It’s safe to say that everyday use of AI tools is one of the most significant disruptors for search engines that’s ever come along. After just a few short years since ChatGPT hit the market, One-third of the U.S. population uses generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and others.

When it comes to your healthcare organization or practice, you may be worried about what that means for you and how you should update your approach to marketing.

In short:

  • AI is reshaping SEO as users begin to ask platforms other than Google informational questions and to help them research products and services. AI Overviews have fundamentally changed Google’s search results, fueling more zero click searches.
  • Overall search volume and click-throughs to websites remain stable, so organizations shouldn’t panic! Prioritize your conversions and your patient volumes as your primary marketing metric, over traffic.
  • Moving forward, healthcare marketing teams should begin to prioritize new approaches to content marketing and SEO, focusing on high-quality, original content, technical SEO and keeping their ear to the ground as trends emerge.

As a healthcare digital marketing agency, Full Media breaks down the trends below and highlights what we think is the best approach.

Jump to a section:

How is AI impacting SEO in general?

Google’s search volume has remained relatively stable despite the use of AI to answer common questions. However, Google is also integrating AI into the search results pages in the form of AI Overviews—the panels at the top of the search results that provide summaries to answer questions. These AI overviews have led “zero click searches” to increase from 56% to 69% since they were widely released in 2023.

A zero click search occurs when a person uses a search engine to look for something, then doesn’t click on to any website in the search results. For instance, searching ‘symptoms of flu’ might show a summary at the top of Google’s results, eliminating the need to click through to WebMD.

Zero click searches have been on the rise over the past decade as Google has rolled out features like Google Business listings, People Also Ask, AI overviews and more to help answer user’s questions directly in the search results, rather than requiring them to go to a website to get the information they need.

It’s important to note that the statistics on generative AI tools are primarily driven by young people. Gen Z and younger millennials are using AI tools at a higher percentage than others, with more than 50% in each group using generative AI.

Is AI hurting traffic to websites?

Google’s click volume to websites has remained stable year over year, but some industries have been impacted more than others—particularly websites that provide answers to questions. Think websites like WebMD, Wikipedia or Wall Street Journal. These websites provide information that AI tools and Google’s AI overviews scrape, them summarize into an easily digestible and specific answer to the user’s question.

In fact, news publishers have been impacted so significantly by AI scraping that Google is exploring new options to help publishers monetize their content. Putting information clearinghouses and news publishers out of business would ultimately be a poor outcome for AI tools, given that they need credible source to do research and publish it online to power the answers their tools give.

We’re already seeing some movement in that space with the New York Times and Amazon striking a licensing deal. OpenAI has also signed deals with the Washington Post, The Atlantic and other publishers.

Is AI hurting traffic to my website?

But down to the real question: is AI hurting your traffic? This is where you’ll need to look at Google Analytics, Google Search Console or any other analytics tool you use to see how your organic traffic is trending. It may be challenging to narrow down a decrease in traffic to a specific issue, but zero click searches could be hurting your traffic in a variety of ways.

  • If your Google Business listings are well-optimized and look great, they could be helping direct patients to your practice without them ever hitting your website. This may look like a decrease in homepage, location or provider page traffic, while appointments stay stable.
  • If traffic to some of your informational pages, like blogs or condition pages, is down, that could be a sign that AI overviews are eating away at traffic that previously came into your website.
  • In analytics, you can also see if traffic is coming into your website from AI tools. In Google Analytics, you’ll want to look specifically at the source / medium of your referral or unassigned traffic to see if ChatGPT or other AI tools are sending traffic your way.

If you see any of these trends in your data, it’s still important to ask yourself—does it matter?

When traffic decreases for a news publisher, it has a real-time impact on their bottom line. Eyeballs on their content and ad revenues fuel their business model. But for a healthcare provider, appointments, procedures and surgeries are how you make your money.

If your Google Business listing is performing well and reducing your organic traffic, that could still be a net positive. If your blog traffic has decreased, it’s worth looking into and optimizing for, but did your blog drive business value to begin with?

Remember that ROI is the reason you invest in marketing

Let’s get down to the real bottom line: How are your conversions doing? What about your appointments?

Website traffic is an indicator—not a core metric. Focus on metrics like conversions, appointments and surgeries to measure true marketing success.

AI is cutting primarily into informational searches more than action-based searches. This should still impact your SEO strategy because any content marketing that you’re doing to increase traffic and brand awareness will need to adapt, but the house certainly isn’t on fire.

As AI progresses, it will likely move more into the realm of action-based searches too, providing answers to questions like “what’s the best program for robotic heart surgery” or “who specializes in endometriosis near me.” Businesses that are generating leads from AI are already seeing that leads tend to be higher quality because users have already done the research!

These are behaviors you can predict and begin optimizing for now. And the good news is that, you probably already are because good SEO and what people are calling GEO (generative experience optimization) or AIO (artificial intelligence optimization) have similar principles.

Optimizing your healthcare website for AI

Don’t panic, prioritize.

As a healthcare organization, goodness knows that you have enough priorities to juggle already. Things are moving quickly in the digital realm, but you have time to adapt.

Consider your demographic and their AI adoption online—if you serve primarily Gen X and Boomers, understand that their search patterns are changing more slowly. If you serve pediatric patients, for example, AI optimization may need to be a bigger priority to reach millennial moms.

Take some time to determine what your highest, most urgent priorities are now, then decide how to fit in research and development when it comes to your SEO process. Ask your vendors how they are adapting, and if they can help advise your internal teams too.

Do great (not good) SEO.

Mediocre, recycled content just won’t cut it anymore in this new environment. Google’s AI overviews and other AI platforms are working to serve up the best answers to each question. If your content is just a repeat of WebMD, Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic’s existing pages, those other platforms will eat your lunch every day.

If a potential patient is using AI to find the best provider for their particular problem, AI is going to be looking for more than just standard content—they want to know what you do different and better.

Remember this acronym: E-E-A-T. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. That’s what you’re aiming for. You also want your content to be easy to understand, delivered in short, well-defined sections, and structured around questions, because that’s how people search and AIs work!

Layer in some extra functionality.

Your core technical SEO pieces are more important than ever. Here are some areas to consider:

  • Improve site speed: AI bots will move on if a page takes longer than 2 seconds to load.
  • Review your bot blockers: Make sure that your website isn’t set up to block all bots—you’ll have to configure your server and robots.txt to accept the AI bots and block the bad ones. High quality code will also help lower the bot’s load and make it easier to crawl the page.
  • Add structured data: Research or discuss structured data with your agency. Structured data is a type of code that helps search engines and AIs understand and easily parse the information on a page. Some tools and platforms out there can also help you roll this out on your website or at scale if you’re a large organization.
  • Improve accessibility: Beyond that, ensuring that your website is accessible for all users can help provide more information to the AI to help contextualize and understand your page. (Not to mention it helps people!)
  • Optimize Open Graph Tags: Using social media’s Open Graph Tags can help improve your appearance in Google’s AI overviews.

Stay updated & innovative.

There are a lot of different AIs out there, each with its own technology and approach to serving up answers to content.

It’s important to recognize that AIO and GEO are new fields. There will be platforms that rise to the top and platforms that sink out of existence. There will be discoveries that tell us more about how AI platforms understand and select the resources they serve as answers.

That’s why it’s critical to work with vendors who are staying in the know and staying innovative. If you insource SEO, ensure that your team has time for ongoing research and development to keep up.

Be wary of scare tactics & secret methods.

You want vendors who are innovative and well-researched but be wary of folks who peddle doomsday messaging and promise secret tactics to get ahead. These types of sales tactics are as old as the SEO industry itself. In fact, they’re probably as old as marketing is.

From black hat SEO to keyword stuffing, we’ve always had words to describe folks in the SEO industry who promise a way to hack to the system. A new term is arising now in the SEO industry called “functionality stuffing,” which describes loading up your website with all kinds of technical SEO to create artificial quality signals for AIs.

AI is just a new and far more conversational type of search engine. Providing original, high-quality information about your services, your differentiators and how to contact you is still the most important thing you can do.

Stay informed, stay strategic and partner with experts who prioritize transparency and your long-term success over vanity metrics or secret approaches.