The fundamentals of healthcare marketing haven’t changed: patients need to discover you, trust you, and choose you. What’s changing is where those discovery moments happen. For years, Google Search has been the primary battleground, and the work organizations have done building review profiles and optimizing listings has created real competitive advantages. But patient search behavior is evolving. Alongside traditional Google searches, patients are increasingly asking AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for direct provider recommendations.
The shift is happening faster than most healthcare leaders realize. According to a recent report, 79% of U.S. adults say they’re likely to look online for answers to health questions, and 75% of those who search say AI-generated responses provide them with the answer they need at least sometimes. More significantly, 70% of patients are open to AI tools for researching physicians, with one-third trusting AI search outcomes as much as traditional search engines and almost one in five trusting AI more.
This represents the most significant change in patient discovery behavior since the rise of online reviews. The problem is, most healthcare organizations feel unprepared for it. While patients are changing how they search, healthcare organizations are still optimizing for the old playbook.
How AI Search Is Different (And Why It Matters)
When a patient searches Google for “best cardiologist near me,” they get a list of results. Ten blue links. Paid ads at the top. Map listings. Review snippets. The patient then has to click through multiple websites, read reviews, compare credentials, and piece together enough information to make a decision.
When that same patient asks ChatGPT or Gemini, “Who’s the best cardiologist in Denver for heart valve issues?” they get a direct answer. The AI synthesizes information from multiple sources and provides specific recommendations, often with reasoning about why those providers might be good fits.
This is a completely different experience. Google requires patients to evaluate options. AI tools make recommendations. Google surfaces information. AI tools provide guidance.
The implications for patient acquisition are important. In the traditional search model, being visible matters most. The goal is to show up on page one, get clicks, and convert some percentage of those clicks into appointments. In the AI search model, being recommended is what matters. If an AI tool doesn’t mention your organization when patients ask for provider recommendations, you’re invisible regardless of your Google ranking.
Search engine optimization has always been a volume game where you try to capture as much search traffic as possible and optimize conversion rates. AI search optimization is a relevance and authority game where you need to be the answer that AI tools provide when patients ask questions in your specialty areas.
The Adoption Numbers Marketing Leaders Can’t Ignore
Around 58% of consumers are using generative AI for product and service recommendations in 2025, up from just 25% in 2023. That’s a 133% increase in two years. If that trajectory continues, AI search will become the dominant discovery method for healthcare services within the next few years.
The age demographics might surprise you. While younger patients were early adopters, AI search usage is spreading across all age groups. Even patients over 65, traditionally the slowest to adopt new technologies, are beginning to use AI tools for health information. Medicare patients are asking ChatGPT which specialists accept their insurance. They’re using AI to understand treatment options before talking to their doctors.
What makes this particularly challenging for healthcare organizations is that the shift is happening unevenly across specialties and service lines. Some medical categories are seeing rapid AI search adoption while others remain primarily Google-based. Organizations need to understand where their specific patient populations are in this transition and optimize accordingly.
What Makes You Visible (or Invisible) to AI Search
AI search engines don’t rank websites the way Google does. They synthesize information from multiple sources to generate direct answers. When a patient asks ChatGPT “Who’s the best cardiologist in Denver for valve issues?” the AI isn’t ranking your website – it’s evaluating whether it has enough credible, structured information about your cardiologists to confidently recommend them.
This changes what matters for discoverability. Traditional SEO factors like keywords, backlinks, and page speed still matter for Google, but they’re only part of what determines whether AI tools recommend your organization. What AI search engines prioritize is different, and understanding those priorities is what separates organizations that get recommended from those that don’t.
Structured data is critical
AI tools need provider profiles with clear, easily parsed information: specialties, conditions treated, procedures performed, locations, and insurance accepted. If your provider data is buried in unstructured paragraphs or incomplete profiles, AI tools can’t extract what they need to make recommendations. It’s not that your information is wrong; it’s that AI can’t easily understand and use it.
Patient reviews carry more weight than ever
When patients ask for the “best” provider for a specific condition, AI tools heavily prioritize patient experience data. This is where organizations with comprehensive, verified review profiles have substantial advantages. AI engines want to see consistent patterns of positive patient experiences tied to specific providers, not just organizational reputation. A cardiologist with 200 recent reviews about their bedside manner and treatment outcomes is far more recommendable than one with 15 reviews from three years ago, even if both are excellent physicians.
Consistency across platforms matters in ways it didn’t before
Google might overlook minor discrepancies in your provider information across different platforms. AI tools don’t. If Dr. Smith’s subspecialty is listed differently on your website versus your provider directory versus insurance listings, AI engines struggle to determine which information is accurate. That uncertainty reduces confidence in recommendations. It’s not enough to have good information in one place–it needs to be consistent everywhere patients might discover you.
Recency signals quality and relevance
Outdated information tells AI engines that a provider may no longer be active or that your data quality is questionable. Regular updates to provider profiles, ongoing patient feedback collection, and current information about services and availability all contribute to recommendation likelihood. Organizations treating their online presence as “set it and forget it” are becoming invisible to AI search, while those maintaining active, current information are getting recommended.
Why Most Organizations Aren’t Ready
The challenge isn’t technological complexity. It’s that provider data typically lives in disconnected systems across the organization. Marketing manages the website. IT maintains the provider directory. Credentialing keeps physician information in a separate database. Patient experience tracks reviews in yet another platform.
This fragmentation creates the inconsistencies that undermine AI search visibility. A cardiologist’s subspecialty might be listed differently across four platforms. Insurance acceptance information might be current on the website but outdated in the provider directory. Patient reviews might exist on third-party platforms but not be connected to official provider profiles.
Right now, most healthcare organizations aren’t optimizing for AI search, which creates a significant opportunity for those that act quickly. In traditional SEO, gaining market share requires outranking competitors who have spent years building domain authority. In AI search, the playing field is more level because most organizations are starting from the same place. The organizations that build unified systems for managing provider data in the next 12 months will establish positions that become increasingly difficult for competitors to overcome as AI search adoption accelerates.
What This Actually Requires
Optimizing for AI search doesn’t require a complete digital transformation or massive technology investments. It requires taking existing reputation management capabilities and using them more strategically with an understanding of how AI tools evaluate provider recommendations.
Start with an audit
Review your provider data across all platforms where patients might discover you: your website, health system directories, insurance provider lists, Google Business Profiles, and major review platforms. Document where information is inconsistent, incomplete, or outdated. These inconsistencies are exactly what undermine AI search visibility.
Establish a single source of truth
Build processes for maintaining data accuracy across platforms. This often means creating one authoritative provider database and implementing systems that automatically update all external platforms when that core data changes. Manual updates across multiple platforms inevitably lead to inconsistencies that reduce AI recommendation confidence.
Prioritize provider-specific reviews
AI search tools need patient experience data tied to specific providers to make confident recommendations. Organizational reputation matters, but AI tools want to know whether Dr. Smith specifically is good at treating the condition the patient is asking about. Focus on collecting comprehensive, detailed feedback that goes beyond simple star ratings.
Structure profiles for AI consumption
Ensure your provider profiles include clear specialty designations, conditions treated, procedures performed, locations, insurance acceptance, and patient experience data. This is the information AI engines need to confidently recommend your providers when patients ask relevant questions.
Monitor your AI presence
Test queries that patients in your market might ask and see whether your providers get recommended. This creates a baseline for measuring whether optimization efforts are working and reveals gaps where competitors are getting recommended instead of you.
The Marketing Implications
AI search changes how healthcare marketing budgets should be allocated. Traditional digital marketing focused on driving traffic to websites and optimizing conversion funnels. AI search focuses on being the answer rather than being a destination.
This doesn’t mean website optimization and conversion rate improvement stop mattering. Patients who receive AI recommendations still need to book appointments, and that conversion process still requires effective digital experiences. But the top of the funnel shifts from volume-based traffic generation to authority-based recommendation optimization.
Marketing leaders need to think about share of AI recommendations the way they’ve traditionally thought about search engine result page positions. Being the first recommendation when patients ask AI tools about your key service lines becomes more valuable than ranking first in Google for broad search terms.
This also affects how patient acquisition costs should be calculated. In traditional digital marketing, you can measure cost per click, cost per lead, and cost per appointment with relative precision. In AI search optimization, the investment is in building and maintaining the data infrastructure that makes you recommendable rather than paying for each individual discovery event. Organizations used to calculating marketing ROI based on campaign-specific performance metrics will need frameworks that account for the sustained value of being consistently recommended by AI tools across thousands of patient queries.
What Success Looks Like
Healthcare organizations winning in AI search optimization share certain characteristics. They have established clear ownership of provider data accuracy – someone is accountable for ensuring information is current, complete, and consistent everywhere it appears. They’ve built systems that automatically propagate updates across all platforms rather than relying on manual processes that create inconsistencies. They’ve implemented comprehensive patient feedback collection tied to specific providers with detail beyond star ratings. And they’re monitoring their presence in AI-generated responses to identify gaps and drive continuous improvement.
Most importantly, they’re treating AI search optimization as a sustained strategic initiative rather than a one-time project. The organizations that will dominate AI recommendations are those maintaining data quality and reputation infrastructure over time.
The Bottom Line
AI search is reshaping patient discovery right now. The infrastructure most organizations need already exists in their reputation management systems—it just needs to be structured, consistent, and current in ways AI tools can parse and cite. The gap between organizations that understand this shift and those still focused solely on traditional search will only widen as adoption accelerates.
