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Amol Ghemud Published: February 18, 2026
Summary
If your hospital’s organic patient inquiries dropped 15-30% in 2025 while your SEO rankings stayed stable, AI search is the most likely culprit. BrightEdge data shows 89% of healthcare queries now trigger AI Overviews. Seer Interactive found organic click-through rates drop to 0.6% when AI Overviews appear, compared to 1.6% without. Zero-click searches increased from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025.
Your rankings didn’t decline. The clicks behind those rankings evaporated because AI answered the patient’s question before they reached your website. The fix isn’t more SEO. It’s making your clinical expertise visible within the AI responses themselves through content restructuring for AI extraction, physician-authority signals that AI can verify, and YMYL compliance across clinical pages.
Medical disclaimer: This article discusses digital marketing 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.
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Rankings stable, but inquiries dropping 20%? AI Overviews are cutting organic CTR by 62.5%; here’s the diagnostic
This is the conversation we’ve been having with healthcare CMOs across India since mid-2025.
The marketing dashboard looks confusing. Keyword rankings for “best orthopedic hospital in Pune” or “IVF treatment in Mumbai” haven’t dropped. Domain authority is stable. Content quality hasn’t changed. But the patient inquiry form submissions keep declining, month after month.
The first instinct is to blame the website. Maybe the conversion rate dropped. Maybe the landing pages need refreshing. Maybe the competition increased ad spend.
None of those explains the pattern. The pattern is specific: clinical information pages lose traffic while transactional pages (appointments, contact) hold relatively steady. That’s the AI signature. Patients are getting clinical answers from AI platforms and skipping your website entirely. When they’re ready to book, they might still visit your site directly, but the research phase, the phase where you build trust and differentiate your clinical approach, now happens in ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Healthcare Brew reported in February 2026 that health systems are competing with AI search tools for patients. The framing is accurate. Hospitals aren’t just competing with other hospitals anymore. They’re competing with the AI layer that sits between the patient and the hospital’s website.
The three forces driving healthcare inquiry decline
Three forces are compounding simultaneously to reduce hospital patient inquiries through organic channels.
Force 1: AI Overviews absorb clinical information traffic.
When a patient searches “what is the recovery time for knee replacement,” Google now answers directly in an AI Overview. BrightEdge found that 89% of healthcare queries trigger these AI-generated answers. Seer Interactive’s September 2025 data shows organic CTR drops to 0.6% with AI Overviews versus 1.6% without. That’s a 62.5% reduction in the clicks that used to flow to hospital websites.
The effect is cumulative. Each clinical query that AI absorbs represents a patient who previously visited your website, read your surgeon’s approach, viewed your outcomes data, and potentially submitted an inquiry. Now that the patient gets a generic AI answer and may never visit your site at all.
Force 2: Zero-click searches hit healthcare hardest.
Similarweb tracked zero-click searches, which increased from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025. Healthcare is disproportionately affected because health queries are inherently informational. Patients asking about symptoms, treatments, and recovery timelines are seeking information, and AI provides it without requiring a website click.
The 69% zero-click rate means roughly 7 out of 10 healthcare searches end without the patient visiting any website. For hospitals that built their patient acquisition strategy around organic search traffic, this is a structural break in the funnel.
Force 3: Aggregators capture what remains.
Of the shrinking pool of clicks that AI Overviews don’t absorb, aggregators like Practo and 1mg capture a disproportionate share. When the AI Overview includes links, they point to sources AI trusts most: aggregators with scale, structured data, and domain authority.
The net effect: your hospital loses traffic to AI (which answers without linking), and the referral traffic that does flow goes to aggregators rather than your specialty pages. Your clinical expertise is doubly invisible.
Diagnosing AI-caused traffic decline vs other factors
Not every inquiry decline is AI-driven. Here’s how to diagnose whether AI is the primary factor.
Check 1: Compare clinical content pages vs transactional pages. Pull your Google Analytics data for the last 12 months. Separate clinical information pages (condition descriptions, treatment guides, procedure explanations) from transactional pages (appointment booking, contact, doctor profiles). If clinical pages show a 20-40% traffic decline while transactional pages are flat or declining less, that’s the AI absorption pattern.
Check 2: Look at impression vs click trends in Search Console. If impressions are stable but clicks are declining for clinical keywords, AI Overviews are absorbing the clicks. Your content still ranks (impressions prove this), but patients aren’t clicking through because AI answered their question in the search results.
Check 3: Run your top clinical queries and check for AI Overviews. Open an incognito browser. Search your top 20 clinical keywords. If 80%+ of traffic is triggered by AI Overviews, the traffic decline is structural and will continue regardless of how much you optimize your traditional SEO.
Check 4: Check your referral traffic from AI platforms. Perplexity sends referral traffic when it cites your source. ChatGPT’s browse mode does the same. If you’re seeing zero referral traffic from AI platforms, your hospital isn’t being cited in AI answers at all, confirming the invisibility diagnosis.
If all four checks point to AI, the problem isn’t your SEO. It’s that your clinical expertise doesn’t exist in the AI layer where patients now make decisions.
What’s actually happening when a patient asks AI about your specialty
Understanding the patient’s AI-mediated journey reveals exactly where hospitals lose visibility.
A patient experiences knee pain. A decade ago, they’d search Google, visit 3-4 hospital websites, compare orthopedic departments, and submit inquiry forms. That journey generated measurable website traffic and inquiry volume.
Today’s journey is different. The patient asks ChatGPT: “What are the best treatment options for chronic knee pain?” ChatGPT generates a comprehensive answer citing NIH guidelines, Mayo Clinic protocols, and possibly Practo’s directory listing. The patient gets clinical information, treatment options, and recovery timelines without visiting any hospital website.
If the patient decides to seek treatment, they might ask ChatGPT: “Best orthopedic hospital near me.” The AI references Healthgrades ratings, aggregator listings, and nationally recognized systems. Your hospital, with 25 years of orthopedic excellence, doesn’t appear because your clinical content isn’t structured for AI citation.
The patient chooses from AI’s recommendations. Your hospital never entered the consideration set.
This isn’t hypothetical. OpenAI confirmed that over 40 million people query ChatGPT daily for health information as of January 2026. NPR reported in January 2026 that patients are using ChatGPT to make diagnosis and treatment decisions. The patient journey has already shifted. Your inquiry decline is the measurable consequence.
The Fix: From website-dependent to AI-visible patient acquisition
Reversing the inquiry decline requires a fundamental shift in how you think about patient acquisition. Website traffic is no longer the funnel. AI visibility is.
Step 1: Audit your AI presence immediately. Run your top 20 clinical queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Document whether you’re cited, who IS cited, and whether the information is accurate. This takes 2 hours and produces the baseline data you need.
Step 2: Restructure clinical content for AI extraction. Your orthopedic page shouldn’t lead with “Welcome to our world-class orthopedic department.” It should lead with a direct, clinical answer: “Knee replacement surgery typically involves a 1-2 hour procedure with a 3-6 week recovery time. Success rates exceed 95% for pain relief within 12 months, according to AAOS 2024 guidelines.” That second version is extractable. AI can cite it. The first version is marketing that AI ignores.
Step 3: Build physician authority signals that AI can verify. Add schema markup to physician profiles. Link to publications, certifications, and clinical outcomes data. AI systems trust what they can verify. Your surgeon’s 25 years of experience is invisible if it’s described in a paragraph without structured data, credential links, or publication records.
Step 4: Establish YMYL compliance across clinical pages. Medical disclaimers, dated clinical data, source citations, and named physician authors. These aren’t optional for healthcare GEO. They’re the trust signals AI platforms evaluate before citing any health content.
Step 5: Monitor and iterate weekly. Set up weekly AI citation monitoring. Track citation frequency, accuracy, and competitor citation share. Adjust content based on which AI platforms are and aren’t citing it.
When upGrowth helped Digbi Health achieve a 500% increase in organic traffic, the approach began with this diagnostic process: identifying where AI platforms were failing to cite Digbi’s clinical expertise and restructuring content to close the gap. The methodology applies identically to hospitals experiencing inquiry decline.
The Timeline: What to expect when you start GEO
Hospital CMOs want to know when the inquiry decline reverses. Here’s a realistic timeline.
Month 1-2: foundation. Technical audit, AI citation baseline, physician schema implementation, content restructuring for top 10 clinical pages. No citation improvement yet. You’re building infrastructure.
Month 3-4: early signals. Perplexity citations begin appearing for niche specialty queries. Google AI Overviews may start including your content for long-tail clinical queries. Citation frequency moves from 0-5% to 5-15% for targeted queries.
Month 5-8: growth. Citation frequency reaches 15-30% for core specialties. AI-attributed referral traffic begins appearing in analytics. First patient inquiries attributable to AI channels. The inquiry decline curve flattens.
Month 9-12: authority. Citation share reaches 25-40% for core specialties. Aggregator citation share decreases proportionally. AI-attributed patient inquiries reach 10-15% of new inquiry volume. Total inquiry volume returns to or exceeds pre-decline levels.
The compounding nature requires patience. Month 3 doesn’t look like success. Month 9 does. Hospital marketing teams that commit to the 12-month timeline build citation authority that competitors starting later will struggle to match.
The inquiry decline isn’t temporary
The decline most hospitals are experiencing isn’t a temporary dip. It’s a structural shift in how patients discover, evaluate, and choose healthcare providers.
The hospitals that diagnose the AI cause, invest in GEO infrastructure, and build citation authority now will reverse the decline and build a compounding advantage. Those that treat it as an SEO problem will optimize for a channel that delivers diminishing returns, while the AI channel they’re invisible in grows every month.
upGrowth works with hospitals and healthtech companies experiencing this exact pattern. Our healthcare marketing services start with the four-check diagnostic to confirm whether AI is the primary cause of your inquiry decline, then build the content infrastructure that makes your clinical expertise visible inside AI-generated answers. If you want to understand whether your hospital’s inquiry decline is AI-driven and what the recovery timeline looks like for your specific specialties, the first step is a structured diagnostic.
1. How do I prove to leadership that AI is causing our inquiry decline?
Run the four-check diagnostic in this article. Pull Search Console data showing stable impressions with declining clicks for clinical keywords. Show that 80% or more of your clinical queries trigger AI Overviews. Compare clinical page traffic decline against transactional page stability. This data package typically convinces CFOs and CEOs because it’s measurable and specific.
2. Isn’t this just a temporary dip while patients adjust to AI?
No. AI search usage is accelerating, not stabilizing. Menlo Ventures found 61% of American adults used AI in the first half of 2025. Capgemini reports 58% of consumers use AI for recommendations, up from 25% in 2023. The trend line indicates more AI use, not less. Hospitals that wait for things to return to normal will wait indefinitely.
3. We already invest heavily in SEO. Why do we need GEO, too?
SEO optimizes for search result rankings. GEO optimizes for AI-generated answers. With 89% of healthcare queries triggering AI Overviews that reduce organic CTR by 62.5%, SEO alone reaches an increasingly smaller audience. GEO doesn’t replace SEO. It adds the AI visibility layer that makes your SEO investment productive in an AI-mediated search environment.
4. What’s the minimum investment to reverse the inquiry decline?
A paid discovery engagement (Rs 5K-35K) produces the diagnostic data and roadmap. A strategy sprint (Rs 4L one-time) builds the GEO blueprint. A monthly retainer (Rs 2L+) executes ongoing AI citation building. Many hospitals start with discovery to confirm the AI diagnosis, then commit to a strategy sprint and retainer based on the data.
5. How many patient inquiries can GEO realistically recover?
Based on our healthcare engagements, hospitals that implement structured GEO programs typically see inquiry volume return to pre-decline levels within 9-12 months and exceed those levels by month 15-18. The new inquiry sources include AI-attributed referral traffic, patients citing AI recommendations in intake forms, and increased direct traffic from patients who found the hospital through AI responses before visiting the site.
For Curious Minds
Zero-click searches represent a fundamental disruption to the patient journey, as the answers to clinical questions are now provided directly on the search results page. This means the crucial research phase, where a hospital builds trust by showcasing its expertise, is bypassed entirely. According to Similarweb, these searches surged to 69% by May 2025, meaning nearly seven out of ten patients get their information without visiting any website. This structural break in the funnel means your high-value content, designed to attract and educate, never gets seen. Patients who previously discovered your facility through informational content now only engage at the final, transactional step, if at all. Understanding this shift is the first step toward adapting your digital strategy to this new reality.
The 'AI signature' refers to a specific pattern of traffic loss where clinical, informational pages see a sharp decline while transactional pages like appointment forms hold steady. This pattern directly reflects how AI Overviews operate, by answering a patient's research questions without needing them to click through to your website. While your ranking for "best orthopedic hospital in Pune" might be stable, the traffic from related queries like "recovery time for knee replacement" is being absorbed by AI. The Seer Interactive data showing a 62.5% drop in organic click-through rate (CTR) with AI Overviews confirms this. Focusing on this signature allows you to correctly diagnose the problem, shifting attention from phantom website issues to the real source of inquiry loss. This diagnostic approach is vital for developing an effective counter-strategy.
To isolate the impact of AI, you must compare the performance of different content types over time rather than looking at sitewide metrics. A decline caused by AI will disproportionately affect your clinical and informational pages, while transactional pages (appointments, contact) will show more stable traffic patterns. Pull your Google Analytics data for the last 12 months and segment traffic to these two page categories. If you see a steep drop in visits to your procedure guides and condition descriptions while your appointment page traffic is relatively unchanged, that is the 'AI signature'. This contrasts with a conversion issue, which would lower submissions across the board, or ad spend, which affects paid channels. The fact that BrightEdge found 89% of healthcare queries trigger AI Overviews supports this diagnostic focus. Pinpointing the correct cause prevents you from wasting resources on ineffective solutions.
This 62.5% reduction in click-through rate is direct evidence of audience interception. It shows that for every 100 potential patients who previously might have clicked on your hospital's link, more than 62 are now getting their answer from the AI Overview and never visiting your page. When a patient searches for information on IVF treatment, Google's AI provides a synthesized answer, effectively becoming the new 'destination' for that query. This confirms what Healthcare Brew reported: health systems are now competing directly with AI search tools. This isn't just a small drop in traffic; it's a redirection of the patient's research journey away from your curated expertise and toward a generic, AI-generated summary. Recognizing the scale of this interception is critical for recalibrating marketing expectations and strategy.
This pattern reveals that AI models prioritize sources with immense scale, structured data, and high domain authority, which inherently favors large aggregators over individual hospital websites. When an AI Overview does provide source links, they are more likely to point to a platform like Practo than to your hospital’s specialty page, even if your clinical expertise is superior. This creates a double jeopardy: first, AI absorbs most informational traffic, as seen in the 69% zero-click rate reported by Similarweb. Second, the referral traffic that remains is funneled to aggregators. Your hospital's unique clinical approach becomes invisible, trapped behind both the AI's direct answers and the aggregator platforms it prefers to cite. This dynamic requires a new approach to establishing digital authority.
The primary diagnostic process involves segmenting your website traffic to uncover the 'AI signature' of inquiry decline. This data-driven approach ensures you are solving the correct problem before committing resources to a new strategy. Follow these steps:
Step 1: In Google Analytics, create two content groups: one for all clinical/informational pages (e.g., blog posts, treatment explanations, procedure guides) and another for transactional pages (e.g., appointment booking, contact us).
Step 2: Analyze the organic traffic trend for each group over the last 12 months.
Step 3: Compare the trend lines. A significant, sustained drop in the clinical group's traffic while the transactional group remains stable is strong evidence of AI impact, consistent with BrightEdge's finding that 89% of health queries trigger AI Overviews.
This simple analysis provides a clear verdict on whether AI is the primary culprit, allowing you to move forward with a focused and effective response.
The long-term implication is that the traditional content marketing model, focused on attracting top-of-funnel traffic with informational blog posts, is becoming obsolete. Hospitals can no longer assume that creating high-quality clinical content will automatically translate into website visits and patient inquiries. The data from Seer Interactive showing a CTR drop to just 0.6% with AI Overviews signals a permanent shift. The new strategic imperative is to build brand presence and authority on platforms where patients are, including within the AI ecosystem itself. This means exploring structured data, entity optimization, and strategies that influence AI-generated answers, rather than just ranking in traditional blue links. The focus must move from solely driving clicks to building discoverable expertise.
The fundamental error is a failure to recognize a structural market shift, attributing its effects to familiar, tactical problems. Blaming a website's conversion rate is incorrect if transactional page traffic is stable; blaming ad spend is wrong if the decline is specific to organic channels. This misdiagnosis leads to wasted resources on A/B testing landing pages or increasing ad budgets when the root cause is external. With Similarweb reporting that zero-click searches have hit 69%, the issue is that fewer qualified users are reaching the website in the first place. A proper diagnosis focused on the AI signature—separating clinical from transactional page performance—prevents this waste. It correctly identifies that the top of the funnel has been intercepted, redirecting efforts toward adapting to the new search landscape.
This 69% zero-click statistic provides the crucial link between stable rankings and falling traffic. It proves that ranking high is no longer a guarantee of receiving a click, especially for informational health queries. When a patient searches for a symptom or treatment, they now receive a direct answer from AI, satisfying their need without requiring a click. Your website may still be the #1 organic result below the AI Overview, but most users never scroll past the AI-generated answer. This directly explains why your analytics show a drop in traffic to clinical content pages. This metric quantifies the decoupling of rankings and traffic, a core feature of the new search environment. Understanding this disconnect is essential for any healthcare CMO trying to make sense of their performance dashboards.
This statistic from BrightEdge demands a strategic pivot from a website-centric model to an ecosystem-centric one. If patients are getting answers directly from AI, the goal must shift from driving clicks to influencing the information within those AI answers. This involves a deeper focus on technical SEO, such as implementing highly structured data and schema markup that AI can easily parse and trust. The strategy moves from 'bring patients to our content' to 'take our expertise to the patient', wherever they are. It also means building authority on third-party platforms like Practo and others that AI models already trust and cite. The hospital's digital presence must become a distributed network of expertise, not just a single destination website. This is the new frontier for establishing clinical leadership online.
The strategic solution is to focus on differentiating what AI cannot easily replicate: specific outcomes, unique surgeon expertise, and patient-centered care narratives. While AI can explain what a knee replacement is, it cannot share your hospital's specific recovery outcomes or your lead surgeon's innovative technique. Given that Seer Interactive shows a CTR of only 0.6% for informational queries, the content that does earn a click must deliver exceptional, proprietary value. The new content strategy must emphasize unique, branded expertise over generic explanations. This involves publishing proprietary data, highlighting specific patient success stories, and creating content formats like video testimonials and surgeon Q&As that are less easily synthesized by AI. This approach rebuilds the trust-based connection that AI-driven search currently bypasses.
These three forces create a multi-layered filter that systematically removes potential patients from a hospital's marketing funnel. First, AI Overviews, which BrightEdge reports are triggered by 89% of health queries, absorb the initial informational traffic. Second, the broader trend of zero-click searches, now at 69% according to Similarweb, reinforces this by training users to not click. Third, for the few who do look for a link, AI often directs them to large aggregators like Practo. This creates a cascade effect where each stage reduces the pool of potential patients reaching your hospital's own website. The result is that your clinical expertise is rendered invisible, outmaneuvered by AI at the top of the funnel and by aggregators in the middle. Navigating this new landscape requires a multi-pronged strategy.
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.
Growth Strategy and Planning
