# 97.8% of Florida Eye Doctors Are Invisible on Four Out of Five AI Platforms

*2026-04-05* · *Original Research*

> We ran 627 queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews in 10 Florida cities. 1,587 eye care practices were named. Not one appeared on all five platforms.

Every week, more patients are skipping Google and asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for a doctor recommendation. Not searching. Asking. And the AI answers with specific names, specific practices, specific locations.

We ran 627 queries across five AI platforms, ten Florida cities, and five specialties: general eye doctor, optometrist, ophthalmologist, LASIK surgeon, and pediatric eye doctor. What came back was the most fragmented AI visibility landscape we've studied in any vertical.

## Does AI actually recommend eye doctors by name?

AI platforms named a specific local eye care practice 70% of the time. Not a directory link. Not a generic "here's how to find one." A name. An address. A recommendation. When a patient in Miami asks ChatGPT "who's a good eye doctor near me," seven out of ten times they get a direct answer.

The question is whether your practice is one of them.

## How many eye doctors appear on more than one AI platform?

We identified 1,587 unique eye care practices across all five platforms. Of those, 97.8% appeared on only one platform. Not two. Not three. One.

> Zero eye care practices in Florida appeared on all five AI platforms. Not one. This is the most fragmented vertical we've studied, worse than dental (94.5%) and home services (80%).

Each AI platform is working from a completely different picture of which practices exist. A patient asking ChatGPT and a patient asking Gemini for the same eye doctor in the same city will get completely different names.

## How often does Google AI Overviews recommend eye doctors?

The most surprising finding wasn't about ChatGPT or Perplexity. It was about Google.

Google's AI Overviews, the AI-generated answers that appear at the top of search results, triggered on only 4% of eye care queries. For comparison, dental triggers at 45%. Home services at 59%. Google's AI is essentially blind to eye care.

| Platform | Response Rate |
| --- | --- |
| Claude | 100% |
| Gemini | 100% |
| ChatGPT | 98% |
| Perplexity | 71.3% |
| Google AIO | 4% |

Claude and Gemini answer every single time. Google barely answers at all. For pediatric eye doctors specifically, the trigger rate was 0% across all ten Florida cities. Google's AI never once generated a recommendation.

Most practices are still optimizing for Google. But the platforms actually recommending eye doctors to patients are ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

## Do ChatGPT and Gemini recommend the same eye doctors?

We measured how often two platforms recommend the same practice for the same query. ChatGPT and Gemini, the two largest platforms, agreed on exactly zero recommendations.

| Platform Pair | Agreement Rate |
| --- | --- |
| Gemini + Google AIO | 33.3% |
| Perplexity + Claude | 9.1% |
| Gemini + Perplexity | 3.7% |
| Gemini + Claude | 3.6% |
| Gemini + ChatGPT | 0.0% |
| Perplexity + ChatGPT | 0.0% |
| ChatGPT + Claude | 0.0% |
| ChatGPT + Google AIO | 0.0% |

What this means in practice: being visible on one platform gives you almost no visibility on the others. Each one requires its own strategy.

## Do LensCrafters and Pearle Vision dominate AI results?

LensCrafters. Pearle Vision. VisionWorks. My EyeLab. You'd expect national chains to dominate AI recommendations the way they dominate strip malls. They don't.

Franchise mentions accounted for 1.3% of all AI recommendations. Independent practices own 98.7% of the results. AI platforms appear to distinguish between retail optical chains and medical eye care practices. When a patient asks for an "eye doctor," the AI recommends doctors, not stores.

Independent practices have a structural advantage in AI search that they don't have in traditional search. That's rare, and it won't last once the chains figure it out.

## Which directories do AI platforms use to find eye doctors?

We tracked every source citation across all 627 queries. Two platforms dominate.

| Source | Times Cited |
| --- | --- |
| Healthgrades | 180 |
| Zocdoc | 134 |
| Yelp | 66 |
| Google Reviews | 55 |
| WebMD | 32 |
| Google Maps | 28 |
| Vitals.com | 17 |
| Angi | 15 |

Healthgrades and Zocdoc account for 59% of all source citations. For eye care practices, these two platforms are the primary gateway to AI visibility. Your profiles on Healthgrades and Zocdoc may matter more for AI recommendations than your own website does.

## What should eye care practices do about AI visibility?

The patient acquisition channel is shifting. Not someday. Now. And eye care has a specific set of conditions that make this moment different from other verticals.

The fragmentation is extreme, which means the barrier to standing out is low. Zero practices have figured out multi-platform visibility. The franchise competition that dominates traditional search barely exists here. And Google, the platform most practices have spent years optimizing for, is the one performing worst.

The first eye care practices that build visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity will be reaching patients through a channel that 97.8% of their competitors don't even know exists.

The question isn't whether AI will recommend eye doctors. It already does, 1,587 of them across Florida alone. The question is whether it's recommending yours.

I built a diagnostic that checks your practice across all five AI platforms. Takes 10 minutes to review on a call.

**Find out what AI says about your practice.** → [Run Your Free AI Visibility Check](https://getlocalvitals.com/check)

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Source: https://getlocalvitals.com/blog/florida-eye-doctor-ai-visibility-study-2026
Published by Local Vitals · https://getlocalvitals.com