You speak English with patients. Does ChatGPT know that too?
Your team handles international patients without a second thought. Part of your staff is bilingual, you see expats in the waiting room, and nobody's ever complained about a language barrier. Yet there's a good chance that when an English-speaking patient asks ChatGPT for "an English-speaking dentist near Rotterdam," your name doesn't come up. Not because you can't help them — because AI can't see that you can.
Two languages are two different questions
To an AI model, "tandarts Rotterdam" and "English-speaking dentist Rotterdam" aren't translations of each other. They're two separate queries drawing on two partly different pools of sources. A model answering an English question leans more heavily on English-language content: your site's English pages, your Google Business Profile description, reviews written in English, FAQ sections that use the English terms patients actually search for.
If all of that exists only in Dutch, your digital presence for that English question is thin — even if your practice itself is fully bilingual.
What our research found
We asked ChatGPT fifty times to recommend a cosmetic dentist in Amsterdam, alternating between Dutch and English. One of three patterns stood out: Dutch and English produced different answers. The set of clinics named in English regularly differed from the Dutch set. A clinic that was strong in Dutch-language sources could be thin or absent from the English answers.
That's the expat gap — measured, not assumed. Read the full research →
What AI sees in each language
Same profile, two languages, two different outcomes. Here's what that looks like in practice:
| Signal | Dutch only | Bilingual (NL + EN) |
|---|---|---|
| Website copy | Invisible to English queries | Counts for both languages |
| GBP description | Only matches Dutch searches | Counts for both |
| Reviews | Most patients write in Dutch | Ask English-speaking patients for an English review |
| FAQ / service pages | Missing English terms ("teeth whitening", "root canal") | Answers the question as it's actually asked |
None of this requires a new website or a second practice. It's the same information, written once more.
The good news
This isn't a separate strategy from your AI visibility — it's an extension of it. A complete, consistent profile, clear answer-shaped content, and real reviews are still the foundation. Do that work in two languages, and you become findable not just to your current patients, but to the group that's often most valuable for a clinic: the international patient who's currently being referred to a competitor — not because that competitor is better, but because they happen to have one English sentence on their site that you don't.
Three things you can do this week:
- Add an English FAQ section to your main services page.
- Write your Google Business Profile description in English too.
- Ask your next English-speaking patient for an English-language review.
Want to know if this affects your clinic?
We check ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok for your clinic, in both Dutch and English, and send you the scorecard. Free.
Get my free AI visibility checkFrequently asked questions
Does my whole website need to be translated into English?
No. An English version of your key pages — services, about, contact, FAQ — is enough to count as an English-language source. You don't need to duplicate every blog post.
Does it count if I just write my Google Business Profile description in English?
It helps, but isn't enough on its own. AI models weigh multiple sources together: your profile, your website, and your reviews combine to determine whether you look "complete" in a given language.
Does this also affect my regular Google ranking?
Yes — an English version of your site can also rank for English-language searches in Google itself, separate from AI answers. It's double the reach for work done once.
How do I know if this actually affects my clinic?
Ask the same question a few times in ChatGPT, in Dutch and in English, and see who gets mentioned. Or let us run it for free — see above.