The Health Content GEO/AEO Playbook: How To Optimize for Gen AI Search
- Derek Flanzraich
- Oct 10
- 14 min read
More than a quarter of Americans are “searching” on generative AI (gen AI) tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, which is pushing health brands to rethink what visibility means across both Google and AI-driven platforms.
Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) are also reshaping behavior. They now appear for about 18% of searches, fueling zero-click searches that cut into publisher traffic.
Google has made it clear that optimizing for traditional search is optimizing for AI. Top LLMs lean on Google results to power their answers.
Gen AI Search & SEO
Content is still king, but staying on the throne just got tougher.
It’s not just me. With the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, basically everyone’s search behavior is shifting. We’re still searching! Just differently. I probably don’t have to convince you of this, but a recent survey found that 73% of Americans have used AI search tools in the last year, and 45% use them every day. The Wall Street Journal even ran the headline “Googling is for Old People.” Yikes. 😬
And the trendline is only going up. An OpenAI working paper found use of ChatGPT for “seeking information” jumped from 14% to 24% in one year. In other words, people are turning to AI as a go-to research tool, and the brands cited most often in authoritative sources are the ones AI keeps surfacing.
But hold your horses. In May 2024, Google also rolled out AI Overviews (AIO), and it’s now the #1 result on a LOT of searches. AIO is supposed to appear on around 18% of searches, and notably, 88% of those are informational queries. In other words, the types of searches health brands care most about are often the ones being intercepted.
So is this shift good for consumers? Honestly, as we say here at Healthyish: IDKID. Faster, conversational, personalized answers are a win for some queries. For others, AI answers fall flat and are missing richness, depth, and trustworthiness.
No matter your health business, though, the time to take action on this was yesterday. So how do you optimize for AI? At a high level, what’s clear is visibility is consolidating: The “rich” may keep getting richer as more clicks go to fewer sources. 💸 So the pressure to get rich quick (sorry) has never been higher.
At Healthyish Content, we’ve been on the cutting edge of this shift. Since 2021, we’ve worked with more than 20 health brands, from startups like Midi Health and NOCD to bigger players like GoodRx and Ro Health. By auditing, optimizing, experimenting, and tracking what surfaces in AI-driven search, we’ve seen what moves the needle.
The results? These brands now consistently show up in Google’s AI Overviews and drive ever-growing traffic from platforms like ChatGPT. Ro alone appears in AIOs for more than 2,770 keywords (and counting). And despite seeing headwinds in GEO/SEO for companies … we’ve played a critical role in 2 of the top 3 fastest-growing digital health brands in SEO this year. NBD.
The playbook isn’t entirely new, but the stakes are. And the brands that adapt fastest will win.
Here’s how we do it. Steal away. 😏
Why Gen AI Search Matters For Health Brands
Health marketers have always played the SEO game. But today, Gen AI optimization (also referred to as GEO and AEO) is SEO, and publishing high-quality, authoritative content has never mattered more.
Google has been explicit: Optimizing for traditional search is optimizing for AI, because OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity, and even Apple’s Siri lean on Google results to power their answers.
What’s changing is how people search. A recent survey found more than half of consumers believe AI-powered search makes it easier to find products and services. That’s a major opportunity for health brands to gain visibility in AI engines, especially considering AI-cited content drives 30–40% higher conversion rates than traditional search.
But it’s not a clean swap: Research from Nielsen Norman Group shows people often toggle between AI and traditional search to fact-check and cross-reference results.
Semrush also found people who start using ChatGPT don’t actually use Google less. If anything, their Google usage increases slightly (!). That means showing up once isn’t enough—you need to be consistently credible wherever users check.
That’s where E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) comes in. In YMYL (“Your Money, Your Life”) industries like healthcare, these signals are non-negotiable because trust is the currency of the field. Brands with visible expertise and verifiable trust signals win visibility, and the competition to do so is fiercer than ever.
E-E-A-T makes success in health content harder. But that’s also a massive opportunity–especially now–because the harder something is to do, the less people are going to be willing to compete.
So how do AI tools decide what to show?
AI chatbots check if an answer exists in their training data.
If it’s not, they run fresh Google searches using multiple related queries (often through intermediaries like SerpApi, which OpenAI and Perplexity have both reportedly used to source Google results).
They aggregate the results and surface the sources they “see” most often.
Perplexity makes this process transparent in its “steps”; ChatGPT and Gemini are more opaque, but produce similar results. The bottom line: If you’re not on page one of Google, your odds of being cited drop fast.
13 Techniques for Health Content GEO
Okay, so leaning on all our experience at Healthyish Content–and working closely with our star SEO/GEO Partners Ken Roberts & Sarah McNaughton to help me–here’s our most up-to-date learnings for you to apply.
Taking a big step back, AI search optimization falls into two buckets:
On-site optimization (how you present yourself)
Off-site optimization (how others present you)
Both matter because AI platforms piece together what they “see” about your brand across the web. But before you can compete, you need strong foundations: namely, quality content and solid SEO best practices.
As Healthyish Content SEO partner Ken Roberts puts it, “Ranking on page one gets you a ticket to the show—it gets you in the door. You need to do everything else to get to the front of the stage.”
On-Site Optimization
Here are seven on-site strategies we’ve used to help brands get to the front and stay there.
Quadruple Down on E-E-A-T
Optimizing for AI means doing what AI can’t: establishing trust at the human level. Highlight the people behind your content—writers, medical reviewers, expert sources. Their expertise, credentials, and unique quotes are your biggest differentiators in both GEO/AEO and brand perception. (In my experience, two expert approvals perform better than one.)
Reinforce that credibility with dedicated profile pages featuring each expert’s title, headshot, background, and external links to validate their credentials.
Credibility goes beyond bylines, too. Cite only authoritative references (think: medical journals, government health sites, peer-reviewed studies) and avoid questionable sources. After all, you are the company you keep. 🙅🏻♂️ In fact, Search Engine Journal found 31.5% of citations in AI results come from high-quality domains, underscoring how much weight credible sourcing carries.
Another important signal is mentioning relevant places, organizations, and people in your content. Writing about heart disease? Reference the American Heart Association, landmark studies like Framingham, and leaders like Dr. Martha Gulati or Dr. Eric Topol. Targeting local visibility? Call out neighborhoods, landmarks, and entities in that area to show true expertise.
Your moves:
🔥 Include expert approvals in your health content and reinforce them with structured data for authors and medical reviewers.
🔥 Build dedicated expert profile pages.
🔥 Talk the talk: Reference relevant organizations, research, people, and places.
Make Your Content Conversational
Approachable content wins. Full stop. AI answers are conversational, so your content should be too. Ditch the jargon, add personality, and explain complex stuff like you’re talking to a friend.
And please don’t keyword-stuff. That is so late 1990s through mid-2000s 😆. Semantic optimization matters, but sounding like a robot doesn’t.
Case in point is this example from GoodRx:
And don’t forget to optimize for the way people actually ask in AI. Unlike Google’s short keywords, AI prompts tend to be longer-tail, question-based queries. That means weaving natural questions into your titles, headers, and FAQ sections is now table stakes. Writing about heart disease? Go beyond “heart disease prevention” and target phrasing like “How can I lower my risk of heart disease?”
Your moves:
🔥 Frame subheadings as natural questions where it makes sense.
🔥 Explain terms and industry references in plain, human language.
🔥 Use if/then logic to appeal to AI search engines.
Prioritize Clean, Structured Content
ChatGPT and other AI tools surface content that’s easy to crawl, fast to load, and clearly organized, so site structure and speed are table stakes.
Schema markup doesn’t influence AI directly today, but it does help Google better understand your content. Use this Google tool to spot errors and validate your data.
Reminder: Don’t get distracted by shiny objects (easy to do in this space, I know). For example, there’s been A LOT of hype around LLMS.tx… but a recent analysis of more than 1,000 domains found that most major LLM crawlers barely use llms.txt at all. In other words, some of the “new” standards people hype up aren’t actually in play yet, so stick to the fundamentals that already work.
Not sure where to start? Ask ChatGPT for help. Try this prompt:
I need to optimize my website for ChatGPT and AI-driven search. My goals are to improve page speed and clean up site structure for better crawlability. Please analyze my current HTML and provide actionable recommendations, including specific code examples and best practices for better site organization.
Structure also matters on the page itself. Lists, FAQs, and TL;DR summaries make content easier to skim and more likely to be pulled into AI answers—in fact, 78% of Google's AI Overviews contain lists. Adding a bulleted table of contents or breadcrumb navigation can also spotlight key takeaways, guiding both readers and AI toward the most important info.
Bonus: Bullet points also optimize your content for voice search, now used by 20.5% of people worldwide.
Your moves:
🔥 Add short bulleted summaries and/or a table of contents to the top of every article.
🔥 End each article with key takeaways in bullet form.
🔥 Use schema markup to reinforce transparency and crawlability on Google (reminder: today, this doesn’t seem to directly influence AI results).
🔥 Keep your code clean and your content structured for readability.
Engage Readers With High-Impact Visuals
Engagement may not influence AI tools directly, but it still matters for Google. And because AI often pulls from Google’s top results, that signal carries through: The more time people spend with your content, the stronger the signal that it’s delivering value. (I've always believed time on page is a metric that really counts in the algorithm.)
Boost engagement by adding:
Branded headers
Images and graphics (think infographics, which are my fave because they’re the most likely to be shared elsewhere)
Polls, surveys, and quizzes
Relevant calculators and tools
Social embeds from TikTok, Instagram, X, you name it
But skip stock photography. It screams generic, and people (and Google) know better. Google favors original content, which is why unique images that haven’t appeared elsewhere online can give your page fresh SEO value and even help revive older, stagnant content. (Hint: A quick Google reverse image search can show you if an image is already indexed.)
Your move:
🔥 Include original and engaging visual elements in your content.
Optimize for “Snack Readers”
Think of every subsection of your content as a standalone “snack” that can be consumed or cited on its own. Add just enough context to make each piece understandable on its own without boring people to death with repetition.
People love to call this “chunking,” which IMO is one of the worst words in the content world. But the point stands: Each subsection (and even sub-subsections, lists, or tables) should hold up on its own.
Why does this matter? Because no one is reading your 3,000-word opus cover to cover.
They’re skimming, Ctrl+F’ing, or jumping straight to the bit they care about. And AI tools are just as impatient, grabbing single snippets and plopping them into answers without any of your hard-won context.
Your move:
🔥 Make each subsection self-contained.
Make Updating Non-Negotiable
Recency matters more than ever. Gen AI prioritizes the most up-to-date content. That means finding smart ways to refresh and re-publish regularly.
But that does NOT mean publishing a higher volume of content. Most companies don’t need more than 4-5 new articles per month. Mediocre content drags the rest down. The only reason to do more is if you can do it without compromising on quality. (And yes, Healthyish Content clients have sometimes gone up to 10-12 per month). Our take? Stick to publishing the best content, and then continue improving it by updating it every six months.
Your move:
🔥 Update your content frequently (at least every six months).
🔥 Re-publish content for any and every reason, even if you only make light changes.
Invest in Super High-Quality Content
In a gen AI search world, quality = placement. Clear, well-structured, trustworthy content is far more likely to get cited (and trusted by your audience).
AI tools can speed up drafting, but they can’t replace the depth, nuance, and judgment of expert-reviewed health content. Most AI copy lacks medical accuracy and unique insights, which is why search engines prioritize authoritative, expert-backed work over mass-produced text. (After all, studies show chatbots can be manipulated into delivering confident yet false medical advice.)
That means publishing content written by skilled writers, reviewed by experts, and edited for clarity. Do that consistently, and you’ll build long-term trust, traffic, and conversions alongside your rankings.
Want to track your AI search visibility? Consider these tools (and yes, we’ve basically tried them all):
Profound: Probably the best known and definitely the most expensive.
Scrunch AI: Our current fave for tracking AI citations with the richest feature-to-cost ratio we’ve seen.
Semrush & Ahrefs: Traditional SEO tools now adding more and more AI visibility and data.
A note on these platforms: Unlike Google search rankings (where advertisers/SEO platforms can access real performance data), AEO/GEO ranking tools are effectively modeling what works based on limited inputs and scraped data. In other words, they’re educated guesses—useful “snapshots,” but not like gospel. My opinion is they’re overselling their precision and usefulness. At the same time, they’re still totally worth using and learning from, especially as the space evolves (though FWIW my guess is Semrush & Ahrefs will end up being the best at this over time). The more directional data points you gather, the better!
Your move:
🔥 Prioritize quality over everything else.
🔥 Consider using an AI visibiltiy platform like Profound or Scrunch.
Off-Site Optimization
On-site is you talking about yourself. Off-site is everyone else backing you up. And in AI land, that second part matters just as much because LLMs pull from everywhere. The more your brand shows up in credible places, the more likely you are to get surfaced in AI answers.
Secure Mentions in Authoritative Content
AI models surface the sources they “see” most often for a given query. But don’t just grab any backlink or mention—aim to show up in the exact places that are already being cited for your priority terms. Getting into high-authority articles, directories, and “best of” lists that AI tools pull from boosts your odds of being surfaced in answers. Think of this as backlinks 2.0, minus the links.
In addition to bringing the SEO juice, it’s also about showing up repeatedly in the sources AI trusts most. These are often referenced as “citations” and are a growing part of cutting-edge GEO marketing.
Your moves:
🔥 Analyze which sources AI tools are already citing for your target queries.
🔥 Pitch for inclusion in high-authority roundups, directories, and “best-of” lists.
🔥 Build relationships with publishers and editors who regularly produce list-based content.
Put Your Experts Out There
Your medical and subject matter experts should be visible and quotable across the internet. The more they appear in top outlets, podcasts, or even niche newsletters, the more credible your brand looks to humans and AI. (Pro tip: Linking their names back to solid bio pages on your site only reinforces that credibility.)
Think of it as making your experts part of the broader health conversation. Those repeated mentions increase the odds of AI tools pulling your experts into the answer box instead of your competitors’ and trusting your brand more.
Your moves:
🔥 Reactively provide journalists access to your experts for timely commentary via platforms like HARO and Qwoted.
🔥 Proactively pitch expert insights to trusted media outlets.
Create Proprietary Data That Gets Picked Up
Want to be the source everyone points to? Own the data. Original surveys, reports, or even small-scale polls give you something no one else has, and publishers love fresh numbers. AI tools pick up on those same signals, which means your brand’s insights are more likely to be cited.
The beauty is you don’t need a 5,000-person clinical trial; even lightweight trend analyses or consumer surveys can make your brand the “stat” that travels.
Your moves:
🔥 Commission proprietary surveys or data reports to share with press.
🔥 Publish trend analyses or data-driven stories that highlight unique insights.
Note: Healthyish Content is currently piloting authority & citation-building services with a heavy emphasis on clinicians and data-driven content for our clients. Will report back.
Engage With Online Communities
People trust people, not faceless brands. Because AI tools often scrape people-powered platforms, being active in communities like Reddit, Quora, or specialized forums only pays off if those platforms are already surfacing for your keywords. When Reddit threads show up in SERPs or AI citations, authentic participation builds trust with humans and leaves digital breadcrumbs AI might pick up. (Though if they’re not, posting won’t magically make them appear.)
The catch? You can’t phone it in. If you show up just to drop links, you’ll get ignored (or banned). The goal is to add real value by answering questions, sharing expertise, and being part of the conversation.
Your moves:
🔥 Participate consistently in niche forums and social platforms like Reddit.
🔥 Answer questions with real expertise instead of pushing promotion.
Double Down on Reputation Management
Nothing tanks trust faster than a trail of bad reviews.
Whether they’re on Healthgrades, Google Business Profiles, or the app store, reviews are the receipts that tell both humans and machines your brand is credible (or not). High ratings and fast, thoughtful responses to feedback make you harder to ignore in search and AI results.
Your moves:
🔥 Monitor reviews across all major review platforms.
🔥 Implement a process to address negative feedback fast (ideally before it snowballs into a Reddit thread).
Make Your Content Citation-Worthy
If you want people (and AI) to cite you, give them no excuse not to. The clearest, most evidence-based resource on a topic will always win because it’s the easiest to link to, reference, and drop into an AI answer box. That’s passive link building at its finest: creating the content that naturally becomes the go-to reference.
Your moves:
🔥 Publish highly useful, evidence-based content designed to be cited (don’t bury the good stuff).
Don’t Forget to Measure
Tracking performance is just as crucial as showing up. Nobody knows the exact prompts people type into ChatGPT, but brands can and should monitor how often they’re being surfaced and cited across AI tools to stay competitive.
You can use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to identify your top-searched questions (and your competitors’). This helps you see which queries are most likely to surface in AI answers. From there:
Check AI mention trackers: Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Profound, or Scrunch show when your brand appears in AI answers.
Track referrals in GA4: Regex makes it possible to identify traffic from common AI platforms directly in Google Analytics.
Integrate dashboards: At Healthyish, we use Looker Studio to pull in GSC data and track brand performance. We’ve even built a module to surface ChatGPT mentions directly in reports.
Put simply, don’t guess. (And as I mentioned, third-party AI rank trackers often do.) Anchor your measurement in Google search data + real referral tracking to know where you’re winning.
A Note On AI Generated Content
While AI tools can speed up content creation (and everyone should be using AI workflows), they can’t replace the depth, nuance, and trust of high-quality, expert-reviewed health content.
AI-generated content often lacks medical accuracy, unique insights, and the critical human judgment needed for high-stakes topics like healthcare. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview prioritize authoritative content backed over mass-produced, generic AI copy—with Google actively sussing out and penalizing AI-generated content. There's a reason every word is written by a person, edited by a person, and approved by two people at Healthyish Content—and we keep winning.
Avoid your content getting lost and give your health brand a competitive advantage by investing in super high-quality content.
The Takeaway
To wrap it up (yep, in bullet form, because practice what you preach 😆):
SEO = GEO/AEO. Gen AI search leans on Google, so if you’re not optimized for traditional SEO, you’re already behind.
Trust is the differentiator: Highlight experts, cite credible sources, and make your content conversational and scannable. E-E-A-T isn’t just Google’s thing anymore—it’s how AI decides who to trust.
Keep it fresh and structured: Update content regularly, lean on schema, and make every section snackable and citation-worthy so AI (and readers) can actually use it.
Play the long game off-site: Mentions, reviews, proprietary data, and community engagement feed the external signals AI scrapes. And the more your brand shows up out there, the more it gets pulled in here.
Measure your impact: Track where you’re being surfaced, cited, and converting. Guessing is for amateurs; data tells you if you’re actually winning.
Now, it’s your move. 😏
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