An off-site citation map for AI patient-discovery, built from 33,340 ChatGPT citation events across 200 NPI-stratified practices, 20 metros, and 10 specialties. The vendor pitch ranks national directories first. The data ranks them fourth.
There is no off-site playbook. There is your specialty's off-site playbook in your metro, and most of what an outside vendor would sell you isn't on it. The biggest off-site citation lanes are largely unmanaged, mostly free, and almost never sold as a service.
Where the 33,340 citation events actually land. Hospital systems, practice-owned domains, and specialty associations together carry 72.6%. National directories – the standard vendor pitch – are fourth at 8.3%. Pick a specialty to see how the map reshapes.
| # | Source bucket | Cites | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hospital systems + AMC staff rosters | 9,161 | 27.48% |
| 2 | Practice-owned domains | 7,684 | 23.05% |
| 3 | Specialty associations + credentialing | 7,363 | 22.08% |
| 4 | National medical directories | 2,777 | 8.33% |
| 5 | State medical boards | 1,706 | 5.12% |
| 6 | Review aggregators | 1,275 | 3.82% |
| 7 | Federal authority (NIH, CDC, FDA) | 1,087 | 3.26% |
| 8 | Regional city magazines | 886 | 2.66% |
| 9 | Ranking aggregators (Newsweek, MediFind) | 755 | 2.26% |
| 10 | Lab + imaging chain locators | 432 | 1.30% |
| 11 | Other (Castle Connolly, news, misc) | 214 | 0.64% |
Hospital-system staff rosters and specialty-association credentialing pages together carry 49.6%. National directories carry only 8.3% – and most practices have two or three vendors there.
Get providers added to the staff rosters of the hospital systems you affiliate with before renewing another directory subscription.
Plastic surgery: specialty-association credentialing at 30.1%. Cardiology: hospital systems at 33.4%.
Filter the map above by your specialty before deciding which lanes to invest in. The all-specialties mean is the wrong target for any single cell.
Review aggregators are 3.8% combined, Yelp is 0.11%, and Google Business Profile has zero direct citations.
Reviews and GBP aren't citation lanes – they're conversion lanes. Don't cut the budget for one to fund the other.
Exploratory secondary analysis of an existing corpus, single-platform (ChatGPT), cross-sectional, US-only. Source-type buckets were generated by a deterministic Python classifier on May 21, 2026 – the previous "practice-or-other" residual was split into clean buckets using deterministic rules plus Claude Code subagent classification of the long tail. No causal claims; all numbers are descriptive citation-share data. Full methodology and pre-registered hypothesis verdicts available on request.
The analysis lives in MGMA Connection – including the magazine-pipeline geography (which eight metros carry it, which five have no pipeline) and the three on-Monday moves administrators can run themselves. Read the full article in MGMA Connection →
Run a free scan to see your A–F visibility grade and how often ChatGPT cites your practice.