How Patients Find (and Trust) Health Info

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. Today, I’m very excited to be here to chat with you about how patients actually find and trust health information today. So your patients aren’t Googling you and landing on your site anymore.

That foundation has shifted beneath us. And as marketers, especially tech savvy marketers, we’ve really seen this coming. But the moment that we all have been kind of fearfully anticipating is officially here. Instead, what patients are doing, instead of going directly to your site, is they’re asking AI, and what AI serves up is increasingly educational, not promotional. So as you’re developing marketing strategies and thinking about resource allocation, the shift really needs to go towards creating educational and helpful content for patients that then AI will want to quote to make sure that you’re showing up in the search results.

So let’s dig into this. Let’s first start by talking a little bit about the AI search shift. And this is happening fast, folks. If you are not an adopter of AI, you may not understand how quickly this is happening. But at this point, AI Overviews within, say, Google search results, 88% of health care related queries now have an AI Overview included in the search result.

It’s at the very top of the page. It’s the first thing that folks see after they do their search; organic click-throughs drop more than 50% when one of these shows. And at this point, health care site referral traffic from Google is down about 35% year over year. Huge drop in referrals. Folks no longer have to go to your website to get their question answered.

Things are changing. That isn’t how the patient journey happens anymore. And if you are not yet one of those people, just know that a lot of other people are those people that are using these tools to try to answer high level health questions. Right now, the most recent statistics say that 1 in 4 adults have used AI tools for health information, and about 40% of patients now use AI directly to research providers.

So when you’re thinking about content creation, one of the first things you need to understand is when and how are these AI overviews are triggered in Google search results? The answer is whenever it’s longer, more specific, or think like a researchery query, right? Somebody trying to ask something, figure something out on their own and they want to get the answer quickly.

So they show for those queries 74% of the time, compared to 36% of the time for a short query. So for example, if they say “dermatologist near me,” that result is likely going to be unaffected for now. As of what is this, August 2026? Compared to “how do I, how can I tell if a mole on my arm is potentially cancerous?”

Right. That is likely to trigger, much more likely to trigger, an AI overview then if somebody is specifically trying to find something. So but the upshot, the goal, then shifts from being from getting a good ranking, a top three ranking in search to being cited. And that’s where answer engine optimization, or AEO, also called GEO, really comes into play.

So, what is that and how does it work? We’ve had a few episodes that really dug into the technical details about how GEO and AEO work, but as a marketer, what you really want to be thinking about is creating content for your website that is really helpful to patients. Help answer their questions. One of the things that has been difficult for marketers for a long time is kind of walking that line of, do we put resources into the top of the funnel, where it’s broad queries that are answering questions and likely will be served to a lot of folks outside of our service area, or do we focus on more specific ones that are

geographically related and perhaps more promotional in an attempt to be able to drive traffic? Well, with the shift of AI overviews, the answer really is both. You certainly do not want to stop those optimizations that will get you to rank for phrases like “dermatologists near me.” But more and more patients are now researching a lot of their symptoms or potential solutions or what providers they should be seeing before they’re actually looking for that exact provider.

So as you’re developing your strategy, really keeping the EEAT model in mind (where it’s experience, expertise, authority (authoritativeness) and trustworthiness), it’s really the standard for AI in Google of how they rate, and evaluate health content. So think real clinician involvement, cited sources and dated reviews. Those are three components that are really important as your content is being indexed and cited for showing up in these AI overviews, or as an answer in an AI tool.

So this really lines up also with what patients already respond to, right? This isn’t anything new. We’ve been creating this content for more than a decade. Most of us. Right. And historically, educational posts always get 2 to 3 times more engagement than promotional posts and patients who engage with this content are also 60% more likely to book and 40% more likely to refer others.

So definitely have the business case in place to be able to invest dollars into creating this educational content. And also, it’s important to keep in mind that in general, content marketing is a lot less expensive than traditional advertising. So it’s up to you and your marketing leadership to be able to create a budget that allows you to properly allocate resources between the two.

So let’s close it out and talk about what to actually do about it. First recommendation is actually, if you’re already doing content creation, go and audit your last quarter of content and ask yourself, what is the percentage here, is why you should choose us versus here’s something useful to know, right? Because the here’s something useful to know is what’s going to get you cited in AI overviews.

So with that in mind, start creating content that is structured around real patient questions. So clear direct answers up top not buried. Lead with the answer. Don’t bury it four paragraphs down. AD schema markup so AI systems can parse and understand your content appropriately. Get clinicians visibly credited, meaning buy lines and review stamps is both a trust signal and an AI citation signal.

So you really want to make sure that you’re helping all of the AI tools understand, hey, this is credible information. A doc signed off on this or a clinician signed off on this and it’s recent, because recency is really important when rankings and mentions come into play. And on that note, make sure that you keep your stats and clinical information current. AI drops outdated sources fast.

So if you have stats or sources on your website, set a monthly or at maximum quarterly reminder to go back through and look at all of those things that are cited and update all of them appropriately, because recency definitely is a big factor in showing up in these AI overviews. So again, you conceptually understand as a marketer that this is happening, right?

But sometimes it can be really helpful to be able to see the numbers and get some really clear guidance on what to be focusing on for content creation. So again, we’re going to answer the question around “how can I tell if this mole is cancerous?” while also making sure the schema and information is there for queries like “dermatologists near me”.

Right?  We’re trying to do both at the same time. So thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope this was a useful episode and got you thinking a little bit about how to make your content, strategy, and production process more useful internally to be able to leverage it across multiple platforms. Thanks for tuning in today. Please share this episode with a colleague who may find it valuable, and we’ll see you next week on a new episode of We Are Marketing, Happy. Cheers!