How Healthcare Marketers Can Win in the Era of AI Overviews

The introduction of AI Overviews (previously known as SGE) marks a significant shift in how patients and consumers find information online.

Healthcare queries received AI generated answers 90% of the time during the year SGE was in beta – significantly higher than other sectors — and this trend is only growing. As a healthcare marketer, you'll need to reimagine your digital strategy to help Google — and other AI models in the future — accurately answer questions about your healthcare organization.

Adapting to the evolving search landscape requires an approach that blends traditional SEO with innovative strategies to make sure your organization shows up when patients need you most.

Here are three ways to set your organization up for success with AI Overviews.

Content is key for two reasons: 1. It helps Google to "read" your site — and then surface information about your healthcare organization in an AI Overview. 2. It gives patients the robust information they need to make an informed decision about their care.

Let's break these two principles down.

First: to make it easy for search engines — and the AI models that underlie them — to find and surface information about your organization,you need a strong data foundation.

That means engaging in data best practices like:

• Regularly updating your content (everywhere): Having up-to-date, accurate content across your listings and your website is key. Search engines are more likely to trust information — surface it in a generated answer — if it is both recent and consistent across every channel where your organization appears.

• Interlinking your pages: This helps patients to navigate between related topics — and helps search engines understand the relationship between pages. For healthcare marketers, this can look like linking "conditions" on a physician bio page to show that a particular provider, at a particular location, treats those conditions (and give further information). By doing this, you're providing Google with clear signals about what your healthcare organization can offer, enhancing your visibility in AI-generated results.

• Prioritizing schema markup: AI-led models rely on knowledge graphs to understand and organize data. That's why the schema markup on your pages serves as another important signal for these technologies: it's seen as more definitive for services crawling your site. (It lets search engines and AI models can "know" that something you have marked up as the office address is the office address, for example.)

Second: your content needs to be valuable to your patients and give them the opportunity to convert. (At the end of the day, having properly marked-up pages means little if your information isn't readable and useful for patients.)

This means distilling clinical information into terms patients actually understand. It also means treating each of your pages as a conversion opportunity. When patients and consumers arrive on your site, do everything you can to make it easy for them to learn about the relevant condition, the providers who treat it, and then to book an appointment — all on one page.

In the evolving search landscape, search algorithms (specifically Google) look at E-E-A-T signals: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Your strategy should prioritize these elements when you create content for your website (and for third-party sites, too).

So, how do you do that? It starts with creating a high-quality site that actually serves patient needs. As you start to think about the basics of your SEO strategy, think about it through the lens of a patient. Is your site making it easy for them to learn about your providers? Are they able to get their questions about their condition? Can they book an appointment? By optimizing for an intuitive experience — and delivering robust, helpful content — you'll naturally reap the SEO benefits that help your organization be surfaced as part of an AI Overview.

Google (and other AI models) have indicated that they pulling from Google Business Profiles, reviews, website content, and various smaller, third-party publishers to source AI-generated answers. This means you need a robust listings and review management strategy.

Making sure your healthcare organization's listings are consistent and up-to-date across a wide network of websites helps establish your credibility— so AI Overviews feels confident in using you as a source.

Additionally, AI is summarizing your reviews as part of crafting generated answers — taking the burden off of searches to read through multiple reviews. By addressing positive and negative reviews, you show you are committed to listening to and optimizing the patient experience.

While AI Overviews presents new challenges for healthcare organizations, it's also a great opportunity for healthcare marketers to reimagine their digital strategy. Creating a compelling content strategy, going back to basics of SEO, and prioritizing your listings and review management strategy will position you for success in an evolving search landscape.

Want more on AI Overviews impact on the healthcare industry? Catch our virtual eventwith Johns Hopkins Medicine and Phase2, where we dive deeper into the strategies outlined above.