In Temple City, One Dentist Wins Every Time. In Santa Clarita, Nobody Does.

I spent most of August calling plumbers, electricians and HVAC companies around Los Angeles. That did not go well, for reasons I have written about elsewhere. In September we started asking the same question about dentists instead, in every location in Los Angeles County, and one result made me realize I had been thinking about this backwards for months.

Here is the question we asked, word for word: "Who is the best dentist in ______?" We asked it 15 times per location, five runs each on ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, with a fresh session every time so no answer could learn from the one before it. Then we counted how often each practice came back.

Temple City: one name, every single time

Temple City is a small city in the San Gabriel Valley, roughly 36,000 people.

Seventeen different dental practices got named at all. One of them, Beautiful Dentistry, was named in 15 of 15 answers. Every time. The second most named practice came back 12 times, the third 11 times.

After that it falls off a cliff. Fourth place got 7, fifth got 6, and nine of the seventeen practices were named exactly once and never again.

That last number is the one worth sitting with. Nine practices appeared in a single answer out of fifteen. If you own one of them, you are not losing narrowly. You are a rounding error in how AI answers that question.

Santa Clarita: thirty seven names, no winner

Santa Clarita is roughly six times the size of Temple City.

Thirty seven practices got named. The most named one came back 6 times out of 15. So did the second. Then 5, then 5, then four practices tied at 4. Seventeen practices were named exactly once.

Nobody is winning Santa Clarita. Not narrowly, not at all.

Both cities answered all 15 times, so this is not a case of the AI refusing to talk about one of them. Same question, same week, same number of runs. One city has a settled answer and the other does not.

The picture

Every bar in the chart with this post is one practice. The height is how many of the 15 answers named it. Both cities are on the same scale, and the dashed line is 8 of 15, which is where we start calling somebody a leader.

Temple City is three bars and then a cliff. Santa Clarita is a low flat carpet 37 names wide.

Why I had it backwards

If you had asked me in July which of those two markets was easier to win, I would have said Temple City without thinking about it. Fewer practices, less competition, smaller pond. That is how everyone who has ever bought search marketing thinks, because that is how search marketing works. Fewer competitors means fewer people ahead of you in the list.

But there is no list. An AI answer holds three or four names, sometimes one. So the number of practices in town is close to irrelevant. The only question that matters is whether one of them has already become the default answer, and in a small market that happens fast, because there is less for the models to read and it converges quickly.

Then it compounds. The practice AI already prefers gets named again the next time someone asks, and the time after that.

In a big market the same convergence has not happened yet. Thirty seven names splitting fifteen answers is not a crowded market you cannot break into. It is an unclaimed one.

What this means depending on where you sit

If you are in a small city and you are not one of the two or three names: you are not ranked low. There is no page two of an AI answer to climb up from. You were not in the answer. Getting in from here means changing what the models can read about you, and you are doing it against a practice that gets reinforced every time somebody asks the question again.

If you are in a large city where nobody has cleared the bar: this is the cheapest it is ever going to be. Nothing about the current state is stable. These answers consolidate, and it is happening in the small cities right now, in public, where you can watch it.

Either way, the first move is the same, and it is not a purchase. Ask ChatGPT who the best dentist in your city is. Ask it four or five times, in fresh sessions, because the answer moves. See whether you come up at all. That takes ten minutes and it costs nothing, and most practice owners have never done it.

How we ran this

The LA AI Visibility Index now covers 89 Los Angeles locations and 1,335 AI answers in the September 2026 dental edition. Across those locations, an average of 26 different dental practices get named per location.

For each location: the same question, 15 times, five runs each on ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, fresh session every time. We count how often each practice is named across those answers, and we record every source the answers cite. In Temple City the answers leaned on 85 source mentions across 21 different websites. In Santa Clarita it was 81 mentions across 36 websites, which is its own small hint about why one of those cities has a settled answer and the other does not.

We call a practice a leader at 8 of 15 or better. That is a judgment call, not a law of nature. We picked it because it is a clear majority of answers, high enough that it cannot be noise.

Every location page is public and free, with no email required.

What this does not prove

A few things I want to be straight about, because they are the questions I would ask.

This is not causation. We can tell you which practices AI names and which sources the answers cite. We cannot tell you that the citations caused the naming. Being cited everywhere may be why a practice gets recommended, or it may just be what already winning looks like from the outside. Anyone who tells you they know which direction that runs is guessing.

Names are messy. Some practices show up under more than one name, a doctor's name and a practice name for example, and that can split a count that should be combined. We check for it, and we checked both of these cities by hand before publishing this. It is the main reason we are careful about declaring that nobody leads a market.

Fifteen answers is fifteen answers. It is enough to see a settled market versus an unsettled one. It is not enough to split hairs between a practice at 4 and a practice at 3.

Check your own city

Temple City: hollar.ai/ai-business-index/temple-city-dental

Santa Clarita: hollar.ai/ai-business-index/santa-clarita-dental

Every location we measured: hollar.ai/ai-business-index/la

If your practice is not on your city's page, that is worth knowing today rather than in a year. Run the free scan at hollar.ai/scan and we will show you what AI systems can actually read about you and where the gaps are.