CATEGORY AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST107 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE The patients you never hear about If you act on one number in this article, make it this one. A quarter of Australians have given up trying to book a dentist because it was too hard. Among under-35s, a third have. They wanted an appointment. They tried to make one, but something got in the way. Nobody answered the phone, or the first available was six weeks out, or they could not book at 9 pm when they finally remembered, or the form on the website did not work. So they stopped. They didn’t complain, and they didn’t leave a bad review. And they did not cancel, because they never got as far as booking. There is no record of them anywhere in your PMS. As far as your practice is concerned, they were never there. The second number is quieter and bigger. 47.1% have skipped or put off a check-up for no reason except that they forgot or got too busy. Not cost. Not fear. Not a bad experience last time. They meant to come in, and it just slipped. That is the easiest revenue in dentistry to win back, and you can win it back with an effective recall system, not a bigger marketing budget. What action should you take? First, find out whether you have an AI visibility problem at all. It takes two minutes. Open ChatGPT or Claude and ask either one to recommend a dentist in your suburb. If your practice comes up, that’s a good start, and you have nothing to panic about right now. If it does not, you need to raise it with whoever handles your marketing, and you should get started on improving it straight away. It is not costing you a lot of patients this month; only 5.7% found their dentist that way. But you need to start giving it some attention. Most of what makes a practice visible to an AI assistant is the same work that makes it visible in Google. It doesn’t need a separate project with a separate budget. Second, fix the two things that are costing you patients right now. A quarter of Australians could not get through a practice’s booking process and gave up. Nearly half have missed a checkup purely because it slipped their mind. And the single biggest way people found their dentist is still a person they know. None of that needs a bigger marketing spend. It needs the phone answered, an easy way to book after hours, a recall system that is more than a single SMS, and the habit of asking happy patients to refer their friends. AI Search is worth ten minutes of your attention this month and a conversation with your marketing people this year. It is coming, and you want to be early rather than late. But the patients who could not get through on the phone, and the ones who meant to book and forgot, are not a future problem. They are this week’s. And unlike AI, they are entirely in your hands. u Tel: 1300 269 811 dentalsurvey@brightdentalmarketing.com.au brightdentalmarketing.com.au ABN 68 168 861 667 About the survey The Australian Dental Consumer Survey 2026 is a national survey of 1,000 Australian adults who are their household’s dental decision-maker, fielded July and August 2026 through the Pollfish (Prodege) rewarded mobile panel. 996 responses were retained after quality screening. Age quotas were relaxed near the close of field to reach 1,000 completes. Results are weighted to Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated resident population by age and sex at 30 June 2025. Margin of error ±3.2% at the total-sample level; subgroup margins are wider. This is a rewarded online panel, which makes it directional rather than a probability sample. Where the survey reports Google, it combines those who said they used Google search and those who said they used Google Maps, counted once per person. A search for a dentist nearby returns a map inside the results, so the two are not reliably separable. Full findings, charts and the complete method note: dentalconsumersurvey. com.au Bright Dental Marketing commissioned and ran the Australian Dental Consumer Survey and is its named sponsor. The full findings and the method note are at dentalconsumersurvey.com.au. About the author Richard Quinn is the founder of Bright Dental Marketing, a Sydneybased agency working exclusively with Australian dental practices on websites, search and AI visibility, and patient growth. The agency sells services in some of the areas this survey covers, recall among them; the questions were written and the survey fielded before any of the findings were known. The patients who never made the appointment How people found their dentist, by age
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