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This article was written for Greystone.Net by Jessica Levco, a freelance healthcare writer and event strategist.
For years, this is how many visitors found your hospital online: search Google, click a link, land on your website, maybe book an appointment. Healthcare marketers built entire strategies around that funnel. Keywords, click-throughs, bounce rates — oh my! But now, because of AI, that funnel is broken.
During a recent Backstage Pass webinar with Mike Schneider, Executive Vice President and Principal of Greystone.Net; Erin Mullen, Enterprise Content Strategy Manager at Franciscan Health; and Jim Watson, Chief Revenue Officer at Gumshoe AI, the trio talked about how AI search is changing healthcare marketing and what organizations need to do to stay relevant. Aby Varma, Founder and Principal of Spark Novus, moderated the conversation.
Let’s look at the data
gSightSM, a digital analytics platform, provides instant feedback on how website visitors find, interact and feel about a website through a standardized survey. The online dashboard features instant visitor experience reactions, areas for improvement, specific KPI performance and verbatim comments. The platform was developed in collaboration between Greystone.net and Klein & Partners.
For the past decade, it has collected more than 400,000 completed survey responses from website visitors. One of the questions asks visitors to identify why they came to the site: current patient, potential patient, caregiver, job seeker or “just looking.”
The “just looking” category is the one that hospital marketers need to pay attention to, Schneider says.
“Those folks haven’t made a commitment to you yet, but they’ve got something they’re looking for,” Schneider says. “Maybe they’ve had a pain in their arm that has been bothering them for a long time, but they’re not ready to become a patient. Instead, they’re looking for information to see how worried they should be about the pain.”
For nine years, the “just looking” category held steady at around 16-17% of all visitors. But then, AI entered the search game. In that last year, the “just looking” dropped down to about 7% of visitors.
“That’s a big chunk of people who used to come to your website to research health information are no longer coming at all,” Schneider says. “They’re getting their answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity and never clicking through to you.”
You don’t want to lose top of funnel visitors
Top of funnel visitors are the ones healthcare marketers have traditionally nurtured: the undecided, the researchers, the people who came to learn and left with a stronger sense of your brand. Losing them means losing the opportunity to shape the earliest stages of patient decision-making, Schneider says.
The consumer research backs this up. Greystone partnered with Klein & Partners and Aha Media Group, LLC on a national study that asked consumers about their AI search behavior. The survey showed 38% of consumers said they have already made a healthcare decision based on an answer from an AI tool or AI overview.
Gumshoe AI helps brands understand how they show up when patients ask LLMs questions. Visitors who do make it to your website from AI tools tend to arrive with higher intent because they’ve done their research and were recommended to you. Watson says conversion rates for these visitors can run anywhere from two to twenty times higher than traditional organic traffic. But you can only capitalize on these types of visitors if AI is recommending you in the first place.
How AI sees your hospital’s website
Watson walked attendees through a live look at Gumshoe AI’s platform. The platform works by building synthetic patient personas. Then, it simulates thousands of conversations with LLMs to track which brands get recommended, how often and for what topics.
“One of the big differences between traditional search and AI search is that AI search has context and memory, and it builds a profile on each of us,” Watson says. “If the four of us on the panel were to go and ask the same prompt to ChatGPT, we’re likely to get different answers.”
Next, Mullen talked about what AI content adaptation looks like in practice. Recently, Franciscan Health had a concussion campaign that was picked up and cited by ChatGPT, but the campaign’s call to action directed patients to fill out an appointment request form with a standard 48-hour response window.
“What ChatGPT did was, when people were asking, ‘Hey, I might have a concussion, what should I do?,’ it would say, ‘Franciscan Health says that you should request an appointment and wait 48 hours for someone to get back to you,’” Mullen says. “You wouldn’t want somebody who potentially has a concussion to fill out a form that was going to take two business days to get back to.”
Once the team understood how the content was being surfaced and interpreted, they were able to fix it. Mullen stressed the importance of monitoring how AI represents you; not just whether it mentions you.
Mullen also shared a recent AI win. After investing heavily in content for a new cancer center in Lafayette, Indiana, a market where Franciscan hadn’t historically been seen as a cancer care destination, the results shifted.
“If you search ‘where’s the best place to get cancer care in Lafayette, Indiana’ in Claude, it will tell you that Franciscan Health is the best, most recommended place to get cancer care,” Mullen says. “There is a direct impact in making sure you have the right content for AI.”
Your website’s future
So, if your patients are getting answers from AI without ever visiting your site, does your website still matter?
“I don't think it’s going away soon in any way,” Schneider says. “And if anything, it’s becoming the most important catalyst for generating transactions and interactions with consumers. AI now moves consumers further down the funnel to the action steps on your website.”
Remember that the middle and bottom of the funnel still live on your website. Physician searches, appointment scheduling, bill pay, donation and career pages — take a deep breath, those are still there. But the website now has to do double duty: serve the patients who land on it, and feed the LLMs that are deciding whether to recommend you in the first place.
“Be strategic and aware of input and output from your digital assets,” Schneider says. “Make a plan to feed and influence AI, continue to drive search and AI volume and move website visitors to website interactivity and transactions. Be prepared to be flexible, stay knowledgeable and bend with this as it changes.”
Learn more
If you would like to learn more about the impact of AI on your search, Greystone.Net can help. Together with our colleagues at Spark Novus and Gumshoe, we offer consultations, analyses and solutions to help you develop effective strategies. Email us for more information.