How do we plan clinician profiles across a large team?

If your practice has more than a handful of clinicians, do not fill in profiles one at a time and hope for the best. Thirty minutes of planning across the whole team first will make every profile more effective, and it is the difference between a team AI search tools can recommend and a team it cannot tell apart.

The goal, in two lines: every service your clinic profile lists is claimed by at least one named clinician who has answered its short depth questions, and every clinician's profile shows the work they most want to be doing and the patient groups they most enjoy seeing. When both of those are true, you are done.

Why this matters: AI recommends people it can tell apart

AI search tools (Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity) answer patients' questions by drawing on sources they can identify and distinguish. The research on how sources get cited is clear on two points that matter for team planning:

• Broad head terms are already taken. Queries like "back pain" are saturated by hospital systems and major health institutions. A small clinic does not win there, and neither does a clinician whose profile says only "back pain". Where independent clinics and clinicians genuinely get cited is on specific, long-tail patient questions, and specific expertise is exactly what a well-planned profile expresses.
• Named, credentialled people are an advantage that costs you nothing. Among the non-institutional sources that do get cited in health, named authors, credentials and clinical review statements are a consistent pattern. Your clinicians are those credentials. A complete profile is what lets the platform put their name, registration and expertise behind everything you publish.

The practical consequence: if all nineteen of your physios list the same three things, the AI has no reason to name any one of them, and your clinic reads as generic. If each clinician owns something specific and true, you have nineteen distinct reasons to be recommended.

Step 1: start from your clinic's services, not from a blank page

Open the services section of your clinic profile first. That list is the source of truth for what the team collectively has to cover, so make sure it is current, and rank it: which services do you most want to be delivering more of? That ranking will tell you where profile depth matters most.

Then build the grid: services down the side (in that ranked order), clinicians across the top, a mark wherever a clinician genuinely delivers that service. Underneath, give each clinician two short rows of their own:

• The conditions they see most. Specific names, not categories: "rotator cuff tendinopathy", not "shoulder pain".
• The patient groups they most enjoy seeing. Postnatal mothers, adolescent dancers, runners returning from injury. Enjoyment is the right test: these are the patients the profile will bring more of.

If a clinician also offers specific treatments patients ask for by name (dry needling, shockwave, cranial work), note those too. If nothing comes to mind, skip that line entirely; do not force it. Most clinicians do not think of themselves as having signature techniques, and the conditions and patient groups carry more weight.

Fill everything in from what is true, not what sounds impressive. There is a ready-made grid you can download and fill in, with a worked example from a fictional team: the team mapping grid template (the link downloads an Excel spreadsheet straight to your computer).

Real conditions, not body parts

The single most common mistake on the conditions rows is writing body parts: back pain, neck pain, foot pain. Here is why that earns almost nothing, and what to do instead.

When someone asks an AI or a search engine a health question, they do not ask about a body part. They ask about the thing they have got: "is sciatica something a physio can fix", "how long does an ACL reconstruction take to rehab", "why does my heel hurt first thing in the morning". The AI answers by finding an expert who specifically covers that question. A profile that says "back pain" does not line up with any question anyone actually asks, and the broad terms are dominated by the NHS and major hospital sites in any case, so there is nothing there for an independent clinic to win. A profile that says sciatica, plantar fasciitis, ACL reconstruction rehab or hip osteoarthritis lines up exactly with the questions real patients type, and those are questions your practice can be the answer to.

Think of the body part as the label on a drawer: the value is what is inside it.

• "Back pain" becomes: sciatica, acute low back pain, lumbar disc injury rehab
• "Neck pain" becomes: cervicogenic headache, whiplash recovery, nerve root irritation
• "Foot pain" becomes: plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendinopathy, shin splints
• "Sports injuries" becomes: ACL reconstruction rehab, hamstring strain in sprinters, runner's knee

The strongest entries of all pair a condition with a person: "runner's knee in marathon trainers", "hip osteoarthritis in over-65s". That matches both the question and the asker, and it is what the depth questions on each condition draw out naturally.

Step 2: cover every service, and give every overlap one owner

Read the grid against the goal:

• Every service on the clinic profile needs at least one named clinician who claims it and completes its short depth questions (who they treat for it, how they approach it, what tells them it works). A service with marks but no completed depth answers is covered on paper and invisible in practice. A service with no marks at all is a gap: assign it to whoever actually does that work most, and they complete the depth answers.
• Where several clinicians deliver the same service, pick one owner: the person with the most genuine depth, who completes the depth answers for it. The others keep the entry but either reword it to their genuinely different population or approach (rotator cuff tendinopathy in overhead athletes is a different entry from rotator cuff tendinopathy in post-surgical over-60s) or leave it as a plain entry without depth answers. Nobody deletes anything they truly treat.
• Your top-ranked services deserve the deepest profiles. If the service you most want to grow is owned by the clinician with the thinnest profile, that is the first profile to invest in.

Step 3: emphasis follows appetite, not the plan

Every condition, technique and patient group entry has a rating: Boost, Normal, or Set aside. One rule before the three options: Boost shapes what work comes through the door, so it follows genuine appetite, never the plan. Ownership on the map is expressed by completing an entry's depth answers, not by Boosting it.

• Boost only the one or two things a clinician genuinely wants more of. It is fine to Boost nothing.
• Normal is right for everything they treat without special emphasis, including entries they own on the map.
• Set aside anything they treat but do not want to be found for. It stays on the profile for completeness without shaping how AI describes them.

Newly qualified clinicians: interests are enough

Early-career clinicians should not claim specialist patient groups or signature conditions they do not yet have, and they do not need to. Their profiles are built from different, equally real material:

• The conditions they see most in a general caseload. A new graduate seeing acute low back pain every day has genuine frequency, and frequency counts.
• Patient groups as interests. Who they naturally connect with and want to build depth around, stated honestly as an interest.
• Training and CPD. Their education is the most recent in the building, so their CPD section is the easiest in the clinic to fill richly, and recent training is real evidence of expertise.
• Clinical voice. The six questions about how they talk about their work. Curiosity and a fresh way of explaining things are exactly the kind of distinctive, quotable material the scoring rewards. Research on AI citation consistently finds that quotable expert statements and specific evidence lift visibility; the clinical voice answers are where those come from.
• The basics done properly. Photo, registration, memberships, professional links and the Beyond the clinic note.

That set reaches the score thresholds that matter without a single specialist claim. There is a dedicated interview guide for early-career clinicians in the editor's Downloads (clicking saves a Word document straight to your computer): a colleague runs a short guided interview about interests, training and who they connect with, and the profile is drafted from the recording.

The honesty rule

Only claim what is true. Each condition and technique carries short depth questions, and those answers appear on the public profile in the clinician's own words. Padding is exposed immediately, and the scoring rewards a specific true answer over a broad hollow one every time. The citation research says the same thing from the other direction: coverage of the specific sub-questions patients actually ask is the strongest measured predictor of being cited, and it cannot be faked with a long list of bare names. Three genuinely owned conditions with real answers beat ten empty labels.

A practical rollout for a big team

1. Check and rank the services on your clinic profile, then build the grid above in one sitting at practice level.
2. Choose a collection route per clinician. The offline profile worksheet (a Word download) for people who prefer paper or want to gather certificates first; the interview guides (early-career and experienced versions — each link downloads a Word document) for people who will not write about themselves; straight into the editor for the willing. Collection can be delegated, and the worksheet can be filled in by a colleague and uploaded.
3. Depth and voice answers come from each clinician personally, in their own words. This is the one part not to delegate, because it is what makes them distinguishable.
4. Watch the points. Every section of the editor shows "x of y points earned", so each clinician can see exactly where their remaining points sit. The voice preparation guide (Word download) is a five minute read before the clinical voice questions.
5. Review the map quarterly. People develop; a new course or a new caseload interest earns a place on the map, and the profile takes minutes to update.

The short version: do exactly this

The goal: every service on your clinic profile is claimed by at least one named clinician who has answered its depth questions, and every clinician's profile shows the work they most want to be doing and the patient groups they most enjoy seeing. Everything below just gets you there.

1. Check and rank your clinic profile's services list. It is the source of truth for what the team has to cover, ranked by what you most want to be delivering.
2. Build one grid (or download the ready-made template — an Excel spreadsheet). Services down the side in ranked order, clinicians across the top, a mark wherever someone genuinely delivers that service. Add two rows per clinician: the conditions they see most and the patient groups they most enjoy seeing. Conditions must be real named conditions, never body parts: sciatica, not back pain; plantar fasciitis, not foot pain. Named treatments patients ask for (dry needling, shockwave) go in only if they come to mind naturally; skip otherwise.
3. Cover every service. Each service needs at least one clinician who claims it and completes its short depth questions in their own words. Unclaimed service: assign it to whoever actually does that work most. Overlapping claims: one owner completes the depth answers; the others reword theirs to a genuinely different population or approach, or keep a plain entry. Nobody deletes anything they truly treat.
4. Use Boost only for genuine appetite. Boost tells the AI to send that clinician more of that work, so it is reserved for the one or two things each person actually wants more of. Never Boost because the plan assigned it; Boosting nothing is fine.
5. Newly qualified clinicians skip specialist claims entirely. They fill in the conditions they see most in their general caseload, patient groups worded as interests, their recent training and CPD, the clinical voice questions and the basics. That is a complete profile.
6. Each clinician answers their own depth and clinical voice questions, in their own words. Everything else can be delegated or collected by a colleague; this part cannot, because it is what makes them distinguishable.