Physical therapy and rehab websites in 2026: what a scan shows

Headline numbers

• 66.3% of 95 domains loaded a normal homepage; the all-niche figure is 64.9% (n=10,522).
• 16.8% of 95 domains (16) did not resolve, against 16.6% across all niches. Another 8 sites put up a bot wall, which we did not count as broken.
• Visibly broken homepages: 6.3% of 95 (6 domains), against 5.5% across all niches.
• FAQPage markup is on 1.1% of 91 reachable sites, which is 1 of the group. Across all niches it is 5.6%.
• LocalBusiness-type markup: 26.4% of 91 sites, below the all-niche 35.2%. Organization markup: 35.2%.
• 4.4% of 91 sites block at least one AI crawler (4 sites), close to the all-niche 4.3%. 2 block all eight.

Do clinic sites load?

For a clinic, a dead homepage means a patient who was referred by a physician types the name, gets nothing, and calls the next practice. Here is how 95 domains fared when we requested them between 9 and 13 November 2026.

66.3% loading normally is above the all-niche 64.9%. 16.8% dead domains is close to the all-niche 16.6%. Smaller practices sometimes keep an old domain on a business card long after a new one went live; the scan cannot tell which is which.

What clinic sites tell machines

Clinic sites are mixed. 67.0% of 91 reachable homepages carry some JSON-LD, yet only 26.4% describe the clinic as a local business and almost none mark up their questions. A physical therapy page that answers 'Do I need a referral?' or 'How long is a first visit?' is a natural FAQPage candidate, as long as the answers are on the page for any visitor to read.

On the crawler side, 4 sites block GPTBot and 4 block Google-Extended; 2 block ChatGPT-User, the agent that fetches a page when a person asks about it. 27 sites (29.7%) have neither JSON-LD nor an llms.txt.

What this means for a clinic owner

Healthcare privacy rules such as HIPAA apply to patient data, not to your homepage, but they shape what a site should collect. Check with your lawyer or compliance adviser before adding any form, chat or tracking tool that handles symptoms or insurance details.

• Give each treatment area (low back pain, post-surgical rehab, dry needling, acupuncture for pain) its own page that names who it helps and what a first visit includes.
• Add MedicalBusiness or LocalBusiness-type markup and FAQPage on pages that really answer questions. Only 1 of 91 reachable sites did. The schema markup generator produces drafts you can paste in.
• State which insurers you accept, whether a referral is needed, and how to start intake. These are the first things a new patient looks for.
• Keep forms free of diagnosis details unless your vendor signs the agreements your professional body requires.
• Test the homepage monthly. With 16 of 95 domains not resolving, a lapse is common enough to guard against.

Related help: website design for healthcare and SEO for healthcare. Read the wider AI search readiness study and the research index.

Method and limits

For the AI figures we requested each homepage, robots.txt and llms.txt once on 8 November 2026 and identified ourselves truthfully. Starting from 120 physical therapy, rehab and acupuncture clinics on a US business list, 91 returned HTTP 200, and shares in the AI tables use those 91.

Homepage health rests on 95 domains and one lookup plus one request per domain, run 9 to 13 November 2026. Visibly broken means a 404 homepage, broken SSL, a server error, a parked or for-sale page, spam hijack, a default hosting page, a suspended account, a WordPress critical error or PHP errors. Bot walls (401, 403, 429) are counted separately.

We cannot tell you who AI tools cite, what traffic a site gets or where it ranks. Our samples are drawn from one US business list. A share measured on 91 sites carries a 95 percent margin of up to about 10 points (about 10 on 95 domains), so a gap of a few points against all niches is not a finding.