The most modern stack in the book, ranking on none of its strengths
Sacramento Dentistry Group · Sacramento, CA · audited September 1, 2026
Who they are
Four-dentist midtown Sacramento practice, twenty years in the market, running general, cosmetic, implants, Invisalign, sedation, TMJ and sleep apnea. Built on Astro — a modern static framework, and the only non-WordPress general practice in the California book.
What we verified
Blog, NexHealth booking, Cherry and CareCredit financing, individual service pages, Astro v5.18. Technically the cleanest site in the book. No before/after gallery and no Spanish version despite the market.
The problem
A fast, modern, four-doctor practice with the widest service range in Sacramento was being found for its name and almost nothing else.
Technical quality is not a ranking or citation strategy. The site had speed and structure but no depth on the conditions patients actually ask about, no off-site mention base, and nothing in the format an assistant reproduces. 55% of patients begin with a '[specialty] near me' query and 47% now bring AI into the provider search — neither of those is won by page speed.
TMJ and sleep apnea are genuinely differentiated services in this market with almost no local competition for the answer space.
What we did
Local health queries only return an AI Overview about 11% of the time. The AI risk to a practice is at discovery, not on the SERP — 47% of patients now research providers with AI and 36% say it changed their choice.
- Built page depth against the questions patients actually ask, not the treatments the practice sells — symptoms and decisions, because that is what gets cited.
- Held the Local Pack with a proper GBP rebuild: local health queries return an AI Overview only about 11% of the time against 93% for conditions and symptoms, so the money keywords are still a pack fight.
- Ran the Scriblr citation baseline across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews on the practice's real patient-question set, tracked weekly.
- Built review architecture as an AI input, not a vanity metric — 75% of patients refuse to book below 4.0 stars, 44% require 4.5+, and 55% have cancelled or avoided an appointment over reviews.
- Went after third-party mentions through LinkersPro, because 77% of AI citations come from sources that are not the practice's own website and 84% trace to earned media.
- Kept every clinical page current, since AI-cited content runs 25.7% fresher than the organic top ten.
How it was sequenced
Citation baseline across four assistants, GBP rebuild, page architecture and entity cleanup.
Symptom and decision content shipped, review engine live, first off-site mention wave.
Mention velocity sustained, citation rate compounds, freshness cycle running on clinical and service pages.
The numbers
These are not reported results. Sacramento Dentistry Group's own reporting has not yet been reconciled against these rows — see how we define a target versus a result.
| Metric | Baseline | Target | Change | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI assistant mention rate | 17% | 38% | +21 pts | share of the practice's patient-question prompt set naming it, across 4 assistants |
| Local Pack top-3 coverage on '[treatment] near me' | 40% | 60% | +50% | share of grid points in the top 3 |
| Non-branded organic new-patient enquiries | index 100 | index 128 | +28% | indexed to engagement start = 100 |
| Review rating, volume and recency | index 100 | index 240 | +140% | new reviews per month, indexed; 4.5+ stars required by 44% of patients |
Where these targets come from
| Published figure | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 47% / 36% | Patients who used AI to research providers, and who say AI influenced their final choice | rater8 Patient Choice Report (2026) |
| 11% vs 93% | AI Overview coverage: local health queries vs conditions/symptoms queries | Search Engine Land / BrightEdge (2026) |
| 75% / 44% | Patients refusing to book below 4.0 stars, and requiring 4.5+ | rater8 Patient Choice Report (2026) |
| 77% | Share of AI citations on branded queries coming from off-page sources, not the brand's own site | Omniscient Digital (23,000+ citations) (2026) |
| 25.7% | How much fresher AI-cited content is than organic top-10 (1,064 vs 1,432 days, 17M URLs) | Ahrefs (2026) |
Objections this answers
- “Patients find us by referral. Search doesn't matter for dentistry.”
The proof behind every figure
These are the raw exports Sacramento Dentistry Group receives, and the ones any number on this page reconciles against. Ask any agency for the equivalent.
- Scriblr prompt-set exports, before and after
- Local grid screenshots
- GBP insights
- Review dashboard
- Mention log with live third-party URLs
Systems used
- Scriblr for AI citation tracking
- LinkersPro for earned mention acquisition
Questions about this engagement
A fast, modern, four-doctor practice with the widest service range in Sacramento was being found for its name and almost nothing else. Technical quality is not a ranking or citation strategy. The site had speed and structure but no depth on the conditions patients actually ask about, no off-site mention base, and nothing in the format an assistant reproduces. 55% of patients begin with a '[specialty] near me' query and 47% now bring AI into the provider search — neither of those is won by page speed.
Audited September 2026: Blog, NexHealth booking, Cherry and CareCredit financing, individual service pages, Astro v5.18. Technically the cleanest site in the book. No before/after gallery and no Spanish version despite the market.
Days 0–30: Citation baseline across four assistants, GBP rebuild, page architecture and entity cleanup. Built page depth against the questions patients actually ask, not the treatments the practice sells — symptoms and decisions, because that is what gets cited. Held the Local Pack with a proper GBP rebuild: local health queries return an AI Overview only about 11% of the time against 93% for conditions and symptoms, so the money keywords are still a pack fight.
Days 0–30 — Citation baseline across four assistants, GBP rebuild, page architecture and entity cleanup. Days 31–90 — Symptom and decision content shipped, review engine live, first off-site mention wave. Days 91–180 — Mention velocity sustained, citation rate compounds, freshness cycle running on clinical and service pages.
The programme was run against four targets: AI assistant mention rate from 17% to 38% (+21 pts); Local Pack top-3 coverage on '[treatment] near me' from 40% to 60% (+50%); Non-branded organic new-patient enquiries from index 100 to index 128 (+28%); Review rating, volume and recency from index 100 to index 240 (+140%). These are the targets the work was set and measured against, derived from the published category benchmarks cited on this page — not figures reported back from Sacramento Dentistry Group's systems. Measured results replace them here as reporting is reconciled.
No, and any agency that guarantees a number is selling you something. Every benchmark on this page is published by a named third party with a live source link, and every figure we report is reconcilable against the raw exports listed under proof — the ad platform change history, the call recordings, and the client-side booking or policy export. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is the standard you should hold any agency to.
Sacramento Dentistry Group runs at the Authority tier — $5,000/mo, covering AI SEO. Tier is set by the number of markets, the number of service lines and the reporting cadence, not by hours. Scope is agreed before anything is committed.
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