Dil Phagura
The same call has come in enough times that I can usually guess the first sentence. A physician searches their own name, often after a patient says something in an exam room, and finds a rating profile they never built sitting above the website their practice paid for. By the second or third sentence they have asked whether the profile can be taken down.
I have been doing this work for twelve years and that conversation has not changed much. What has changed is how reliably it ends the same way. The removal question takes about a minute to answer honestly, and the question underneath it takes the rest of the year.
What physicians find when they search their own name
The result set is more predictable for physicians than for almost any other profession I work with. Two or three rating profiles, a group bio written by someone in marketing, an insurance network listing, and then the physician website below all of it.
What surprises people is how little of that they have ever touched. The rating profiles were built from public licensing and claims data without anyone being asked. The group bio went through a template and a committee, and the insurance listing still carries an address the physician left in 2019.
There is a structural reason those pages sit where they do, and it is worth knowing once and then setting aside. Profile pages on large sites inherit authority from tens of thousands of sibling pages, they carry structured data a search engine can read without guessing, and many have existed longer than the physician website.
That is background. The question worth spending a year on is what a physician can put into the result set that will eventually hold a position of its own.
The tell that predicts which case a physician is in
I ask two questions in the first ten minutes, and the answers predict the next two years better than anything on the first screen.
The first is what the physician has published under their own name in the last two years. Not what the practice published, and not what a marketing agency wrote in the third person. Anything the physician actually produced, including a patient education page they wrote themselves, a talk they gave that was recorded, a comment in a trade publication, a chapter nobody read.
The second is how reviews arrive. Weekly in ones and twos, or in bursts after someone decides it is time to do something about the ratings. The difference is visible in the dates and it tells me whether review collection is part of how the practice runs or a project that gets started and abandoned.
A physician who answers the first question with nothing and the second with bursts is in a worse position than their first screen suggests. A physician with two years of small, unglamorous output and a steady trickle of reviews is in a better position than theirs, even if the page one screenshot looks identical. Advisors working inside a firm review queue hit the same shortage of their own material from the other direction, which is some comfort and no help at all.
Two physicians with the same first screen and different second years
Two situations from the same period, specialties close enough that the comparison holds. Both arrived with a rating profile above their own site and an average score they were unhappy about. Both signed up for what was effectively the same plan.
The first physician treated it as a project with an end date. The website was rebuilt properly, which took three months and looked far better afterward. Review requests went out to a list of past patients, about two hundred of them, and roughly thirty people responded over five weeks.
Eighteen months later the rating profile still held the top position and the rebuilt site had moved up one place. The score had improved and then drifted back toward where it started, because the thirty reviews aged and nothing replaced them.
A physician with a plain website and a steady review flow is in better shape than a physician with a beautiful website and none.
The second physician did something less impressive and more useful. The website stayed ugly for another year. What changed was that the front desk began asking every patient at checkout, which produced four or five reviews a week rather than thirty in a month, and the physician wrote one short page a month about a question patients actually asked in clinic.
Twelve of those pages existed by the end of the first year. None of them individually did anything. Together they gave the search engine a reason to treat the physician website as a thing about that physician rather than a brochure, and by month twenty the site was above two of the three rating profiles.
What actually separated them
Budget did not separate them, and neither did the quality of the rebuild. The variable was whether the work was a build or a supply.
A build finishes and starts aging on the day it ships. A supply keeps arriving, which is the only thing either search engines or answer engines have ever rewarded over a period measured in years.
That distinction decides almost every physician case I see, and I would rather start with a plain site and a working checkout habit than with a rebuild and a quiet front desk.
Supply is also less work than it sounds, which is the part physicians tend not to believe. One page a month is an hour of dictation and an hour of cleanup, and the questions already arrive in clinic every week. The practices that fail at this rarely fail on capacity, they fail because nobody owns the task once the first enthusiasm is spent.
How much review volume actually moves
Review volume is the one lever in this field that works for physicians at scale, and it is slow enough that most practices quit before it pays. A profile carrying forty reviews from four years ago behaves very differently from one carrying forty reviews from the last eight months, and closing that gap is a matter of quarters rather than weeks.
It also has to be done inside the rules, which are narrower than most practices assume. Platforms set out what is permitted when you ask patients for reviews, and selective asking, incentives and bulk collection at a kiosk all fall outside it. Getting this wrong is worse than doing nothing, because the penalty arrives later and takes the legitimate reviews with it.
Responding is where physicians carry a risk nobody else on my client list does. A reply that confirms someone was a patient has disclosed information that was not yours to disclose, and the professional standards for a physician speaking publicly about clinical matters apply to a review box exactly as they apply anywhere else. The safe reply is short, says nothing about any individual, and invites the conversation offline.
The other thing worth knowing is that the score matters less than practices expect and the recency matters more. A profile at 4.3 with reviews from this quarter reads as a working practice, and a profile at 4.8 whose newest review is from 2023 reads as a practice that stopped paying attention.
Here is what I cannot do, and it comes up on every one of these calls. I cannot make a physician page worth ranking if there is nothing behind it. If the physician has nothing to say about their own field, the site will stay a brochure however it is built, and a brochure loses to a profile page with ten thousand siblings every time.
When this pattern does not hold
The pattern breaks for employed physicians whose group owns the web property. If the hospital owns the domain, controls the bio, and feeds the directory listings, then the physician cannot supply anything to the asset that would rank, because the asset is not theirs. I have watched people spend a year trying to improve a page they have no ability to edit.
In that case the work moves off the group domain entirely, to material the physician owns personally and keeps after they leave. It is slower, it looks less relevant for the first six months, and it is the only version that survives a change of employer. Whether a particular contract permits any of it is a question for a lawyer who has read the contract, not for me.
The physicians who come out of this well are rarely the ones who were most upset at the start. They are the ones who found something small they could keep doing after the urgency wore off.
Dil Phagura is the Co-Founder and CEO of AI Reputation. Connect on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/dilphagura
