. You are one conversation among an enormous number, and nothing you type into an assistant is stored as a vote for your clinic. If somebody offers to raise your standing by querying assistants about you on a schedule, they are selling a mechanism that does not exist.

  • What if it refuses to recommend any practice at all?

    That is an ordinary response to a health question and it is not about you. Read what it offers instead: the criteria it tells the patient to look for are the things it believes can be checked. Whether your practice states any of them anywhere is the useful question to take away.

  • Which assistant should I test with?

    More than one, and whichever ones your patients actually use. They do not share a view of the world: the same practice can be described correctly by one and not found at all by another, and knowing that the disagreement exists is more informative than any single verdict.

Read next

We ran the equivalent exercise across 182 US clinic websites, reading what each hands over before anything on the page runs. What came back is on the clinics page → · how those 182 were drawn →