A patient has back pain that won't go away. They open ChatGPT and describe what they're feeling. They ask Google about "dull lower back pain that gets worse when sitting" and an AI Overview answers before the regular search results show up. They scroll through Perplexity to see what sources it cites. By the time they're ready to find a doctor, they've already had a 20-minute consultation with an AI that didn't ask for their insurance card.
This is happening at scale. Patients are using AI tools to research symptoms, treatments, and providers more than most practices realize, and the share keeps climbing. A recent KFF tracking poll found that roughly a third of US adults have turned to AI chatbots for health information in the past year, on par with the share who use social media for health.
What’s less obvious is what any of this means for your practice. Most of the content you’ll read about “optimizing for AI search” assumes you can compete with Mayo Clinic, WebMD, and Cleveland Clinic on generic medical content. You can’t, and trying to is mostly a waste of your marketing budget. The actual opportunity for a local practice is narrower than the hype, but it’s still real, and it’s mostly the same SEO and Google Business Profile foundation that’s been in place for years.
Where Patients Are Actually Researching
The shift isn’t to one AI tool. It’s to several at once.
Google AI Overviews (the AI-generated summary that appears above the regular search results) now trigger on roughly 88% of healthcare queries, up from 59% two years ago. Treatment questions trigger them close to 100% of the time. So does anything with the word “pain” or “symptoms.” When a patient types a medical question into Google, they’re more likely than not to read an AI summary before they ever see an organic result.
ChatGPT and Perplexity sit alongside that. Perplexity processes roughly 780 million searches a month, and about one in ten is health-related. ChatGPT’s usage numbers are larger and still growing. Patients aren’t picking one tool. They’re stacking them. Symptoms in ChatGPT, treatment options in Perplexity, then a local provider search in Google with an AI Overview at the top.
The downstream effect on traffic is real. When an AI Overview shows up, the click-through rate on the first organic result drops by roughly 61%. In healthcare, the zero-click rate (where the patient gets their answer without clicking anything) sits between 43% and 63%, and mobile is higher than desktop. If your SEO strategy still assumes ranking #1 organically produces the same traffic it did five years ago, the math has changed underneath you.
Why You Can’t Win Generic Medical Content
When an AI Overview answers a generic medical question, it pulls from a small handful of sources. Mayo Clinic gets cited in roughly 89,000 AI Overviews. WebMD sits at around 87,000. Cleveland Clinic and Healthline round out the top tier.
Your blog post explaining what a root canal is, or what plantar fasciitis feels like, or how Botox works is not competing on a level playing field with those sources. Google’s YMYL filter (which stands for Your Money or Your Life, the category Google applies to medical, financial, and safety topics) gets stricter as AI Overviews expand, and the systems behind those summaries are designed to suppress healthcare content that doesn’t carry verifiable authority signals.
Author verification for AI citations increasingly leans on things like NPI numbers (the unique identifier every provider has in the federal registry), PubMed authorship, or Wikidata entries. A practice’s marketing-team-authored blog post about a procedure isn’t going to clear that bar, no matter how cleanly it’s written.
This is the part most “AI SEO” agencies don’t tell their clients. There’s no clever schema trick or content strategy that gets a local dermatology practice into the AI Overview for “how does Accutane work.” That citation slot is going to Mayo Clinic.
Spending money trying to displace Mayo Clinic in an AI Overview is spending money on the wrong battle.
What’s Actually Unchanged
The picture changes for a local practice.
Google explicitly removed AI Overviews from provider-intent local queries. When a patient searches “dermatologist near me,” “best dentist in their city,” or “urgent care open now,” no AI Overview appears. The patient sees a traditional local pack with three map results, followed by organic listings. This is by design. Google’s own documentation describes provider-intent local searches as an exception where AI summaries aren’t shown.
The part of healthcare search that most directly produces patients for your practice (the local-intent query) is still the same SEO and Google Business Profile battle you’ve been fighting all along. If that’s a relief, it should be.
What You Can Actually Influence
There are three places where AI search optimization moves the needle for a local practice. None of them are exotic.
Branded queries. When someone types your practice name into ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google, the AI is going to describe you using whatever it can find. That description gets pulled from your Google Business Profile, your website, your reviews, schema markup on your pages, and third-party listings like Healthgrades and Zocdoc. If those sources are accurate and consistent, the AI describes you accurately. If they’re scattered or out of date, the AI fills the gaps with its best guess. The fix is the same one a real local SEO program would have flagged anyway.
Local-intent queries. Because AI Overviews don’t trigger here, this is traditional local SEO and Google Business Profile work. Posts and updates on Google Business Profile, photos kept current, service categories accurate, reviews coming in steadily, location pages on your site that don’t get rolled up into a generic services page. We covered most of this in the Local SEO for Multi-Location Healthcare Practices post earlier in this series.
How AI describes your specialty and capabilities. When someone asks an AI tool “what does a periodontist do” or “what’s the difference between an orthodontist and a dentist,” the AI is going to pull from authoritative sources to answer the question. It often adds local examples if the user’s location is shared. That’s where structured schema markup on your service pages, real depth on your specialty content, and a clean technical foundation start to pay off. Not because you’ll out-rank Mayo Clinic on the topic itself, but because when the AI pulls a local example, you want to be the one it surfaces.
The Optimization Is Mostly Boring
The work that actually moves the needle for AI search in healthcare is the same SEO work that already moves the needle for traditional search.
Schema markup on your location pages and service pages. Accurate, current Google Business Profile listings for every location. Real reviews coming in at a steady cadence. Clean NAP citations across the web. Content that’s deep enough to be useful and consistent enough to look authoritative. Site speed that doesn’t make AI crawlers (and patients) bounce off before the page renders.
AI search optimization is a real service category, and there’s legitimate work behind it for the right kind of business. A local healthcare practice generally isn’t that business. The reason traces back to the sections above. You can’t win generic medical content against Mayo and Cleveland Clinic, and you don’t need a separate service to win local-intent queries that AI Overviews don’t trigger on. The work that would actually move AI visibility for your practice (schema, Google Business Profile, reviews, citations, content depth) belongs inside your regular SEO scope, not as a separate AI line item.
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overview about your practice, about your specialty in your city, and about a common procedure you offer. Read what comes back. If something is wrong or missing, trace it back to the source the AI is pulling from (usually your Google Business Profile, website, or a third-party listing) and fix that source.
The one thing that’s genuinely new is paying attention to how AI tools describe your practice and your specialty. That’s a quarterly check, the kind of thing that fits inside the SEO work that’s already running.
Where the AI Budget Actually Goes
If your agency is pitching a separate AI search optimization service to your practice, that’s the moment to pause. The service category is real for other industries, but for a local healthcare practice it isn’t what’s going to move patients in your door. Ask the agency what specifically they would do differently than your existing SEO. If the answer comes back as schema, Google Business Profile, reviews, citations, and content depth, that’s the SEO program you should already have. No agency should be selling a separate AI SEO package to a local healthcare practice.
For a local practice with a real marketing budget, the AI search opportunity is narrow and mostly local. Branded queries, local-intent queries, and how AI describes you. The work behind those is unglamorous, and you’ve probably been paying for most of it already. The shift is in where the attention goes, not in how much you spend.
This article is part of the Healthcare Digital Marketing series.
