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Amol Ghemud Published: February 18, 2026
Summary
AI chatbots get medical information wrong 32% of the time, and your hospital’s clinical expertise isn’t being cited to correct it. When patients trust ChatGPT over your specialists, the risk isn’t just lost revenue. It’s patient harm. One in six American adults now asks ChatGPT for medical advice at least once a month, according to an Oxford University study published in Nature Medicine in February 2026. That’s roughly 55 million people bypassing clinical professionals for their first medical opinion every 30 days.
Healthcare brands that don’t actively manage their AI presence are outsourcing their clinical reputation to algorithms that hallucinate nearly half the time. The brands that build citation authority now will earn the trust that non-compliant competitors never will.
Medical disclaimer: This article provides general information about AI-generated health content and its implications for healthcare organizations. It does not constitute medical advice, clinical guidance, or treatment recommendations. All healthcare marketing must comply with CDSCO regulations, NABH standards, and applicable medical advertising guidelines. For medical information, patients should consult licensed healthcare providers.
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Why healthcare brands that ignore AI citation risk are outsourcing their clinical reputation to algorithms that hallucinate nearly a third of the time
A 37-year-old father in Ireland named Warren Tierney had a persistent sore throat. He didn’t book a doctor’s appointment. He asked ChatGPT. The AI told him cancer was “highly unlikely.” He kept asking ChatGPT instead of seeing a physician. By the time he finally visited an emergency department, he had stage four cancer.
This isn’t a one-off horror story. It’s your new patient intake reality.
The numbers are accelerating. Menlo Ventures reported that 61% of American adults used AI in the first half of 2025. Searches for “AI Doctor” increased 129.8% in 2024 compared to 2023. And 58% of consumers now use generative AI for product and service recommendations, up from just 25% in 2023.
Here’s what this means for your healthcare organization: your patients are forming medical opinions before they ever contact you. They’re walking into consultations with AI-generated diagnoses, treatment expectations, and cost assumptions. Some of those are accurate. Many are not. And when the AI gets it wrong, your clinical team spends time correcting misinformation instead of treating patients.
The patient journey has fundamentally changed. It used to be: symptom, Google search, doctor visit. Now it’s: symptom, ChatGPT conversation, self-diagnosis, then maybe a doctor visit. Your brand either shows up in that AI conversation or it doesn’t. Right now, for most healthcare providers, it doesn’t.
What happens when AI gets your treatment information wrong
When ChatGPT provides inaccurate information about a treatment your hospital offers, three things break simultaneously.
Patient safety degrades. A February 2026 study published in The Lancet Digital Health by Mount Sinai researchers found that leading AI systems mistakenly repeat false health information 32% of the time. When fake medical claims were phrased in authoritative language, such as “an expert says this is true,” AI models accepted them 34.6% of the time. These aren’t edge cases. They’re systematic failures in how AI processes medical content.
ChatGPT’s diagnostic accuracy is worse than a coin toss. A study assessing 150 clinical case studies from Medscape found that GPT-3.5 gave a correct diagnosis only 49% of the time. Lead researcher Dr. Rebecca Payne from Oxford stated plainly: “AI just isn’t ready to take on the role of the physician. Patients need to be aware that asking a large language model about their symptoms can be dangerous.”
Your clinical reputation takes invisible damage. When a patient arrives at your cardiology department convinced they need a specific procedure because ChatGPT recommended it, your cardiologist now has two jobs: diagnose the actual condition and undo the AI’s recommendation. That interaction creates friction. Your NPS scores drop for reasons that never appear in your patient feedback surveys.
Your competitive position shifts to aggregators. When AI gets your treatment information wrong, it’s usually because it’s relying on aggregator content rather than your clinical expertise. Practo’s description of cardiac rehabilitation might be broadly accurate, but miss the specific protocol innovations your hospital has developed. The AI doesn’t know the difference. It cites what it can find, and aggregators are easier to find.
This is the core problem. Your hospital’s 20 years of cardiac surgery excellence is invisible to AI, while a health platform’s generic procedure overview gets cited as authoritative. The patient trusts the AI citation. The AI trusts the aggregator. Your expertise never enters the conversation.
Why aggregators win AI citations over clinical experts
The aggregator problem in healthcare AI citations isn’t about content quality. It’s about content architecture.
Health aggregators like Practo, 1mg, WebMD, and Healthline have built content systems optimized for machine consumption. They cover thousands of conditions with consistent formatting, clear structure, and comprehensive depth. Their content isn’t necessarily better than your hospital’s clinical expertise. But it’s more readable by AI systems.
Your orthopedic department has a surgeon who has performed 3,000 hip replacements with a 98.2% success rate. That expertise lives in surgical outcomes data, patient records, and the surgeon’s professional reputation. None of that is visible to ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overview system.
The aggregator advantage can be broken down into four structural factors.
Coverage breadth matters because Practo covers 500+ medical conditions, while your hospital might publish clinical content about 30 conditions in your specialties. From an AI training perspective, the aggregator appears more comprehensive. AI systems interpret breadth as authority, even when depth tells a different story.
Content freshness matters because aggregators update content systematically with editorial teams dedicated to refreshing medical content monthly. Most hospital websites update clinical content only when forced to by regulatory changes. AI systems place a heavy weight on recency in medical content because outdated health information poses a safety risk.
Structured data matters because aggregators implement medical schema markup, FAQ structures, and content hierarchies that AI systems can parse efficiently. Your hospital’s clinical guides might contain superior medical information, but if they’re published as unstructured PDFs or locked behind patient portals, AI systems can’t access them.
Author verification at scale matters because large health platforms maintain databases of verified medical reviewers. Each piece of content carries author credentials, review dates, and editorial standards. Your hospital might have world-class specialists, but if their credentials aren’t structured in a way AI systems can verify, that expertise is invisible.
The good news: clinical authority is harder to fake than content volume. When you build the right digital infrastructure around your actual clinical expertise, AI systems recognize authentic medical authority. An aggregator can publish 500 condition guides, but it can’t produce the surgical outcomes data, the peer-reviewed publications, or the institutional certifications your hospital has already earned. The gap isn’t capability. It’s infrastructure.
The GEO framework for medical accuracy: how to become AI’s trusted source
Generative Engine Optimization for healthcare isn’t about gaming AI algorithms. It’s about making your existing clinical authority visible to the systems patients are already using for medical decisions.
The framework has three phases, and the order matters.
Start by auditing your existing clinical content through the lens of AI readability. Take your top 20 condition and treatment pages and assess each one: Is the author a named clinician with verifiable credentials? Does the content cite primary clinical sources? Is the information current and dated? Is it structured with clear headings that match patient search queries? Is it accessible to crawlers?
Most healthcare organizations find that 80% of their clinical content fails at least three of these criteria. The fix isn’t rewriting content. It’s restructuring existing clinical expertise for use by machines.
When upGrowth worked with Digbi Health, the first step was separating clinical education from promotional content. Digbi’s nutrition guides were clinically sound but structurally invisible to AI. By restructuring content around verified author credentials, primary-source citations, and clear clinical-versus-commercial boundaries, Digbi achieved a 500% increase in organic traffic in three months.
Phase 2: authority signal development (weeks 5-12)
This is where you translate your hospital’s real-world clinical reputation into digital signals AI systems can verify. It includes creating structured author profiles for your key clinicians with board certifications, publication records, and institutional affiliations. It also includes implementing medical schema markup (MedicalWebPage, MedicalCondition, Physician) that connects your content to verifiable credential databases. And building external authority through clinician publications, clinical network participation, and professional society visibility.
NABH-accredited hospitals have a built-in advantage here. That accreditation is exactly the kind of institutional trust signal AI systems look for when evaluating medical sources. But most NABH-accredited hospitals don’t surface that credential in structured data that AI systems can parse. The accreditation is represented in PDF certificates and wall plaques, not in schema markup or digital authority signals.
Phase 3: AI monitoring and correction (ongoing)
Once your clinical content is structured for AI consumption, you need to monitor what AI systems actually say about your hospital, your treatments, and your specialties. Set up weekly monitoring for your top 20 condition and treatment queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude. Track whether you’re being cited, whether citations are accurate, and whether competitors or aggregators are being cited instead.
When you find inaccuracies, you have a correction pathway. For Google AI Overviews, you can submit feedback and optimize your content to provide the correct answer AI should cite. For ChatGPT and Perplexity, the correction comes through building stronger content authority that outweighs the inaccurate sources currently being cited. This isn’t a one-time fix. It’s an ongoing clinical content operations function.
Your immediate action plan: audit, correct, and protect
Days 1-2: AI accuracy audit. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Claude about your hospital’s top 5 specialties. Document every response. Note which cite your hospital, which cite competitors, which cite aggregators, and which provide inaccurate information about your services. This audit typically reveals 3-5 critical inaccuracies and 10-15 gaps where your expertise is completely invisible.
Days 3-5: priority content fixes. For the critical inaccuracies, create or update clinical content pages that provide the correct information in AI-readable format. Author them with named clinicians. Cite primary sources. Date everything. Add medical disclaimers. Implement Article and MedicalWebPage schema markup. These pages become your correction mechanism.
Days 6-10: author credential infrastructure. Build structured author profiles for your top 5 clinicians. Include full name, credentials, board certifications, years of experience, institutional affiliations, publications, and specialty focus. Implement Person schema markup to connect these profiles to the clinical content they’ve authored. This single step can shift AI citation behavior more than any other technical change.
Days 11-15: aggregator gap analysis. Compare your clinical content against what Practo, 1mg, and other aggregators publish for your specialties. Create a content roadmap that matches the breadth of aggregators in your specialties while maintaining the clinical depth they can’t replicate.
Ongoing: weekly AI monitoring. Set up a weekly check on your top 10 medical queries across all major AI platforms. Track citation changes, accuracy improvements, and new misinformation. It takes 30 minutes per week and prevents the kind of invisible brand damage that compounds over months.
Your clinical reputation took decades to build
Don’t let it become invisible to the systems your patients trust most. Healthcare organizations that start this process now will have a 6-12-month compounding advantage over competitors who wait. AI citation authority builds slowly but permanently.
upGrowth works with healthcare organizations to build the clinical content infrastructure that earns AI citations and protects brand reputation. From AI accuracy audits and physician schema implementation to ongoing citation monitoring, our healthcare marketing services are built specifically to meet the compliance and authority requirements of healthcare content. If you want to understand where your clinical content stands today and what it would take to become citation-ready, the first step is a structured diagnostic.
1. Can AI chatbots actually harm patients with wrong medical advice?
Yes. AI chatbots get medical information wrong approximately 32% of the time, according to a February 2026 Mount Sinai study in The Lancet Digital Health. The Warren Tierney case demonstrates real harm: a patient delayed a cancer diagnosis because ChatGPT assured him cancer was “highly unlikely.” AI diagnostic accuracy runs below 50% on validated clinical cases. Patients acting on incorrect AI medical advice face delayed diagnoses, inappropriate self-treatment, and dangerous medication interactions.
2. How do I know if AI is providing wrong information about my hospital?
Conduct a manual audit. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini about your hospital’s specialties, treatments, and doctors. Document every response. Most healthcare organizations discover 3-5 critical inaccuracies and 10-15 visibility gaps in their first audit. There’s no automated tool that comprehensively tracks AI accuracy about individual healthcare providers yet, so manual monitoring is essential.
3. Why does ChatGPT cite Practo instead of my hospital for conditions we specialize in?
AI systems prioritize sources with consistent formatting, comprehensive coverage, structured data, and verified author credentials. Aggregators like Practo cover hundreds of conditions with standardized content architecture. Your hospital might have superior clinical expertise in your specialties, but if that expertise isn’t structured for AI consumption (schema markup, named authors, primary source citations), AI systems default to the aggregator’s broader, more accessible content.
4. Is this a HIPAA or data privacy concern?
Partially. Health data shared with ChatGPT is not protected by HIPAA. Unlike conversations with physicians, there is no legal privilege covering patient-AI interactions. Patients often share sensitive symptoms and medical histories with AI chatbots without understanding these privacy implications. For healthcare organizations, the concern is reputational and clinical rather than directly regulatory, but compliance teams should monitor how patients interact with AI about your services.
5. How long does it take to fix AI misinformation about our brand?
Technical fixes (content restructuring, schema markup, author profiles) can be implemented in 2-4 weeks. AI citation changes typically appear within 4-8 weeks for real-time AI search engines like Perplexity. ChatGPT citation changes take longer (3-6 months) because they depend on updates to the training data. Full authority development, where AI systems consistently cite your hospital as a trusted source, takes 6-12 months of sustained content and authority work.
6. Should we report AI medical misinformation to the platform?
Yes, use available feedback mechanisms (ChatGPT has a thumbs-down button, and Google AI Overviews has a feedback option). But don’t rely on platform corrections as your primary strategy. The more effective approach is to build your own content authority so that AI systems cite your accurate information rather than inaccurate sources. Platform-level corrections are reactive and temporary. Content authority is proactive and permanent.
For Curious Minds
AI citation risk is the danger that AI models will cite inaccurate, generic, or outdated medical information from third-party sources instead of your organization's expert clinical content. This outsources your reputation to algorithms that cannot discern quality, directly threatening the trust you have built with patients because they arrive with flawed expectations based on what an AI like ChatGPT told them. This erosion of authority happens invisibly, before a patient ever speaks to your team.
The core issue is that when AI provides information, it appears authoritative, yet the source is often a content aggregator, not a clinical expert. A study in The Lancet Digital Health found that AI models mistakenly repeat false health information 32% of the time. This leads to three primary problems for your organization:
Patient Safety is Compromised: Patients may delay seeking real care or demand inappropriate treatments based on AI hallucinations.
Clinical Friction Increases: Your physicians must spend valuable consultation time de-bunking AI-generated misinformation instead of focusing on diagnosis and treatment.
Competitive Disadvantage Grows: Your specialized protocols and superior outcomes become invisible, while aggregators like WebMD are presented as the default source of truth, diminishing your market position.
Managing this risk requires a strategic shift from creating patient-facing content to architecting clinical information specifically for AI consumption. Understanding how to make your expertise the most citable source is the new frontier in healthcare marketing and reputation management.
The patient journey has transformed from a simple search-and-find model to a complex, conversational one where patients form strong medical opinions before ever contacting a clinician. Instead of Googling symptoms, patients now engage in dialogue with an AI, receiving diagnoses and treatment plans from a machine. This means they no longer arrive as a blank slate; they come to you with a pre-formed, AI-generated diagnosis, which research shows is correct just 49% of the time for GPT-3.5.
This new reality has profound implications for that critical first consultation. Your clinical team is no longer just diagnosing a condition but also negotiating with a patient's AI-informed beliefs. Key changes include:
Shift in Information Authority: The patient may grant initial authority to the AI's output, viewing your physician as a second opinion to either confirm or deny what ChatGPT has already told them.
Increased Misinformation: Your team must now be prepared to correct detailed and specific inaccuracies about your hospital's treatments, which the AI may have misrepresented by citing a generic source like Practo.
Altered Patient Expectations: Patients arrive with assumptions about everything from the necessity of a procedure to its cost, creating potential for friction and dissatisfaction if your expert assessment differs.
Effectively navigating this new journey requires your organization to be present and authoritative within the AI conversation itself, not just on your website. Failing to do so means you are starting every patient relationship from a defensive position.
Information from a health aggregator is designed for breadth, not depth, providing a generic overview that omits crucial, institution-specific details. In contrast, your hospital's content reflects your unique clinical protocols, advanced technology, and superior patient outcomes. An AI citing Practo might describe standard cardiac rehabilitation, but it will completely miss your hospital's innovative, evidence-based recovery program that reduces readmission rates. The AI lacks the ability to discern this critical difference in quality and expertise.
The primary risk is a dangerous oversimplification of care that directly impacts patient choices and outcomes. When an AI presents aggregator content as authoritative, patients lose the ability to make an informed decision based on the factors that actually differentiate clinical excellence. This discrepancy creates several problems:
It commoditizes expertise: The AI's response makes all providers appear the same, eroding the competitive advantage your hospital gained from years of surgical innovation.
It sets incorrect expectations: A patient may arrive expecting a standard procedure, only to be confused or resistant when your specialists recommend a more advanced and appropriate alternative.
It creates a citation gap: The text notes that AI models accepted false claims phrased authoritatively 34.6% of the time, a tactic often used in generic health content.
Your goal must be to structure your expert content so that its unique value is legible to AI, making your protocols the definitive answer. This is how you reclaim the narrative from generic content platforms.
This 32% error rate from the Mount Sinai study is a stark indicator that AI models are not yet reliable sources for medical information, frequently amplifying misinformation rather than correcting it. It demonstrates a systemic failure in how these systems process and verify health content, treating a generic blog post with the same authority as a peer-reviewed clinical paper. For healthcare brands, this statistic is a powerful tool to anchor patient communication strategies in a new reality: you must assume patients have been exposed to flawed information before they ever contact you.
This evidence should prompt a proactive, rather than reactive, approach. Instead of waiting to correct misunderstandings in the exam room, your communication should anticipate them.
Educate patients directly about the documented limitations of AI for medical advice, using clear statistics to build trust in your human experts.
Develop accessible content that directly answers the types of questions patients are asking AI tools like ChatGPT, ensuring your accurate information is available for citation.
Equip your clinical staff with talking points and resources to efficiently and empathetically address AI-generated misinformation.
This data isn't just an academic finding; it's a market signal. It reveals a critical gap in trustworthy information that your brand is uniquely positioned to fill, turning a systemic AI weakness into a strategic advantage for building patient trust.
The 49% accuracy figure shows that using GPT-3.5 for a diagnosis is statistically worse than a coin toss, a fact horrifically illustrated by the case of Warren Tierney. His story moves the problem from a theoretical risk to a life-and-death reality. He received false reassurance from an algorithm, delaying critical medical intervention until his cancer reached stage four. This case exemplifies the ultimate danger: AI's inability to recognize urgency, nuance, or the need for physical examination, which are the cornerstones of responsible medical practice.
This tragic example highlights several tangible dangers that healthcare providers must address.
The Illusion of Authority: AI delivers its probabilistic guesses with confident, authoritative language, which can mislead a worried patient into a false sense of security.
The Absence of Follow-up: Unlike a physician, an AI does not ask clarifying questions, recommend tests, or schedule a follow-up if symptoms persist.
The Cost of Delay: As seen in the case, the most significant danger is the delay in seeking professional care. For progressive diseases like cancer, this delay can be the difference between a treatable condition and a terminal diagnosis.
This is why your organization's messaging must clearly and urgently differentiate between AI as an informational tool and your clinicians as diagnostic experts. The evidence shows that relying on tools like ChatGPT for diagnosis is a gamble that patients cannot afford to take.
Health aggregators win AI citations not because their content is more clinically accurate, but because it is architecturally superior for AI consumption. Their entire business model is based on discoverability, so they have perfected creating content that is easy for algorithms to find, parse, and reference. This is a technical advantage, not a clinical one. With searches for "AI Doctor" increasing by 129.8% in 2024, this visibility gap is becoming a critical competitive issue.
The key reasons for their success are rooted in their content systems:
High-Volume, Broad-Topic Content: Aggregators like Healthline produce vast libraries of content covering nearly every conceivable medical topic, creating a massive surface area for AI to crawl.
Structured Data and Schema: They heavily use structured data that explicitly tells algorithms what the content is about, making it easier to process.
Internal Linking and Authority Signals: Their sites are built with a dense web of internal links and have high domain authority, which AI models interpret as signals of trustworthiness, even if the content is generic.
In essence, aggregators have built an information architecture that speaks the language of algorithms, while most hospitals have built websites that speak only to humans. To compete, your organization must learn to do both.
To ensure your expert content is cited by AI, you must shift your strategy from simply publishing information to architecting it for algorithmic consumption. The goal is to make your specialized knowledge more discoverable and understandable to models like ChatGPT than the generic overviews on aggregator sites. This involves treating AI as a primary audience, which is crucial as 58% of consumers now use AI for service recommendations.
Here is a three-step plan to begin this process:
Conduct an "AI-Readiness" Audit: Analyze your highest-value service line pages. Identify where your content is unstructured, buried in PDFs, or lacks clear, declarative statements about your protocols and outcomes. Compare this to how an aggregator like WebMD structures similar topics.
Implement Structured Data: Work with your web team to wrap key clinical information in appropriate schema.org markup, such as `MedicalProcedure` or `MedicalCondition`. This acts as a clear label for the AI.
Create a "Clinical Expertise" Hub: Develop a dedicated section of your site that centralizes your unique protocols, clinical trial results, and physician expertise, structured with clear headings and concise summaries.
This approach is not about dumbing down your content but about making your intelligence machine-readable. By focusing on structure and clarity, you can begin to reclaim your hospital's voice in the age of AI.
Clinicians can address AI-generated misinformation by validating the patient's proactive approach while gently redirecting them toward expert-led diagnosis, a method we can call "Acknowledge, Educate, and Co-create." The key is to avoid being dismissive, which can damage rapport. Instead, frame the conversation as a partnership where AI information is a starting point, but clinical expertise is required for an accurate conclusion, especially since tools like GPT-3.5 are correct only 49% of the time.
A practical, stepwise approach for your physicians includes:
Acknowledge and Empathize: Start by saying, "I can see you've done a lot of research, and it's great that you're taking an active role in your health. Let's look at what ChatGPT suggested and compare it to what I'm seeing here."
Educate with Data: Briefly explain the known limitations of AI in medicine. Mention that studies show these tools often make mistakes and lack the ability to conduct a physical exam.
Co-create a Plan: Guide the conversation toward a collaborative diagnostic process. Frame your examination and tests as the necessary next steps to build a complete and accurate picture.
This method reframes the clinician's role from a simple information provider to an expert guide. It respects the patient's initiative while reinforcing the irreplaceable value of professional medical judgment.
This explosive growth in AI adoption for recommendations signals a fundamental shift in how patients discover and select healthcare providers. It means your brand's visibility and reputation are no longer just determined by your website's search engine ranking. Your new, most influential marketer is an AI, and patient acquisition will increasingly depend on your ability to be favorably represented in its responses.
The implications for future healthcare marketing strategies are significant:
The Rise of "AI Optimization": A new discipline will emerge, focused on structuring clinical content to be easily citable and preferred by AI models like those powering ChatGPT.
Reputation Management Becomes Proactive: Hospitals will need to constantly monitor how AI models are describing their services. Correcting an AI's "hallucination," which can occur up to 32% of the time on health topics, will become a core marketing function.
The Decline of Traditional Funnels: The linear patient journey is breaking. The AI conversation combines all stages at once, making the point of AI contact the most critical moment for patient acquisition.
Healthcare providers who fail to adapt will essentially become invisible to a growing majority of prospective patients. Your future marketing success depends on your ability to win the trust of the algorithms that have already won the trust of your patients.
The proliferation of "AI Doctor" tools will transform physicians from being the initial point of contact to becoming expert validators and correctors of pre-existing, AI-generated information. Patients will increasingly arrive at appointments not with a list of symptoms, but with a full AI-generated differential diagnosis and treatment plan. This shifts the core function of the initial consultation from pure discovery to a more complex process of verification, education, and, frequently, de-escalation of patient anxiety caused by inaccurate AI outputs.
This evolution will require a new set of skills and focus areas for clinicians:
Medical Information Counselors: Physicians will need to become adept at quickly evaluating AI-generated reports and clearly communicating their validity.
Masters of Empathy and Trust: As patients bring more external information into the exam room, the physician's ability to build rapport and establish trust as the ultimate authority will become even more critical.
Navigators of Complexity: Rather than starting from scratch, doctors will need to untangle often-plausible but incorrect information from sources like ChatGPT.
The physician's role will elevate from an information gatekeeper to a sophisticated sense-maker. Their value will be defined less by what they know and more by their ability to apply that knowledge to correct and contextualize the information patients bring with them.
The fundamental problem is that the negative interaction occurs outside of your ecosystem, in a private chat between a patient and an AI. When a patient arrives with flawed expectations from ChatGPT and your clinician corrects them, the resulting friction is attributed to your hospital, not the AI. This damage is "invisible" because it never shows up in patient satisfaction surveys, which cannot capture pre-visit sentiment shaped by an algorithm that has a 32% error rate on health facts.
The strategic solution is to move from a reactive to a proactive reputation management model by directly engaging with the AI information landscape.
Make the Invisible Visible: Implement new patient intake questions that specifically ask about prior research, including whether they consulted an AI. This surfaces the issue.
Create Authoritative, Citable Content: The most effective solution is to solve the problem at the source by developing and structuring your clinical content to be the definitive answer for AI models, reducing reliance on aggregators like Healthline.
Monitor Your AI Brand Presence: Actively query major AI models about your key services to understand what they are saying about you and identify falsehoods.
You can no longer afford to manage only the reputation you can see. The solution is to build an information architecture so strong that it becomes the ground truth for the algorithms shaping patient perception.
AI hallucinations are not random glitches; they are a core characteristic of how large language models work. These models are designed to predict the next most probable word in a sequence to create fluent text, not to verify factual accuracy. When an AI provides incorrect medical advice, it's because it has assembled a statistically plausible answer from training data that includes both expert sources and inaccurate content from aggregators like Practo.
The most effective solution is to become the most trustworthy and algorithmically accessible source of information on your areas of expertise. Since you cannot fix the AI's core architecture, you must influence the data it relies on.
The Problem: The AI is citing generic, low-quality, or outdated information because that content is structured for easy discovery. A study showed diagnostic accuracy can be as low as 49%.
The Solution: Your organization must create and structure its clinical content to be the most authoritative and easily citable source for AI models. This involves a technical strategy of using structured data, clear semantic language, and content designed to directly answer patient queries.
By making your expertise the easiest answer for an AI to find, you are not just performing marketing; you are building a digital public health infrastructure to protect patients.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.