Whose doctor does the AI recommend? An algorithm audit of reputation and demographic signals in large language model-assisted physician choice

Abstract

Patients increasingly ask large language model (LLM) assistants which doctor to see, making these systems AI infomediaries: algorithms that intermediate one person's choice among other people and thereby decide, silently and at scale, which physicians become visible. We report a prespecified randomized algorithm audit of what causally moves those recommendations. Seven models (six open-weight; gpt-4o-mini) each chose among five synthetic family-medicine physician cards whose attributes were independently randomized across 3,024 choice sets, three patient personas, nine prompt paraphrases and nine experimental arms, yielding 40,068 scored responses; gender and ethnicity were signaled through names following correspondence-audit methodology. Reputation signals dominate: raising a rating from 3.9 to 4.7 increases choice probability by 31.4 percentage points (pp), and raising the fee from $90 to $190 lowers it by 20.0 pp. Demographic parity is rejected, but not in the direction human audit studies predict: female-signaled names gain 2.5 pp, and Hispanic-, South-Asian- and Black-signaled names gain 1.3-2.9 pp over White-signaled names, tilts worth $7-$14 per visit in fee-equivalent terms, and a content-free first-listed position is worth $11. Yet models mentioned gender or ethnicity in at most 0.03% of their stated reasons and abstained in 0.39% of trials, so these effects are invisible in the models'own explanations, and transparency obligations relying on model self-report would not detect them. One reasoning model failed the prespecified auditability gate outright. The frozen design makes the audit repeatable: any new model can be assessed against identical stimuli, making recurring behavioural audit, rather than self-reported explanation, the monitoring technology fit for purpose.