Is Your IVF Clinic Invisible to ChatGPT? A 10-Minute Check in Plain Words

Something quietly changed in how patients choose a fertility clinic. Before they call anyone, more and more of them open an AI assistant — because it feels private at 11pm — and ask: "Which fertility clinic near me has good reviews?" or "What should I look for in an IVF clinic?" The answer names clinics. The question is whether yours can be in it.

The new first question is not asked on Google

Google still matters — but AI answers happen before the shortlist. An assistant can only recommend what it can fetch, read and understand: your treatments, your doctors, your location, your real differentiators. If your site is a wall of images, a blocked crawler, or marketing fog, the machine has nothing to carry into that answer. Invisibility there is not a penalty — it is simply being unreadable.

The 10-minute check

1. Ask the question your patient asks. Open any AI assistant and ask it which fertility clinics in your city it would look at. Are you named? Is a directory named instead of you? Write down exactly what it says — that is your real report card.

2. Check your front door. Your site's robots.txt and AI rules decide which machines may read you. Run your address through our free Through Machine Eyes — it shows your site exactly as the bots see it, blocked doors included.

3. Check that the machine-readable facts exist. Treatments, doctors, location, opening hours — AI answers are built from structured facts (schema and, increasingly, a plain GEO-style guidance file). No facts, no citation.

What we found checking 12 fertility clinics

In our September 2026 census of twelve fertility clinic websites, only 3 of 12 serve a hand-written llms.txt guidance file, 0 of 12 set deliberate AI rules in robots.txt, and one blocked itself from plain readers entirely. The most trust-dependent medicine on earth is leaving its front door unreadable to the machines patients actually ask. For one clinic in your city, that is a crisis. For the first one to fix it, it is an open field.

Questions this raises