The Credibility Engine: How We Turn Clinicians Into Links, Citations, and AI Visibility

By Derek Flanzraich, Managing Partner at Healthyish Content

Every health company says it wants to "build authority." Most of them go about it the same way: Hire a PR firm, sign a five-figure monthly retainer, and, er, wait for the New York Times feature that never comes.

Meanwhile, the stuff that actually compounds—a psychiatrist quoted in a health publisher's explainer, a neurologist cited in a national magazine, a link from a site Google and ChatGPT already trust—gets handed to the most junior person on the account. Somewhere between making press release draft edits and picking up coffee.

At Healthyish Content, we built a different machine for this. We call it the Credibility Engine. It's not glamorous. It's a system for turning your clinicians into the most quotable, most responsive, most useful sources in a health journalist's inbox—and then putting them in front of those journalists over and over again.

We’re now going to give away exactly how it works. Every step. The recruiting, the training, the tools, the pitching, the “newsjacking” (yes, this is a thing). Because knowing the recipe has never made anyone a chef–the hard part is running the kitchen every single day!

Credibility Is the New Currency

The biggest search shift in an AI world is that LLMS don’t just rank pages, they decide who to believe. And that’s decided based on who else vouches for you.

When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or just searches Google and gets AI Overviews (AIO) for whether TMS actually works for depression, the answer gets assembled from sources the model already trusts. The brands that get named are the ones that keep showing up inside those sources. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found branded web mentions had the strongest correlation with AI Overview visibility of anything they measured (0.664)—about three times stronger than raw backlink count (0.218). Brands in the top quartile for web mentions earned up to 10x more AI Overview mentions than the next quartile down. This is technically correlation, not causation, I know… but I'd bet big it’s causal. (We sure have.)

Links haven't stopped mattering, either. Health is a "Your Money or Your Life" category, where Google holds content to a higher bar, and domain authority is still the toll you pay to rank for anything competitive. What's changed is that a link is now just one of three things you want from every placement: The link, the citation, and the mention. One good quote in the right article can deliver all three. Basically “that’s the rule, that’s the goal now.”

What our Credibility Engine is

A system that turns your clinicians into the sources health journalists rely on—then feeds those sources into stories every week, at volume. The outputs are boring and specific: backlinks from high-authority domains, expert citations in the articles LLMs read, and brand mentions sitting right next to the topics you want to own.

What it isn't

It's not brand building. I’m upfront about this because others (*cough* PR agencies cough) love to blur it. Practically nobody reads your psychiatrist's two-sentence quote in a Real Simple piece about multitasking and books a consult. This won't make you famous. It won't (usually) get you on TV. It's not a substitute for a real brand strategy or a big launch moment.

Instead, think of it more like plumbing. Unsexy, compounding plumbing (my favorite kind). And if you're a health company trying to show up when patients ask AI what to do next, it's probably the highest-leverage plumbing you can install right now. (Just call me Mario).

Here's the whole machine:

Ideally, every placement earns a link, a citation, a mention, or all three—plus, each one makes the next journalist more likely to say yes.

Step 1: Recruit Clinicians Who Say Interesting Things

The first mistake almost every health company makes: assuming the clinician with the best CV is the best source. The best source is the one who answers fast and says something worth printing. Those are… often not the same person.

When we kick off a Credibility Engine, our team sends a short intake form to three to five clinicians the client has pre-approved, along with a one-pager on what to expect and—critically—how this helps their work. Then we read the answers like editors, looking for the one or two "core" clinicians who'll carry the early load.

Here's what we're screening for:

• Responsiveness. A brilliant psychiatrist who replies in four days is worth less to a journalist than a good one who replies in four hours. Unfortunately, timeliness super matters here!

• A point of view. Journalists don't need another "it depends on the individual." They need someone willing to say what most people get wrong. Opinions, backed by evidence, matter!

• Plain English. Can they explain a mechanism to a smart 14-year-old without a single acronym? Bonus points for doing it in fewer sentences, short and sweet.

• Range. Their specialty is the floor, not the ceiling (more on this in a second).

• Actual enthusiasm. Some clinicians love this. Some tolerate it. Ideally, build this around the ones who love it.

The intake covers the obvious stuff—credentials, specialty, a bio link—plus what most programs skip: what they do outside of work, what brought them into health care, which identities or experiences they're comfortable speaking from publicly (parent, caregiver, LGBTQ+, living with a condition), which formats they're up for (written, phone, on camera), and whether we can text them when something time-sensitive comes up (obvi the answer you want is yes.)

Personal angles = more surface area

That "range" point is where most programs like this end up with too few shots on goal/volume to win. A psychiatrist who's also a parent can speak to kids' anxiety during back-to-school season. One who works with new moms becomes the go-to for postpartum depression. Holidays? Family stress, grief, loneliness. Suddenly an interventional psychiatry clinic, say, has a credible voice in a dozen stories a month that have nothing to do with TMS—and every one of them still carries the brand's name (and, ideally, a link, too).

Interesting beats impressive

Some clinicians are born sources. Radial co-founder Owen Muir, MD, writes a Substack called The Frontier Psychiatrists and has a take on just about everything happening in his field. Someone literally built an Owen GPT. He’s an extreme(ly awesome) example, but you want some of this energy. You don't need a bench full of Owens—you need one or two, plus a few reliable clinicians behind them who'll answer the email.

Fix the landing page first

Before a single pitch goes out, make sure every clinician has a strong bio page on your site: credentials, specialties, publications, a real photo, and a clear tie to your company. That page is where a lot of your links will point, and it's one of the places Google and LLMs look to decide whether an expert is real. A great quote that links to a thin bio page can be a wasted pitch. We help co’s do this a lot because it’s super important!

Step 2: Train Them Like Sources, Not Spokespeople

The truth is (sorry) most clinicians are terrible at giving quotes. Not because they're not smart. But because they've been trained their entire careers to hedge, qualify, and cover every edge case. That's exactly right in a patient room. It's boring (read: death) in a journalist's inbox.

So training and coaching isn't optional, it’s critical! (Worth saying we do find many clinicians are willing and eager to learn about this and are quick studies).

Async by default

Everything we do with clinicians is async unless they ask otherwise. No standing calls. No weekly syncs. Training happens through a short written guide with examples and room for questions. Quote review happens in a shared doc. If a journalist wants a live interview, great—that's the exception, and it gets scheduled around clinic hours if the clinician is willing.

This isn't a nice-to-have. The fastest way to kill a clinician media program is to ask too much of clinician time. Make participation take ten minutes and you'll get it. (Make it take an hour and you'll get it once. 😬)

Make them "get it"

The first thing we train isn't technique. It's why. Clinicians show up when they understand what's in it for them:

• Their name and expertise in front of millions of readers,  in highly respected publications, and potentially promoted via newsletters and social media (and the AI models reading these insightful takes over their shoulders)

• A chance to correct, and get out ahead of, the misinformation patients often bring into their offices—basically if they’re using Doctor Google, we’re whispering in its ear

• A stronger professional profile and footprint without writing a single article or paper

• Almost no time cost, because we do the drafting, editing, and pitching

Then we teach what journalists actually need, which surprises most of them:

• Answer the question first. The opening sentence should work on its own.

• Have an opinion. "Many factors are involved" is not a quote. "Here's the mistake I see every week" is.

• Be specific. A pattern from practice, a real-world example, a number. Specificity is what gets printed.

• Keep it short. Two to four sentences. Journalists will cut the rest anyway.

• Stay defensible. No promotional language, no patient details, no overstated outcomes. Compelling, but nothing your compliance team would lose sleep over.

Here's the kind of before-and-after we walk through (illustrative, not a real quote):

Before: "Feelings of emptiness can stem from a variety of factors, and individuals experiencing persistent symptoms should consult a qualified healthcare provider."

After: "Emptiness is one of the most overlooked signs of depression. People expect to feel sad. When what they feel is closer to nothing, they often don't recognize it as depression at all."

Same clinical substance… but only one of these is going to get picked up.

Build a quote bank so speed isn't the bottleneck

Speed matters more than almost anything else here. Journalists file on deadline, a single request can pull in a flood of responses, and the first few truly useful answers tend to win.

The fix: don't wait for the request to start writing the answer. During onboarding, we pull 5–10 evergreen quotes per clinician from their intake and any existing interviews, articles, or newsletters, and get them pre-approved. We also build each brand a messaging guide—priority angles, quotable soundbites, language to avoid. When a relevant request lands, we can move immediately with something tailored but built on language the clinician has already blessed. They only get looped in for the final sign-off.

Then we keep it fresh. A short async interview each month (or an optional 30-minute call, if they prefer talking) captures new insights and refills the bank.

Get the attribution right

This one sounds small and isn't. A quote attributed to "a psychiatrist in New York" instead of "Dr. Jane Smith, a psychiatrist at [Your Company]" is a citation you earned and didn't get. Every response we send spells out exactly how the clinician should be credited and points to their bio page wherever the outlet allows a link (plus includes as many medical letters/degrees as possible 😆).

Close the loop

Nothing motivates a clinician like seeing their name in Prevention. Send every placement back to them (and to their leadership). It turns a chore into a small dopamine hit—and turns your most reluctant participant into your best one.

Step 3: Play Defense—Win the Reactive Game

Reactive pitching is the part everyone thinks they understand. A journalist posts a request ("Looking for a psychiatrist to comment on ADHD burnout, deadline Friday"), you respond, you get quoted. Simple.

It is simple. It's just not easy—because you're competing against every other expert, agency, and (increasingly) AI-generated response on the platform. Plus, you know, time (the ultimate villain).

The platforms

The ones we work every day:

• Qwoted: the workhorse for health and lifestyle requests right now. In the first month of Radial's program, almost every reactive opportunity we logged came through it.

• HARO: the OG. Cision shut it down (by then rebranded as Connectively) in December 2024, and Featured.com bought and relaunched it in April 2025.

• Source of Sources, ProfNet, etc.: There are lots of these.

The daily sweep

This is where that “running the kitchen” metaphor kicks in. Every day, multiple times a day, you have to sweep the platforms, flag anything that's a real fit for your clinicians, and respond to the best one or two with tailored answers—built from the quote bank whenever possible. Every pitch gets logged: outlet, request, deadline, clinician, platform, outcome.

Most requests aren't for you (and that's fine)

Be ruthless about fit. Looking back at the first few weeks of Radial's tracker (our first Credibility Engine client) and it’s mostly lots of opportunities passed on ("not within scope," "not a good fit," "off-brand for the team") and a healthy share of responses where the journalist simply never replied. That's, unfortunately, how it works! Reactive is a volume game with a lot of silence in it.

But the requests that look off-topic are where the edge lives. A personal-finance outlet wanting someone to talk about helping a grown child through a layoff. A lifestyle magazine asking why you should start new habits on a Wednesday. A psychiatrist can answer both. Those are exactly the ones your competitors skip.

How to actually win a request

• Answer the exact question asked, in the first line. Not the question you wish they'd asked.

• Lead with credentials in one line: name, degree, title, company.

• Respect the constraints. If the request says "MD or DO only, no chiropractors or naturopaths," believe it.

• Make it copy-paste ready. Clean, quotable sentences in the clinician's voice. No attachments. Headshot and bio link included.

• Sound like a human. These platforms are flooded with ChatGPT-written responses, and journalists can smell them. Specific, opinionated, slightly imperfect beats polished and generic every time. Pluuuus increasingly a lot of these platforms will ban you if you use AI, just saying.

• Beat the deadline, not just meet it. Journalists often lock in sources well before the stated deadline—one we saw posted a deadline three weeks out and asked for pitches by end of day. Early is a critical part of the strategy.

Step 4: Play Offense—Pitch, Newsjack, Trendjack

Sports ball (or insert whatever popular sport you like) typically has two sides–defense AND offense. Reactive pitching is more like defense, you're answering questions someone else already decided to ask. But playing offense helps you shape the story before the request ever gets posted–and is a critical part of this strategy.

The list

Over time, we've built a list of 600+ health journalists: staff writers, editors, and the freelancers behind so many of the expert-sourced pieces across health and lifestyle outlets. It's segmented by beat (mental health, women's health, nutrition, parenting, aging, and on and on) and kept current, because health media turns over constantly. (I've watched it collapse in real time.)

Plus, it’s not just a “list.” The critical knowledge of which freelancer is filing for three outlets this month, which editor just changed jobs, who links out to expert bios and who never does, etc. lives in experienced people who engage with it every day.

The weekly proactive pitch

At minimum once a week, we draft and send a proactive pitch featuring a client clinician, tied to one of three things:

1. A seasonal hook. Holiday family stress and grief. Back-to-school anxiety. New Year's resolutions. The winter slump when the clocks change. These come around every year, and journalists plan for them weeks/months in advance—so you should, too.

2. A trending topic or cultural moment. More on this in a second.

3. A new data point. Internal data, a survey, a fresh study a clinician can interpret. Data gives journalists something new to say, which is the whole job.

4. New clinician with a cool story. Sometimes this leads to bites, too!

Newsjacking and trendjacking

The news cycle is a constant, free stream of pitch hooks, and most health companies ignore it because, well, they’re busy.

We set up alerts on each client's core topics (for Radial, for example: ketamine therapy, TMS, treatment-resistant depression) and watch the broader health and culture conversation daily. When something breaks—a new study, an FDA decision, a celebrity disclosure, a viral TikTok trend—the goal is to get a clinician's take to the right journalists within hours, while the story is still being written.

The magic is in how far you can stretch it. Look at the range of stories Radial's clinicians have been quoted in:

• Prevention, on a study about grandparents living longer

• Newsweek, on the downsides of “pretty privilege”

• CNET, on AI chatbots making everyone think the same

• Real Simple, on fredagsmys, the Swedish cozy-Friday tradition

• Yahho Heath, on AI health coaches

None of those is "about" interventional psychiatry. Every one of them puts a Radial clinician and the Radial name in front of readers… and in front of the AI models that read those outlets. That's trendjacking, essentially–finding the expert angle inside whatever the internet is already talking about.

The multi-client unfair advantage

Here's something that's hard to replicate in-house: because we run this for multiple health companies, we can sometimes hand a journalist two or three vetted experts for the same story—a psychiatrist, an autism specialist, a pediatric occupational therapist—with each client's approval. Journalists love one-stop sourcing. It also makes us someone they come back to.

The boring stuff that also counts

Not every link comes from a quote. At a higher tier of our Credibility Engine, we partner with our Editorial Engine team on a link-worthy, data-backed piece. In between, we run unlinked-mention reclamation (asking outlets that named you to actually link you), broken-link building, and relevant directory submissions. None of it is exciting. All of it compounds.

It Takes a Journalist to Pitch a Journalist

The people running the Credibility Engine at Healthyish Content have sat on the other side of the inbox. We mostly hire former health journalists and editors—and it's the single biggest reason this works.

For example, Tanya Edwards leads the Credibility Engine at Healthyish Content, where she builds digital PR, SEO, and earned media programs that make health brands and their clinicians the sources journalists, search engines, and AI tools trust. She brings 20 years of writing, editing, and content strategy to the job, much of it spent shaping how millions of readers get their health information (whether it was as Editorial Director of AOL Health or as Managing Editor of Yahoo Health).

She also has never stopped reporting. Tanya still files stories for outlets including CNN,  USA Today, Bon Appétit, the Boston Globe, Eater, and BBC Travel. That means she sits on both sides of the pitch every week, which is what makes our Credibility Engine uniquely work: We position clinicians the way an editor would want to find them, and build the kind of credibility that survives scrutiny.

Former journalists know things you can't train into a junior PR coordinator:

• What a usable quote looks like before a single word gets edited

• How deadlines actually work (and that "Friday" often means "Wednesday")

• Which outlets link out to expert sources and which never do

• How to write a subject line an overwhelmed editor will actually open

• How not to be annoying, which is exactly why journalists keep coming back

Journalists remember who made their job easier. Every clean, on-time, on-point response builds a relationship that makes the next placement easier.

"Oh, our PR firm does this"

Okay, so it’s true every PR and comms firm will tell you they do this. And technically, many do! In practice, it usually looks like the most junior person on the account, squeezed between the press release, the launch plan, and the monthly report, spending a sliver of their week on expert sourcing.

That's not a knock on them. It's a rational allocation. To an agency built around big earned-media moments, a two-sentence quote in a health explainer is a rounding error. To us, it's the whole job. That focus is why we get more volume, better quotes, and more links out of the same clinicians.

It's a different scoreboard, too. A lot of PR reporting still leans on impressions and "potential reach." We track links, referring domains, domain rating, and where your brand shows up in AI answers—because those are what actually move rankings and AI visibility.

To be clear: keep your PR firm for the big swings if you want to. We’re pro-PR at Healthyish Content! The funding announcement, the crisis, the NYT profile. The Credibility Engine is built to run underneath all that as an effective credibility-building tactic. It doesn’t have to be either/or.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Radial: from invisible to a go-to source

Radial runs a national network of interventional psychiatry clinics—TMS, Spravato, ketamine—in the emerging category of “brain medicine” where trust is everything and awareness is low. When we started working together in mid-2025, Radial had essentially no search footprint: a domain rating of 7 and just 72 referring domains.

We launched what's now the Credibility Engine in November 2025, running alongside our Editorial Engine. Here's where things stand essentially a year later:

As of this week, Radial's DR sits at 39!

It’s worth saying these numbers reflect both Healthyish Content engines working together—content building authority on-site, credibility building it off-site. I won't pretend you can cleanly separate the two. 

Nonetheless, the placements tell the off-site story in an epic way: Self, Everyday Health (multiple times), Prevention, Yahoo Health (multiple times), CNET, Medscape, U.S. News & World Report, Real Simple (multiple times), Vice (multiple times) and more—high-authority domains that both Google and LLMs lean on heavily. Radial's marketing manager, Emery Wright, put it better than I can: "They're getting our doctors quoted in external publications every week, which builds domain authority and credibility in a way most content partners don't think about."

Prosper: when the right clinician meets the right story

Prosper Health provides diagnosis and therapy for autistic adults—a population that's been badly underserved and, for a long time, barely covered.

Their chief clinical officer, Rachel Loftin, PhD, is exactly the kind of source journalists dream about: trained at the Yale Child Study Center, formerly on the editorial board of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, and licensed to practice across multiple states. Within the initial engagement, Prosper's clinicians landed in Upworthy (DR 80, twice) and Psychology.org (DR 74), SheKnows (DR 82), Vice (DR  91), EatingWell (DR 85), and more—and Rachel even did an on-camera interview with PBS.

Remember when I said this won't usually get you on TV? Usually. With Credibility Building, word gets out there, and the team at a PBS program knew we had the best expert to speak to topics around neurodiversity, so they contacted Healthyish, and Dr. Rachel Loftin appeared on A World of Difference for PBS.

The Bottom Line

The Credibility Engine isn't complicated. Find clinicians who say interesting things. Train them to say those things fast, in plain English. Answer every relevant request. Pitch every relevant trend. Track everything. Then, repeat—every single day, for months.

That last part is the whole game. Most companies do this for a few weeks, but almost nobody does it for a year. The person running it gets pulled onto a launch. Clinicians stop responding because nobody closes the loop. The tracker goes stale. The PR agency prioritizes other things. And the compounding never kicks in.

In a world where AI decides which health brands to trust based on who else trusts them, that compounding IS the point. Links, citations, and mentions are the raw material of AI visibility—and right now, most of your competitors aren't even collecting them.

So steal this playbook. Seriously. Or, if you'd rather have a team of former health journalists run it for you every day—with a 500+ journalist list and the obsessive focus a PR firm can't afford to give it, well that's exactly what we do.

Ready to turn your clinicians into your biggest credibility asset? Reach out.