How Truemed Used GEO to Drive 404% Non-Branded Search Growth in Just Three Months
- Derek Flanzraich
- 15 hours ago
- 9 min read
Summary:
As AI-powered search reshapes how people discover information, Truemed set out to win a new category of visibility: the conversational questions people ask large language models (LLMs) about HSA and FSA eligibility.
Healthyish Content developed a focused Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) program (yes, sometimes also called Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO) that identifies long-tail AI queries and then publishes the clearest, most authoritative answers on the internet for those questions.
The strategy quickly paid off.
Within a few months:
🚀 AI brand mentions increased nearly 5x (710 to 3,400)
🚀 Truemed’s content began appearing across ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews
🚀 Truemed gained leading visibility across key non-branded HSA/FSA prompts, overtaking competitors
The result: Truemed expanded its reach beyond traditional SEO and positioned itself as a trusted source across the emerging ecosystem of AI-powered discovery.
Here’s how we did it:
The Challenge
Winning the next battleground: AI-driven search
When Truemed partnered with Healthyish Content, the goal was to build a strong search presence around one of the most confusing areas of consumer health finance: what actually qualifies for HSA and FSA reimbursement.
“We had some content momentum on the Truemed blog before Healthyish, but no real strategy and no clear path to showing up for the terms that actually mattered to our business,” says Kennedy Coleman, Truemed’s Senior Marketing Manager.
“Healthyish came in and built us a proper SEO strategy from the ground up, giving us the tools to generate meaningful traffic through the kind of comprehensive ‘best-answer on the Internet’ content that earns rankings.”
And it worked. Building on early content momentum, Healthyish Content developed a structured SEO strategy that helped Truemed scale its organic presence. By the time GEO launched, the blog was generating 194,000 organic clicks and 6.4 million impressions, establishing a strong foundation in traditional search.
But even as Truemed’s search presence strengthened, the way people were discovering information online was beginning to shift. Instead of typing short keyword searches into Google, more people were asking full questions in natural language—the same way they might ask a friend or prompt an AI tool.
Questions like:
“Can you use an HSA for a sauna?”
“Is red light therapy HSA eligible?”
“Does HSA cover cold plunges?”
And increasingly, those questions weren’t being answered by traditional search results alone. AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity synthesized answers directly, drawing on sources they determine are trustworthy and authoritative—and citing those sources when generating answers.
That shift created a new battleground for visibility.
For Truemed, whose platform sits at the intersection of healthcare, finance, and consumer wellness, the stakes were high. The internet was already full of confusing (and sometimes downright incorrect) information about HSA eligibility. Left unchecked, that meant third-party sites and forums were shaping the narrative around Truemed’s core category.
If Truemed could become the clearest and most trusted source for these answers, it wouldn’t just win traditional rankings. It could become the source AI systems relied on when generating responses.
Healthyish Content saw an opportunity to build exactly that.
The Solution
Building a GEO engine for AI-driven discovery
To compete in this new environment, Healthyish Content didn’t abandon Truemed’s existing SEO strategy. Instead, the team layered a focused GEO program on top of it.
The goal was straightforward: When someone asked an AI system a question about HSA or FSA eligibility, Truemed would still be the best answer available.
But winning highly specific conversational prompts required a more targeted workflow. Together, Healthyish Content’s SEO & GEO Partner team (shouts especially to Ken Roberts) and I built a GEO program designed to systematically tackle the narrow, high-intent questions people were asking AI systems. In other words, Healthyish Content deployed a SWAT team built to win a very specific kind of search.
Step 1: Identify the questions AI users were asking
The GEO program began by analyzing real conversational queries people are asking AI systems using GEO tooling like Semrush and Scrunch (our favorite GEO/AEO-only tool).
Many of these prompts were highly specific long-tail questions that traditional SEO strategies often overlook, but that represent high-intent decision moments for consumers (think “can you use an HSA for probiotics?” versus a broader SEO keyword like “best probiotics for gut health”).
No wonder it’s said AI search visitors convert up to 4.4× more than traditional organic search visitors.
By identifying these conversational prompts early, Healthyish Content could publish content designed to win the answer, not just rank for the keyword.
Step 2: Publish the clearest answer on the internet
Once a prompt was identified, the team set out to publish the clearest, most authoritative explanation available online.
Healthyish Content’s broader SEO framework already emphasizes clear answers, expert sourcing, and structured content—qualities that also help content perform well in AI-driven search. But the GEO program applied those principles in a tighter, question-first format designed to resolve a single eligibility question quickly and definitively.
Step 3: Structure content so AI systems can easily extract answers
So we adapted our existing editorial framework into a question-first architecture designed for both human readability and AI retrieval. Each GEO article was intentionally structured to make answers easy to identify, extract, and cite. Key elements included:
Prompt-aligned titles, URLs, and metadata: Each article was built around a specific conversational query, with titles, meta descriptions, and URLs reflecting the exact phrasing of the prompt to maximize alignment with how people search and how AI systems interpret queries.
Semantic keyword coverage: Content naturally incorporated variations and related phrasings of the core question to improve semantic matching across both traditional search engines and LLM-driven retrieval.
Chunked, scannable content: Articles were broken into short, digestible sections (typically under ~200 words) to improve readability and help AI systems efficiently process and retrieve relevant information without relying on large blocks of text.
Concise, answer-first structure: Each article addressed the core eligibility question immediately, with short, direct explanations designed to surface clearly in summaries, answer boxes, and AI-generated responses.
Structured, machine-readable formatting: Where relevant, information was presented in formats like HTML tables to make key details easier for AI systems to parse and cite (as opposed to less-readable formats, like images).
Expert-backed, authoritative sourcing: Input from physicians, insurance experts, and HSA/FSA administrators—along with citations to IRS guidance and regulatory frameworks—reinforced trust in a category where accuracy is critical.
Testing the GEO model
With the GEO framework in place, the next step was to test whether the approach could reliably generate visibility in AI-driven search environments.
Starting November 22, 2025, Healthyish launched a focused GEO publishing program alongside Truemed’s existing SEO engine. Rather than replacing the broader content strategy, the GEO initiative functioned as a targeted experiment designed to evaluate how AI-focused content performed in real search conditions.
The team began publishing four GEO-focused articles per month: enough to generate meaningful performance signals while still allowing room to refine the approach as results came in.
A smattering of Truemed’s GEO articles
Turning AI prompts into content
Using conversational queries surfaced through Semrush, the team built a pipeline of GEO topics based on real questions people were asking AI systems. Each prompt was converted into a tightly scoped editorial brief built around a single eligibility question.
Unlike Truemed’s traditional SEO articles—which often run 2,000–3,000 words and cover broader topic clusters—GEO pieces were intentionally more focused, typically around 1,000 words. Not because the content was any less comprehensive, but because the scope was narrower. Yes, still the best answer on the Internet!
This format allowed Truemed to systematically publish authoritative answers to high-intent prompts, creating a growing library of content optimized for both traditional search engines and AI-generated responses.
Early Signals
After launching the GEO program in November 2025, we tracked what happened next in Scrunch. And the first signals appeared quickly.
Instead of waiting months for traditional SEO traction, several GEO articles began appearing inside AI-generated search experiences within weeks of publication, including Google AI Overviews.
Monitoring of more than 1,200 non-branded prompts related to HSA and FSA eligibility also showed Truemed beginning to gain visibility across conversational AI queries in its category.
Individual articles also offered early examples of how that visibility appeared in practice:
🚀 Earned non-branded #1 rankings for queries like “can you have a hsa and fsa”🚀 Appeared in AI Overviews for multiple queries🚀 Captured People Also Ask visibility
🚀 Jumped from #81 → #1 ranking for the query “can I have an HSA and FSA”🚀 Appeared as a cited source in AI Overviews for multiple queries
🚀 Appeared as a cited source in AI Overviews for multiple queries🚀 Earned non-branded search visibility within weeks of publishing
Together, these early signals showed that publishing precise, authoritative answers to conversational prompts could help Truemed surface directly inside AI-generated responses—often within weeks of publication.
The Results
GEO visibility scales across AI-driven search
As the GEO program expanded, Truemed’s presence across AI-driven search environments grew rapidly.
One of the clearest indicators was the insane increase in AI brand mentions. Between November 2025 and March 2026, mentions rose from 710 to 3,400, reflecting Truemed content appearing more frequently in answers generated by systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
Semrush AI mentions
Within weeks of publication, multiple GEO articles began appearing directly in AI-generated answer features, including Google AI Overviews:
🚀 An 80% increase in AI Overview citations (35 → 63) across HSA eligibility and reimbursement queries
🚀 Increasing presence across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews
🚀 Growing visibility across 1,200+ monitored non-branded prompts
Truemed content cited directly in a ChatGPT response
Truemed content cited directly in a Gemini response
At the category level, that visibility translated into a measurable competitive advantage:
Truemed leading in AI visibility across monitored B2B prompts
These signals showed that Truemed’s GEO content was being surfaced directly inside the environments where people were asking eligibility questions—not just in traditional search results.
GEO and SEO working together
At the same time, the GEO program reinforced Truemed’s broader SEO engine.
Traditional SEO continued driving broad discovery traffic, while GEO articles answered the precise eligibility questions people asked when deciding whether a purchase qualified. Together, they reinforced Truemed’s authority across the entire search journey, from early education to final eligibility confirmation.
“We started ranking for key terms we hadn’t touched before, and those gains translated directly into meaningful lifts in organic traffic,” Coleman says. “Now, nine months in, we’re really seeing the compounding effect. New articles rank quickly, and even content our internal team produces performs well because of the domain authority Healthyish helped us build.”
During the same 90-day period after GEO launched, SEO metrics improved, too:
🚀 Total impressions from search grew by 344%, surpassing 28 million impressions across the blog
🚀 Total clicks from search increased 90%, reaching more than 382,000 clicks
🚀 Non-branded clicks from search surged 404% (27,332 → 137,721) as Truemed began ranking for high-intent eligibility queries
Truemed’s performance 90 days post-GEO: 328k clicks, 28.8M impressions, referring domains trending up.
Why the strategy worked
Three factors drove the success of the GEO layer:
Authority: By grounding each article in regulatory guidance, IRS rules, and reputable healthcare sources, Truemed’s content signaled credibility to both readers and AI systems synthesizing answers. Those citations acted as trust signals, reinforcing that the explanations were reliable.
Structure: The articles were designed to be easily interpreted by both humans and machines. Clear definitions, direct explanations, and logically organized sections made it easier for AI systems and search engines to extract key information when generating summaries, answer boxes, and AI Overviews.
Intent alignment: Most importantly, the topics matched the questions people were already asking. Instead of competing broadly for attention, the content appeared when users were trying to confirm whether a purchase qualified.
Taken together, these elements created what we think of as Authority Architecture.
Rather than simply publishing content around a topic, each page embedded proof—credible sources, clear explanations, and direct answers—into the structure of the article itself. Over time, that approach compounded, strengthening Truemed’s visibility across both traditional search results and AI-generated answers.
“In our space, everything we publish has to be deeply rooted in our mission while also meeting strict compliance standards, which is a difficult balance to strike,” says Coleman. “Healthyish has walked that line exceptionally well, producing content that ranks strongly, attracts high-intent consumers, and still reflects our brand ethos and regulatory requirements.”
Spotlight: Turning “Is Truemed legit?” into a GEO authority signal
One of the clearest examples of the GEO strategy in action came from a simple but important search query: “Is Truemed legit?”
For companies operating in new or complex categories, questions like this are inevitable.
When people encounter an unfamiliar model—especially one tied to healthcare rules and tax policy—they often turn to search or AI tools to verify whether the service is legitimate.
At the time, search results for this query were inconsistent. Some sources offered partial explanations of Truemed’s model, while others reflected broader confusion about how HSA and FSA eligibility works.
That created a clear GEO opportunity.
Healthyish Content developed this article to answer the question directly and transparently. Instead of avoiding skepticism, the piece addressed it head-on, providing:
A clear answer to the legitimacy question at the top of the page
A transparent explanation of Truemed’s reimbursement model
Citations to IRS guidance and eligibility frameworks
Expert-backed context on HSA and FSA rules
Structured sections addressing common follow-up questions
Within weeks of publishing on February 4, 2026, the page became the dominant source for the query.
🔥 #1 ranking for “Is Truemed legit?”
🔥 Featured snippet / AI Overview inclusion
🔥 AI systems citing the article when answering legitimacy questions about Truemed
The result was more than a ranking win! Instead of letting third-party sites define the narrative, Truemed transformed a skeptical search into a credibility asset—demonstrating how GEO can help brands proactively shape how AI systems and search engines explain their business.
The Google search results for “is Truemed legit” after November 22, 2025.
ChatGPT also now cites the article in its response and mentions the brand as legitimate.
In the age of AI-driven search, winning the answer can matter as much as winning the ranking.
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