Contributors:
Amol Ghemud Published: February 18, 2026
Summary
Google AI Overviews now appear on 51% of health-related searches, according to WebFX’s analysis of over 130,000 health queries. For treatment and procedure queries specifically, BrightEdge December 2025 data shows 100% AI Overview presence, up from 45% in 2023. Seer Interactive’s September 2025 study found organic click-through rates drop 61% when AI Overviews appear (from 1.76% to 0.61%), based on 25.1 million organic impressions.
Healthcare websites are seeing 20 to 30% year-over-year declines in traffic to clinical information pages, while rankings remain stable. The traffic is not declining because your SEO failed. It is declining because Google now answers the patient’s question before they click any result.
Medical Disclaimer: This article discusses digital marketing data and search traffic trends affecting 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.
In This Article
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A Healthcare GEO Data Report by upGrowth Digital
The Healthcare AI Overview Trigger Data
BrightEdge’s December 2025 analysis tracked AI Overview deployment across healthcare query categories over three years. The data shows a systematic expansion that now covers virtually every clinical query type.
Treatment and procedure queries show 100% AI Overview presence, up from 45% in 2023
Pain-related queries show 98% AI Overview presence, up from 58% in 2023
Symptoms and conditions queries show 93% presence, up from 57%
Medical coding queries (ICD-10, CPT) show 90% presence, up from 67%
The pattern is clear. Google is applying AI Overviews to healthcare queries at the highest rate of any category, and the deployment does not vary by search volume. Long-tail, low-volume medical queries now predominantly feature AI-generated responses alongside high-volume ones.
WebFX’s study of over 130,000 health queries found AI-generated summaries appear on 51% of all health-related searches. This aggregate number includes navigational and brand queries where AI Overviews are less common. For informational clinical queries, the trigger rate is significantly higher.
Healthline Media data confirms the publisher’s perspective. 45% of their tracked medical keywords returned AI Overviews by July 2024, and that percentage has continued climbing since. For health publishers and hospital websites, AI competition on core content topics is now the default, not the exception.
The CTR Impact: 61% Organic Click Decline
Seer Interactive’s September 2025 update provides the most rigorous CTR data available. It analyzed 3,119 informational queries across 42 organizations, spanning 25.1 million organic impressions and 1.1 million paid impressions from June 2024 to September 2025.
The headline finding is direct.
Organic CTR dropped from 1.76% to 0.61% when AI Overviews appeared
That is a 61% decline
Paid CTR dropped 68%, falling from 19.7% to 6.34%
The most important nuance is that queries without AI Overviews are declining as well, just more slowly.
Non-AI Overview queries showed 1.62% organic CTR
Still higher than AI Overview queries
But still representing a 41% year-over-year decline
This means the entire search click ecosystem is compressing. AI Overviews accelerate the compression, but even queries without them are delivering fewer clicks than 12 months ago.
Seer’s projection for 2026 is clear. Plan on assuming that CTRs for high-funnel queries will be 20 to 30% lower than current levels. There are no signs of CTR recovery in the data. The decline is structural, not cyclical.
For healthcare specifically, this compounds with the near-universal AI Overview trigger rates on clinical queries. If 100% of treatment queries trigger AI Overviews, and each AI Overview cuts CTR by 61%, the net traffic impact on clinical content pages becomes severe.
A hospital website that generated 10,000 monthly visits from treatment-related queries in 2023 may now be generating 3,000 to 4,000 visits from the same queries in 2026, even with identical rankings.
What Types of Healthcare Traffic Are Most Affected
Not all healthcare website traffic declines equally. The data reveals a clear pattern in which pages lose traffic and which pages hold.
Most affected: Informational clinical content
This includes:
symptom guides
treatment explanations
condition descriptions
recovery timelines
clinical FAQ content
These pages historically accounted for the largest volume of organic traffic to hospital websites. They are now the most affected because AI Overviews provide good enough answers directly in search results.
Some medical sites report a 40-70% drop in traffic for informational content that AI Overviews directly answer.
Moderately affected: Service and department pages
These include pages describing:
hospital departments
service offerings
clinical programs
These pages have a mix of informational and navigational intent. Traffic declines are measurable but less severe because patients seeking specific hospital services often have navigational intent.
Least affected: Local provider searches
This is the most strategically important finding from BrightEdge’s data.
Google completely reversed its approach to local healthcare searches.
In December 2023, 100% of local/provider intent queries had AI Overviews
By December 2025, 0% of local/provider intent queries have AI Overviews
Google decided that queries like:
Orthopedic surgeon near me
Best hospital in Pune
Gynecologist in Mumbai
should be answered by traditional local results such as Maps, local pack, and organic listings rather than AI summaries.
This has a direct implication. Local healthcare SEO remains valuable because Google shields local provider queries from AI Overview cannibalization.
Hospitals investing in:
Google Business Profile optimization
Local keyword targeting
Review management
Local schema markup
are protecting a traffic channel. AI Overviews are not consuming.
Also, least affected: Branded searches
Patients searching for your hospital by name are not impacted by AI Overviews. Brand awareness and direct traffic still work as they always have.
The problem is the patient who has not decided which hospital to visit and is still researching conditions, treatments, and provider options.
That research phase is now being answered by AI.
The Zero-Click Healthcare Problem
AI Overviews compound an already accelerating zero-click trend.
Similarweb data shows zero-click searches increased from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025
Gartner predicts that by 2026, traffic from typical searches will drop by 25%
For healthcare, the zero-click problem is more extreme because health queries are overwhelmingly informational.
A patient searching “what is the recovery time for knee replacement” wants an answer, not a website. When Google provides that answer inside an AI Overview, the search ends.
Zero clicks. Zero visits. Zero conversion opportunity.
Press Gazette, citing Reuters Institute and Chartbeat data, reported that Google search traffic to publishers declined globally by a third in the year to November 2025. Healthcare publishers and hospital websites are part of that decline, and clinical information pages are disproportionately affected because they serve the exact informational intent AI Overviews are designed to satisfy.
The compound effect becomes unavoidable.
89% of healthcare queries trigger AI Overviews (BrightEdge data)
When AI Overviews appear, organic CTR drops 61% (Seer Interactive data)
Zero-click searches reached 69% (Similarweb data)
The traffic model that worked from 2015 to 2023 is structurally broken.
The Citation Opportunity Inside AI Overviews
The data is not purely negative. There is a measurable advantage for healthcare brands that appear in AI Overviews rather than being displaced by them.
Brands cited in AI Overviews earn:
35% more organic clicks
91% more paid clicks
compared to brands not cited.
Even when the user does not click, being cited builds authority and trust. For healthcare, where patient trust determines provider selection, citation visibility has value beyond click-through rates.
The strategic shift is not about trying to recover all the traffic AI Overviews absorbed. It is about earning citation placement inside the AI Overviews themselves.
When Google generates an AI answer for “knee replacement recovery,” your hospital’s clinical data should be the cited source. That citation builds trust, which converts into direct traffic when the patient decides to seek treatment.
This is the core difference between traditional healthcare SEO and healthcare generative engine optimization.
Both matter. But as AI Overviews consume a larger share of healthcare clicks, citation strategy becomes proportionally more valuable.
When upGrowth helped Digbi Health achieve a 500% increase in organic traffic, the approach included optimizing content specifically for AI citations within AI Overviews, not just for ranking. The same methodology applies to any healthcare organization facing AI Overview traffic displacement.
What Healthcare Organizations Should Do With This Data
The data points toward three strategic priorities for hospital marketing teams.
Priority 1: Protect local search visibility
Google removed AI Overviews from local healthcare queries. That makes local SEO one of the few channels where traditional optimization still delivers full click-through value.
This includes:
Google Business Profile completeness
local keyword optimization
review generation and review velocity
local schema markup
location landing pages and provider listings
Priority 2: Build AI Overview citation presence
For clinical queries where AI Overviews are unavoidable, the strategy is not to compete against the AI Overview. The strategy is to be cited inside it.
This requires:
structured clinical content formatting
verified physician authorship
YMYL compliance workflows
E-E-A-T infrastructure that AI systems can validate
evidence-backed medical citations and dated clinical data
Priority 3: Diversify beyond Google search traffic
With Google organic CTR in structural decline, healthcare organizations need AI-attributed visibility from:
ChatGPT
Perplexity
Google AI Overviews
Gemini
other retrieval-based AI systems
Healthcare marketing in 2026 requires multi-platform AI visibility, not dependence on Google alone.
For hospital marketing teams evaluating their 2026 strategy, the first step is measuring the AI Overview’s impact on your own traffic. Pull Search Console data for clinical keywords. If impressions are stable but clicks are declining, AI Overviews are the cause.
That impression-to-click gap quantifies the opportunity GEO addresses.
Try it with upGrowth
If your hospital or healthtech platform wants to compete in AI-driven patient discovery, you need more than content. You need a clinical authority infrastructure that AI engines can verify and cite.
upGrowth helps healthcare brands build compliant GEO systems across physician credibility, YMYL-safe content, schema implementation, and AI citation monitoring.
The data in this report is not a projection. It is a measurement of what has already happened. Google AI Overviews trigger on 100% of treatment queries and cut organic CTR by 61%. Healthcare websites are experiencing traffic declines that will continue regardless of how aggressively they optimize for traditional SEO.
Hospitals that recognize this structural shift and invest in AI citation visibility, local search protection, and a multi-platform AI presence will maintain patient acquisition volume. Those who keep optimizing for a traffic model that no longer works will watch the decline accelerate.
FAQs
1. How much traffic has Google AI Overviews taken from healthcare websites?
The impact varies by content type. Informational clinical pages such as symptoms, treatments, and recovery guides are seeing 20 to 40% traffic declines year-over-year with stable rankings. Some medical publishers report up to 70% drops for pages directly answered by AI Overviews. Local provider pages and branded searches are minimally affected because Google removed AI Overviews from local healthcare queries.
2. Will Google AI Overviews continue to expand in healthcare?
Yes. BrightEdge data shows AI Overview presence in healthcare growing from 45 to 67% across query types in 2023 to 90 to 100% in December 2025. Seer Interactive found no signs of CTR recovery and recommends planning for 20 to 30% further CTR decline in 2026. The trend is acceleration, not stabilization.
3. Do AI Overviews affect appointment bookings or just informational traffic?
Direct appointment booking traffic is less affected because patients with booking intent often search by hospital name or location, both of which Google shields from AI Overviews. The impact is on the research phase of the patient journey, where patients compare treatment options, understand procedures, and evaluate hospitals before deciding where to book. That research phase is increasingly happening within AI Overviews rather than on hospital websites.
4. Is local SEO still worth investing in for hospitals?
Yes. Google’s decision to remove AI Overviews from 100% of local healthcare queries makes local SEO one of the highest ROI channels remaining. Google Business Profile optimization, local review management, and local keyword targeting deliver full click-through value because AI Overviews do not compete for those queries.
5. Can getting cited in AI Overviews actually increase traffic?
Yes, but with caveats. Brands cited in AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks than non-cited brands. The citation builds trust, which converts into clicks when the patient needs more detail than the AI Overview provides. Traffic from clinical queries will still be lower than pre-AI Overview levels, but cited brands retain significantly more of it than non-cited competitors.
For Curious Minds
Data from BrightEdge shows Google's AI Overviews have systematically expanded to cover nearly all clinical query types, representing a fundamental shift in the search landscape. This is not a random test but a deliberate strategy, making AI-generated answers the default for users seeking health information and directly competing with publisher content. The analysis through December 2025 indicates a near-total saturation for critical topics. For example, treatment and procedure queries now have a 100% AI Overview presence, a massive jump from 45% in 2023. This pattern holds for other high-intent areas like pain-related searches (98%) and symptom queries (93%). This trend signifies that the traditional model of attracting traffic through informational content is now under direct threat, forcing a re-evaluation of how healthcare organizations provide value and capture audiences. Understanding this full-scale deployment is the first step in building a resilient digital strategy.
The rise of AI Overviews has fundamentally changed the user's path to information for clinical queries, creating a new layer of competition directly on the search results page. Your content no longer just competes with other websites but with Google's own AI-generated summary. Data confirms this is a near-universal challenge. According to BrightEdge, the AI Overview presence for medical coding queries (ICD-10, CPT) has climbed to 90%. Similarly, symptoms and conditions queries now show a 93% presence. This means for the vast majority of these searches, users get an immediate answer without needing to click through. Publishers like Healthline Media saw 45% of their tracked keywords trigger these features by mid-2024. This forces you to rethink your content's purpose beyond just providing a direct answer, focusing instead on unique insights, trust signals, and calls-to-action that an AI cannot replicate. Discover how to adapt your content in the full report.
The Seer Interactive study provides stark, quantitative evidence of the damage AI Overviews inflict on search traffic. Its analysis of over 25 million impressions found that the appearance of an AI Overview causes organic click-through rates (CTR) to plummet by a staggering 61%, dropping from 1.76% to just 0.61%. This demonstrates that AI-generated summaries are effectively intercepting the user journey. The impact extends to paid search as well, where CTR fell by an even greater 68%. This data forces a major recalculation of ROI for both SEO and PPC campaigns. A hospital that previously relied on high rankings for informational queries must now accept that even top positions deliver a fraction of their former traffic. This requires a strategic pivot from chasing high-volume keywords to targeting lower-funnel, conversion-focused terms where user intent is less likely to be satisfied by a simple AI summary. The complete data offers a clearer picture of this new reality.
This dramatic decline is the direct result of a two-part problem revealed by the data. It's a compounding effect where nearly every relevant search triggers a feature that drastically reduces the likelihood of a click. First, BrightEdge's analysis shows that 100% of treatment-related queries now feature an AI Overview. This means there is no escaping the feature for this entire category of content. Second, Seer Interactive's research quantifies the damage, showing that the presence of an AI Overview causes a 61% decline in organic CTR. When you apply a 61% traffic loss to a content category that is now 100% affected by the feature, the outcome is a catastrophic drop in visits. This illustrates why understanding both the deployment rate and the per-query impact is essential for accurately forecasting and responding to changes in the search landscape. This example is not a hypothetical outlier but a direct calculation based on the provided market data.
The data from Seer Interactive reveals a critical distinction about the current search environment: while AI Overviews are the primary driver of traffic loss, a wider "click compression" is affecting all queries. Specifically, queries with AI Overviews saw organic CTR fall by 61% to 0.61%. However, even queries without AI Overviews experienced a significant 41% year-over-year CTR decline, settling at 1.62%. This comparison shows two things. First, AI Overviews drastically accelerate traffic decline. Second, the entire search ecosystem is becoming less "clickable" as users find answers on the results page itself through various features. This implies that simply avoiding keywords that trigger AI Overviews is not a viable long-term strategy. Instead, healthcare marketers must build brand recall and target high-intent queries where users are more motivated to click through for detailed, authoritative information. The full analysis explores how to navigate this contracting search landscape.
The projection from Seer Interactive of a further 20-30% CTR decline by 2026 signals a permanent change, not a temporary dip, requiring immediate strategic adjustments. The era of relying on high-volume, top-of-funnel informational content for traffic acquisition is ending. Healthcare organizations must now shift their focus from traffic volume to traffic quality and conversion. Key adjustments include:
Prioritizing Bottom-Funnel Content: Focus resources on service line pages, physician bios, appointment scheduling flows, and content that directly supports patient acquisition.
Building Direct Traffic Channels: Invest in email newsletters, branded content, and community engagement to build an audience that comes directly to your site, bypassing search.
Optimizing for Entity and Brand: Ensure your organization, locations, and physicians are clearly defined entities that Google can understand, which builds authority and can appear in different SERP features.
The data, including the reported 61% CTR drop on AI-affected queries, confirms that waiting to adapt is no longer an option. The full report details how to begin this strategic pivot.
The 100% AI Overview presence on treatment queries is fundamentally reconditioning patient behavior, training users to expect instant, summarized answers without visiting a website. This shift diminishes the role of traditional informational blog posts in the early stages of patient research. However, it also creates new opportunities for savvy hospital marketers. With basic information commoditized by AI, the new value proposition is trust, expertise, and direct access to care. The opportunity lies in creating content and experiences that AI cannot replicate, such as patient testimonials, video interviews with surgeons, detailed cost and insurance guides, and interactive tools for assessing treatment options. Marketers should focus on converting the user's next step, moving from "what is this procedure" to "who is the best doctor for it near me." This transforms the goal from simply informing to actively facilitating the patient's journey toward booking an appointment.
The most common mistake is attempting to out-optimize or rewrite existing informational content in the hopes of regaining lost rankings or clicks, which is a losing battle against Google's AI. A more effective solution is to accept that the value of this content has fundamentally changed and pivot your strategy. Stronger organizations are now reallocating resources from high-funnel "symptom guide" content to mid- and bottom-funnel pages that drive patient acquisition. Instead of fighting for traffic that has declined by over 61% according to Seer Interactive, they focus on strengthening pages that are more resilient. This includes:
Service and Department Pages: Detailed descriptions of what makes your cardiology or oncology department unique.
Physician Biographies: Highlighting doctor expertise, experience, and patient philosophies.
Location-Specific Pages: Optimizing for "near me" searches and local patient needs.
This strategic pivot moves the goal from attracting broad awareness to capturing high-intent users ready to take the next step.
While informational pages like symptom guides have seen traffic drops of 40-70%, pages with a clear transactional or navigational intent are proving far more resilient. These pages hold their value because they answer questions that AI Overviews cannot, such as "Where can I get this service?" or "Who is the best specialist for my condition?". Resilient content types include:
Physician Profiles: These pages are unique, authoritative, and serve a direct need for patients evaluating providers.
Service Line Pages: Content detailing specific hospital offerings, technologies, and patient outcomes provides value beyond a generic AI summary.
Location and Facility Pages: These are crucial for local search and help users find and navigate to your physical locations.
The key difference is that these pages facilitate an action rather than just providing information. Shifting focus to these assets helps mitigate the impact of the 61% CTR drop reported by Seer Interactive on top-funnel queries.
Facing a significant drop in organic traffic requires a deliberate pivot, not just minor adjustments. Based on the data showing a potential 61% CTR drop from AI Overviews, a hospital marketing team should execute a three-step strategic overhaul. This plan shifts focus from informational volume to transactional value.
Conduct a Content Audit and Triage: Analyze your traffic data. Identify informational pages (symptom guides, condition descriptions) with the steepest declines. Deprioritize these for new investment and reallocate resources.
Double Down on Bottom-Funnel Content: Focus all new content and optimization efforts on pages that directly support patient acquisition. This includes enriching physician bios with videos and publications, building out detailed service line pages, and creating robust location-based content.
Build Authority and Direct Channels: Develop a strategy to earn links and mentions from authoritative medical sources to boost your site's overall credibility. Simultaneously, build an email list and social media presence to create traffic streams independent of Google's algorithm.
This pragmatic approach accepts the new reality of search and repositions your digital presence for sustainable growth.
The combined data from WebFX and Healthline Media paints a cohesive picture of pervasive AI Overview integration in healthcare search. WebFX's study of 130,000 queries revealed that AI summaries appear on 51% of all health-related searches, an aggregate figure that includes navigational queries where they are less common. This broad-based finding establishes a significant baseline presence. From the publisher's side, Healthline Media confirmed that by July 2024, 45% of their tracked medical keywords were already returning AI Overviews, with that number continuing to grow. This convergence of evidence shows that whether you analyze from a wide-angle, query-based perspective or a focused, publisher-centric view, the conclusion is the same. AI competition is now the default environment for health content, forcing a strategic re-evaluation of keyword targeting and content formats to remain visible and valuable to search users.
A specialized clinic should build a content plan that emphasizes its unique value proposition, moving beyond the generic information now supplied by AI. Since WebFX data shows over half of health searches trigger AI Overviews, the goal is to create content for the click that happens after a user digests the AI summary. This involves enriching moderately affected pages, such as those for services and departments, to answer the next set of questions a potential patient will have. Your plan should include:
Detailing Unique Technology and Techniques: Explain what specific equipment or methods your clinic uses and why they lead to better outcomes.
Showcasing Provider Expertise: Feature your specialists prominently with videos, publications, and patient success stories.
Clarifying Logistics and Patient Experience: Provide transparent information on costs, insurance, scheduling, and what a patient can expect during a visit.
This strategy focuses on building trust and demonstrating differentiation, which an AI summary cannot do.
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.
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