The fix is not dramatic. It is five items on a list, done once, maintained annually, and reviewed when anything changes. Before the complaint arrives, not after.
Roughly 88% of healthcare-related searches in Australia now return an AI-written paragraph above the usual list of links. Most patients never click through. Google’s summary is the answer they get, and increasingly, the only one they look at.
This has quietly changed the rules for every doctor whose name a patient might ever type into a search bar.
I wrote recently in these pages about the mental health cost of negative search results for medical professionals. The response was generous and, in some cases, painful. A number of GPs asked the same practical follow-up.
Say I understand the problem. What do I do before a complaint is ever made? How do I protect myself in advance?
This piece is the answer.
The new threshold
Add a qualifier like “Australia” or your suburb to a doctor’s name and that figure climbs again. The majority of users who see an AI overview never click through to any underlying website.
The implication is structural, not cosmetic.
A GP with no meaningful online presence used to be invisible. A patient would search, find very little, and rely on word of mouth or the booking system.
Today, a GP with no meaningful online presence is summarised by whatever Google’s model finds first.
If Google finds the practice website with a short bio, that is what it summarises. If it finds an old regulatory notice, that is what it summarises.
Invisibility has been replaced by summarisation. The GP is no longer absent from the search result. The GP is the subject of it, whether they have participated or not.
Looking after your professional profile online is no longer an optional marketing activity for doctors who enjoy that kind of thing. It is professional infrastructure, in the same category as your indemnity cover or your CPD log.
Why the old advice no longer works
In 2020, that was sufficient. Today it is not, because patients often no longer click through to the underlying pages at all. Ranking in the top results is necessary but no longer sufficient. If a positive page about you ranks at position three but is not the source the AI quotes in the paragraph at the top, the patient has formed an opinion before they reach it.
The AI also pulls from a much wider set of sources than the old top 10 links. Older articles, professional directories, social media posts, and Wikipedia-style structured entries all feed in. Something you considered “old news” because it had dropped off the first page can be lifted back into view because Google’s AI considers it relevant.
The five things to do before a complaint arrives
Own the domain of your own name
The reason this matters has shifted.
Three years ago, the argument for a personal domain was that it ranked at position one for searches of your name.
Today the argument is stronger.
The AI treats a doctor’s self-owned site as one of the most authoritative possible sources of information about that doctor. It can tell, from the domain registration and the way the page is set up, that this is the person describing themselves rather than someone else describing them. That carries weight in what the paragraph ends up saying.
If you do not own the domain, someone else eventually may, and the choice you will have at that point is much worse than the choice you have today.
Domain registration costs about $20 a year. It is the cheapest piece of professional protection on this list.
Be the same person on every page
If the answer is no, you have a quiet problem the AI is not making any better.
Google’s systems work hard to identify which Dr Smith a patient is searching for, and inconsistent biographies make that harder.
In the GPs I have worked with, the most common consequence of a fragmented online identity is not dramatic. It is that the AI’s paragraph reads like a composite, a sentence drawn from one stale bio, another from a directory you forgot existed, a third from a profile that was set up by a previous practice manager.
The fix is unglamorous.
Pick one master biography, in your own words, with your qualifications, your years in practice, your areas of interest, and your practice location. Use it everywhere. Update it everywhere when something changes.
Related
Publish something the AI can quote
Publishing is not self-promotion. It is record. A clear, plain-English article about a condition you commonly see in your practice, published on your own simple website, is structurally no different from the patient handouts you already write. The audience is broader. The content is the same.
The reason this specifically matters in the AI era is that the paragraph Google writes about you is assembled from sentences it can quote.
A page that says “Dr Smith is a leading GP in Bondi” gives the AI nothing usable. A page that says “Type 2 diabetes affects roughly one in 20 Australian adults, and is increasingly diagnosed in patients under 40” gives the AI a sentence with facts in it and a clear voice attached. When the AI later writes about you, those are the sentences it reaches for.
Almost every GP I speak with raises the same objection at this point: “Doesn’t section 133 of the National Law and AHPRA’s advertising guidelines make all of this off-limits?”
The short answer is no.
The advertising guidelines prohibit testimonials about clinical services and a defined list of misleading claims. They do not prohibit educational content, biographical accuracy, or descriptions of conditions you treat. Most GPs are operating with a much wider sense of what the rules forbid than the rules actually do.
(We have written a longer piece on what AHPRA’s advertising rules do and do not allow on a medical practice website, which is worth 20 minutes of your time.)
One short article a quarter, on a condition you actually see, is enough.
Be present on the platforms patients actually use
For most GPs the shortlist is straightforward:
These are the platforms Google’s AI considers reliable for healthcare information about doctors. A GP whose profile exists in a coherent way across them is a GP the AI describes coherently.
A GP whose only public presence is a single line on a practice website is a GP the AI describes with whatever else it can find.
A note on testimonials, which is the second AHPRA objection that comes up here.
Section 133 prohibits testimonials about clinical services. It does not prohibit a Google Business Profile, an accurate biography, or correct contact and consulting information on a directory.
The advice in this piece is about educational content and biographical accuracy. Patient reviews are a separate question with separate rules.
You do not need to be on every platform. You do need to be on the ones that already exist for you, and to make sure what they say is right.
Search yourself once a year
The last piece of infrastructure is the simplest.
Once a year, sit down for 10 minutes and Google your own name. Try it with “Australia” added. Try it with your suburb added. Try the question form: who is Dr X. Read the AI overview carefully. Take a screenshot. File it.
Do it again 12 months from now and compare.
What the AI says about you shifts without warning. New sources get crawled. Older pages get reweighted. A complaint you handled and resolved years ago can resurface in the paragraph as the AI’s sense of who you are changes.
You only find out by looking. The doctors I see struggling most are not the ones who acted early on a negative search result. They are the ones who did not realise, for two or three years, that the paragraph Google was writing about them had become the paragraph they would not want their patients to read.
What to do if you leave this until a complaint arrives
Building a resilient digital profile before a problem arrives is a few months of fairly modest work.
Building one after a problem arrives is years of harder, more expensive, more emotionally loaded work.
Negative content on government regulator sites and major news outlets is hard to displace once it has ranked and once the AI has incorporated it into its description of you.
It can be done. It takes time, careful platform choices, consistent publication, and a discipline that most GPs reasonably did not sign up for when they trained in medicine.
Prevention is dramatically cheaper than remediation. Not just in dollars, but in the cost of carrying a search result you wish wasn’t there while you try to outwork it.
Closing
The choice is not whether to have a professional digital profile. That choice is no longer available. The choice is whether to participate in the profile you already have.
Medicine has building codes for hospitals, safety protocols for procedures, and credentialling for practitioners. It has checklists that have saved thousands of lives.
Digital presence is the one piece of professional infrastructure the profession has not yet standardised around, and the cost of that gap is being paid by individual doctors in ways that are rarely visible in a consulting room.
The fix is not dramatic. It is five items on a list, done once, maintained annually, and reviewed when anything changes. Before the complaint arrives, not after.
Clare Burns is the founder of Narrative Digital, a specialist firm that helps professionals take control of their search results through content strategy and multi-platform publishing. With a background in ICU and anaesthetic nursing, she understands the unique pressures facing medical professionals. For a confidential conversation, contact clare@narrativedigital.com.au.
