Background
Dr. Jacob Hattenbach runs a private practice in Santa Monica and Marina del Rey focused on non-surgical spine care and precision-guided injections. He’s excellent at what he does, and as far as AI was concerned that was a well-kept secret. His site launched in late 2025, and when ChatRank first measured how often he came up in AI answers, he was essentially absent from the questions his future patients were asking.
What changed underneath him is how people look for a doctor. Someone whose back pain hasn’t improved after three months of physical therapy used to open a browser and click through a page of results. Now they ask ChatGPT who does epidural steroid injections in West LA and they call whoever the answer names. If you’re not in that answer, you never hear from them, and you have no idea you missed them.
Like most physicians in private practice, he had no marketing department to hand this to. He had patients to see.
What he did
ChatRank showed him which questions people in his area were actually putting to AI assistants, and which ones his practice had a real shot at owning. From there he picked the topics he knew best and used ChatRank to draft the articles, reviewing each one so the clinical detail was right before it went live.
The whole thing takes him a couple of hours a month. He does it between clinic days. Every article names the procedure, names the neighborhood, and answers the question in the first couple of sentences with the specifics a model needs before it will recommend somebody by name: fellowship trained, fluoroscopy guided, takes insurance, has appointments this week. ChatRank handles the part that’s genuinely hard, which is knowing what to write and how an answer engine decides who to trust. He brings the medicine.
What happened
Dr. Hattenbach now shows up across a growing share of the questions ChatRank tracks for him, including people searching for epidural steroid injections in West LA, PRP therapy for joint pain, and same-week consultations for spine and joint pain in Santa Monica. Most of those citations come from the blog posts he published rather than his homepage or service pages, which tells you the content is what’s doing the work.
The part that matters
In his words: “New patients started telling me they found me through ChatGPT. That had never happened before.”
That’s the whole reason to do this. Every one of those appointments is revenue his practice didn’t have before, from a patient who would have gone somewhere else if the AI had said a different name. For a private practice where a handful of new patients a month moves the needle, it adds up quickly.
Why it works
A solo practice can’t outspend a hospital system on advertising and doesn’t need to. What it can do is give a better answer to one specific question than anybody else, in a form a language model can quote. Dr. Hattenbach already had the expertise. ChatRank made it easy for him to get that expertise in front of AI without hiring anybody or giving up his evenings.
If you’re a physician reading this and wondering where you’d find the time, that’s the honest answer. A couple of hours a month is what it took.