Comparative Assessment of AI Chatbot Responses to Parental Questions on Pediatric Dental Anxiety and Behavior Guidance: Accuracy, Reliability, Readability, and Day-to-Day Consistency

Background/Objectives: The performance of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots in providing information to parents about pediatric dental anxiety and behavior guidance remains insufficiently established. This study compared four AI chatbots regarding accuracy, overall quality, reliability, readability, and day-to-day consistency. Methods: Twenty frequently asked parental questions were submitted to ChatGPT-5.6 Luna, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Claude Sonnet 5.5, and Grok 4.5 over three consecutive days, generating 240 responses. Two blinded pediatric dentists independently evaluated accuracy using a five-point Likert scale, overall quality using the Global Quality Scale (GQS), and reliability using modified DISCERN (mDISCERN). Readability was assessed using the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), and day-to-day semantic consistency using Sentence-BERT. Model comparisons were performed using the Friedman test with Holm-adjusted pairwise comparisons. Results: Significant differences were identified among chatbots in accuracy, reliability, and readability (all p < 0.001). Accuracy was generally high across models (median 4.5–5), although Gemini demonstrated significantly lower accuracy than ChatGPT and Grok. Reliability remained limited (median mDISCERN scores: 1.00–3.00/5), particularly regarding source transparency. Claude demonstrated the highest readability (median FRES: 71.90), whereas Grok had the lowest (47.47). No significant differences were observed in overall quality (p = 0.051) or day-to-day semantic consistency (p = 0.602). Conclusions: Although AI chatbots generally provided accurate and semantically consistent responses, limitations in reliability and readability were evident. These findings support their potential use as supplementary parental education tools while emphasizing the importance of source transparency, accessible language, and individualized counseling by pediatric dentists.