How health systems are competing with AI search tools for patients

AI tools like chatbots and Google’s AI Overviews are changing the way patients find health information, and health systems are taking note.

About 79% of adults in the US turn to the internet for answers to their health questions, per an April 2025 survey from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. Some 31% of users say AI Overviews “often” or “always” give them the answer they need.

According to OpenAI, 230+ million people across the world ask ChatGPT health and wellness questions each week. On Jan. 7, the company announced ChatGPT Health, a dedicated search engine for those queries.

OpenAI and other tech companies like Amazon One Medical and Anthropic, which have created similar tools, emphasize their programs are not designed to replace medical advice and will refer patients to medical care if needed.

But when Google gives an AI overview, organic click-through rates for search results are only 0.6%, compared to 1.6% when Google doesn’t give an AI overview, per September 2025 data from digital marketing agency Seer Interactive. This means potential patients are clicking less on healthcare providers’ websites, which “puts the primary source of [historical] new patient acquisition for health systems at risk,” Ann Bilyew, president of WebMD Ignite, a B2B growth partner for healthcare organizations, told us.

In this new era, healthcare systems are changing how they attract new patients.

Planning for the future. Matt Eaves, VP of digital marketing for Cleveland, Ohio-based University Hospitals, told Healthcare Brew he’s seen a dip in the number of visits to the health system’s website as AI becomes a more common search tool. The shift is not large enough to hurt patient acquisition “yet,” but he fears it could in the future.

“Digital search has been a core part of our patient acquisition strategy. So for sure, [AI] is having an impact,” Eaves said.

The University Hospitals marketing team is pivoting its strategy in anticipation of more people turning to AI for health advice. For instance, the team now uses generative search engine monitoring tools to analyze the types of questions people ask large language models (LLMs). They then use that data to inform the content they put on their website in the hopes those links to their site will be featured in AI-generated overviews.

Eaves also noted that the overviews only impact some types of searches. An analysis of healthcare keywords by AI-powered search engine optimization marketing company BrightEdge found Google provides an overview for 89% of healthcare-related queries. But when someone searches for medical care “near me,” AI Overviews isn’t deployed at all.

“We want to show up [in search results] for ‘most advanced breast cancer treatment in Northeast Ohio,’” Eaves said. “‘What is breast cancer?’ or ‘What are the symptoms of breast cancer?’—those are the searches that we’re not as concerned about losing traffic from.”

Changing strategies. Other systems are testing different strategies to get on AI’s good side.

King of Prussia, Pennsylvania-based Universal Health Services is hoping to rack up good Google reviews in order to increase its visibility on AI-driven search platforms, Becker’s Health IT previously reported. The system sent out 1+ million texts to patients encouraging them to write a review.

Bilyew suggests another strategy: shifting users away from search platforms by offering an AI-powered chatbot to search out answers on a healthcare organization’s website itself.

She said WebMD Ignite is in the process of developing a conversational AI experience that allows patients to ask questions and get answers from an LLM trained on WebMD’s content. It would be a tool that could be hosted directly on a health system’s site, making it easy for patients to ask questions and make an appointment in the same place.

“Instead of a consumer going to Google to ask a health question—or ChatGPT, or Claude, or God forbid, Grok—they should go to their health system’s website,” Bilyew said.