By Hunter Kerrison, MHA, MBA-AI, CSO, HealthLinks Marketing
Winning Patients in the AI Era
Why healthcare organizations must rethink marketing, search, reputation and patient experience before AI does it for them
Sponsored Health Content
Beach week with my kids, now in their twenties, turned into a clinical case study I never signed up for. Between them and their friends, we cycled through strep throat, a mystery virus, and a scary spider bite. My instinct wasn’t to Google it. I opened Perplexity, then ChatGPT, then Google’s AI Overview: does strep need antibiotics, who needed to quarantine, was that bite a brown recluse (yikes)? We scrolled Reddit for firsthand accounts and sorted out whose insurance covered which urgent care before anyone left the house.
THE SHIFT IS ALREADY UNDERWAY
I’m not an outlier. Google’s search market share dropped below 90 percent in mid-2024, and the traffic moved. By April 2025, ChatGPT was the fifth most visited website on earth. AI Overviews went from roughly 4 percent of searches in January 2025 to about 25 percent by November, with health queries above 40 percent.
Ahrefs’ study of 300,000 keywords found the top organic result lost 58 percent of its click-through once an AI Overview appeared. Ranking well and being seen are no longer the same thing.
AI CHATTER IS ALREADY IN THE ROOM
An analysis of 30 million sources cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI tools found Reddit is the most-cited domain. Ask an AI which urgent care moves fastest or whether a plan is in network, and the answer comes from forums and reviews.
AI itself is becoming the referral source, forming its opinion of a practice from conversations you were never invited into. Practices missing from those conversations get skipped.
HOW HEALTHCARE CATCHES UP
Ask the AI platforms what they say about you. Cultivate real patient reviews instead of hoping they accumulate (reputation management is a different article; email me if you want it). Answer the plain-language questions patients actually type and show up where the conversation is.
At HealthLinks, we built a diagnostic, AI Dx and AI Rx, that scores a practice’s visibility across AI engines and forums by brand, location, physician, and service line, in patients’ own language. Our vascular client markets GAE (genicular artery embolization). Few patients search “GAE.” They search “alternatives to knee replacement” or “arthritis knee relief.” A useful scorecard speaks both languages.
We keep this AEO and GEO diagnostic separate from our agentic SEO tool because the two respond to different fixes. Goals matter too: a new location needs different work than a knee pain service line. Treating them alike is a common marketing error.
The next time someone stands in a beach house kitchen at nine at night, phone in hand, wondering if that bite needs to be seen tonight and hoping their insurance covers it, I want the answer to include you.
Send comments or questions to Hunter@HealthLinksMarketing.com.
