The Collapse of Mainstream Health Media

December is usually dead for health search. Traffic drops, people tune out, and most sites accept the seasonal dip (while publishing recipes about seasonal dips). This year was different.

Search visibility among large, generalist health publishers—Healthline, WebMD, Everyday Health—dropped big time following Google's December 2025 core update. But, at the same time, smaller, specialist health brands gained visibility. Not in some obscure long-tail corner, but in competitive, high-intent searches that drive real discovery and revenue.

This is just the latest example in the seismic shift I’ve seen over the past few years. Google (and ChatGPT/LLMs in turn) is redefining trust: it’s increasingly stopped rewarding encyclopedias and started rewarding experts.

After two decades inside health content—and selling my first company, Greatist, to Healthline in 2019—I've never seen a shift this decisive. It’s finally the end of generic health content.

The Playbook That Built Empires Is Now Sinking Them

For years, the winning move was brute force: publish everything, cover every condition from acne to Zika (get it?) in more detail than others have, run it past a medical reviewer, and let Google do the rest. That playbook built empires like Healthline, WebMD, Everyday Health, and others.

Now they’re aging like a 2008 content farm. (Sick burn, I know).

Essentially, the internet has lost patience for content that is accurate but not accountable. The thousand-article mega-library is losing ground to the scrappy specialist who only talks about one thing. And search is favoring pages that feel like they were written for an actual human with an actual problem.

Why This Isn't Armchair Analysis

In the early 2010s, a few of us went all-in on health while most venture-backed media chased culture and politics. That's how Greatist started. We scaled it into one of the fastest-growing health sites online with 10-20M unique visitors per month (almost entirely from organic Google Search, not Facebook), then sold it to Healthline for a reasonable exit in 2019.

Greatist made money primarily from CPG brands trying to resonate more with millennials. We helped put RxBar on the map. We promoted KIND Bars and The Beef Board (🤷).

But mainstream health publishers had a secret weapon: pharma dollars. Huge budgets, few compliant places to spend them, and ROI math so generous that even a trickle of patient acquisitions justified massive content investments. We could out-punch traditional lifestyle titles on creativity and voice, but when pharma dollars were on the table, the biggest, most clinical-looking publishers won.

That pharma subsidy was especially powerful because of how limited drug companies were by where they could advertise. At the time, FDA regulations made social media and most digital channels like Meta and Google paid ads nearly impossible—character limits clashed with "fair balance" requirements to disclose every side effect, and compliance risk was high. So pharma concentrated spending on a handful of brand-safe health publishers. If you wanted pharma dollars, you needed to look clinical, comprehensive, and utterly risk-free. In other words: if you wanted pharma dollars, you had to look like WebMD.

Over the past decade, pharma money’s spreading across more channels, not concentrating on a few dominant publishers. While the FDA cracked down even harder on pharma advertising in September 2025—expanding oversight to influencer partnerships and AI-generated content—digital ad spending is still surging, with projected $24.8 billion and 13.3% year over year growth last year. And most of that hasn’t gone to generic health content.

Plus, smaller, specialist players started peeling away budgets because they owned a specific patient or use case. After Greatist, I helped launch GoodRx Health—proof that a tightly focused, utility-first model could grow fast too (and eat up some of this budget).

Since then, I've worked with niche health brands that make the contrast stark. Companies like Midi and Oshi stay obsessively focused on one category. They're gaining traffic, trust, and revenue while the old generalist giants steadily lose ground. And they monetize in a completely different way–a way that’s typically way more aligned with the searcher’s interests.

It’s not just traffic. What’s happening is authority redistribution.

Breadth Without Authority

When a content library spans thousands of articles and hundreds of conditions, no single clinician or perspective can anchor it. Pieces get written and medically reviewed—but no one truly stands behind them. You end up with content that’s clinically safe, but strategically hollow.

Sure, that's fine for a quick definition. But it's frustrating when someone is trying to decide what to actually do about their own body. There's no clear expert voice saying, "Here's how this actually plays out in real life.”

Meanwhile, the teams behind these archives keep shrinking. Repeated layoffs at Healthline, WebMD, and Everyday Health have left tiny crews tending enormous libraries. In some cases, entire brands (Greatist included) were being run with a single overextended editor–down from something like 50 at its peak.

The data reflect it. Generalist health giants show steady visibility declines, while focused specialist brands trend sharply upward–at least according to what I pulled from Semrush below (as of 02/11/26):

VeryWell Health (All Time):

WebMD (All Time):

Everyday Health (All Time):

Healthline (All Time):

Talkspace (All Time):

*BetterHelp (All Time):

Hims (All Time):

Hers (All Time):

*Ro (All Time):

*Midi Health (Last 2 Years):

*Oshi Health (Last 2 Years):

*Allara Health (Last 2 Years):

*Equip Health (All Time):

*Radial (Last 2 Years):

A lot of top talent has followed that momentum. At Healthyish Content (my premium health-focused content marketing agency), we've hired most of our editors and writers straight out of those cuts. When those same editors move from publishing 40-100 articles a month to 4-10, the content transforms. We aim to write “the best answer on the Internet” and, in this model, can actually deliver.

That's the specialist playbook. Go deep, not wide. Put the same named experts (not just anyone with an “MD” in their title) on the field again and again until a strong clinical perspective emerges, a deep understanding of the target reader is shown, and the advice starts to feel usable, not just readable.

What Google (and AI Search) Actually Rewards Now

Strip away the jargon and ranking debates—the winners all share the same traits. In Google-speak, this is EEAT: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. In practice, it shows up as:

• Named, visible, credible experts

• Tight topical focus

• Consistent, opinionated point of view

• Depth that compounds across articles

• Human, practice-informed language

• Strong site-wide topical coherence

• Dense internal linking within one category

• Repeated contributions from the same experts

• Real-world citations and community mentions

• Quotable, source-worthy answers

• Clear authorship and accountability

• Narrow relevance to a specific audience and problem

This matters even more in AI search. These systems hunt for the best home base on a subject, not a random page that happens to mention it. They're looking for sources they can trust to represent a topic well. And we’re seeing niche, specialty health brands kick mainstream ass in ChatGPT and elsewhere.

The Winners: Focused, Opinionated, Clinically Grounded

Despite different audiences and conditions, these brands play the same game. They choose one problem space, a clear target reader/customer/patient, put deeply relevant experts at the center, publish from a consistent clinical point of view, and (ideally) the writer is someone with lived experience. Every new piece strengthens the last one instead of branching into a new topic.

That tight focus turns these sites into go-to hubs for a specific question set. Patients share them, clinicians reference them, other sites cite them. Authority compounds because nothing feels random, one-off, or generic.

None of these brands try to win “health.” They win their health category.

• Midi Health: Owns menopause (and perimenopause) care as a category, pairing specialist clinicians with deeply practical, stage-of-life guidance instead of generic women's health content.

• Oshi: Centers everything on GI conditions. GIs, dietitians, and even therapists show up across content, making the advice itself feels like continuous care AND making the case for their uniquely successful clinical model.

• Ro: Built early wins going deep on specific treatment paths like sexual health and weight management, translating clinical protocols into clear next steps users can actually follow.

• BetterHelp: Made mental health approachable at scale by focusing on therapy access and real therapeutic conversations, not abstract "mental wellness" tips.

• Truemed: Specializes in helping people make smarter health spending decisions, blending medical eligibility knowledge with practical shopping guidance.

• Radial: Approaches treatment-resistant depression care through a tight, clinician-led lens on “brain medicine” and advanced psychiatric treatments.

Why This Matters for Real Humans

Most people Googling a symptom want to know what to do next without opening twelve tabs and spiraling. Generic, averaged-out advice might be technically safe, but it strands readers in a fog of "it depends." And when you’re scared about your body, “it depends” just isn’t good enough. 

Specialist content cuts through that. It sounds like the perfect appointment with your dream physician, not the high-level pamphlet you read in the waiting room. Instead of vague maybes, you get guidance shaped around a specific situation and your likely path forward.

That specificity is empathetic and effective. It tells you someone has seen this exact thing before and knows the usual playbook. Not for everyone on earth, but for people like you. When it comes to your body, feeling understood is what turns late-night searching into next-day action (and prevents clicking back to the Google search results).

What This Means Going Forward

Today’s health media playbook has flipped from "scale fast" to "matter first."

For health companies: Pick a lane and stay in it until search engines and AI systems have no doubt what you're the authority on. Not because you published the most, but because you said something useful every single time. We’ve seen this work repeatedly at Healthyish Content–and usually start by recommending sites aggressively prune thin, tangential, and old content. The way is less content and more authority.

For clinicians: Show up again and again around the same patient problems to build authority that algorithms recognize and people rely on. We’re living in an era where links have never mattered less (they still matter some, to be clear)--so getting cited, mentioned, and included in the right places is critical!

For founders and health marketers: Growth is less about piling on adjacent categories and more about becoming indispensable in one. You don't have to beat the entire health internet. You just have to own one meaningful corner of it. And I’d argue it’s never been easier, in fact, to capture your own corner.

The Bottom Line

The era of giant, generic health encyclopedias dominating by default is over.

In their place, focused health brands are gaining visibility because their content is unmistakably relevant and relatable–for a real person with a real problem. Discovery is dramatically shifting toward sources that demonstrate hands-on experience, clear expertise, and a consistent point of view across an entire topic. Search and AI are only going to increase surfacing sites that read like a specialist practice, not a general reference shelf.

So, the health brands that win from here are the ones that pick a category, produce the best content around what they know best, and become impossible to ignore in it.

*Disclaimer: All Healthyish Content clients.