Where do AI assistants get their information about doctors?

Two kinds of knowledge

An AI assistant answers from two places. The first is what it learned in training, a snapshot of text that is months or years old by the time anyone asks. The second, for assistants that browse, is what it reads on the web at the moment of the question. For a question about one named clinician, the second matters more: there is rarely enough about an individual in training data, so the assistant goes looking.

What it finds is whatever pages describe that clinician and can be read by a machine: directories, practice websites, hospital pages, licensing boards, news, and mirrors of the public registry. Pages with clean structured data and consistent facts are easier for a machine to read than pages that disagree with each other.

The common thread is the NPI record

Every clinician and organisation that bills in the United States has a National Provider Identifier, and the record behind it, in the federal NPPES registry, is public: name, credentials, specialty taxonomy, practice address, phone. Most directories start from that record. So does Guide.md. When the record carries an old office, a home address or a phone that is no longer yours, every page built on it inherits the mistake, and so does any assistant that reads them.

Guide.md mirrors the registry weekly and gives every record a page. A clinician can claim the page free, correct it, hide a home address or personal phone, and from then on the weekly refresh never overwrites what they wrote. The corrected page is what a browsing assistant reads next time.

How often do assistants actually read it?

We measure it rather than claim it. Requests from AI assistants and their crawlers are counted at the edge, and the running figure, by assistant, is published at guide.md/ai-reads/. The same sentence appears on the home page and the pricing page, and it updates daily.

What a clinician can do this week

1. Search your name on Guide.md and read what the registry record says about you. That is what an assistant will repeat.
2. Claim the profile, free. A practice or institutional email confirms in a minute; any other address is reviewed by a person.
3. Correct the specialty wording, the addresses, the phone, and add what you treat and do. Hide a home address or personal phone if the registry lists one.
4. If the registry itself is wrong, update it at NPPES as well; the weekly refresh shows you the change and lets you accept it or keep yours.
5. Check the other directories that mirror the record. Our comparison pages say, from each vendor's own pages, how to correct or remove a profile on each.