Ever tried searching for answers about your company in ChatGPT? Chances are the results aren’t quite right…or worse, you’re not there at all.

Unsurprisingly, roughly 45% of Americans use AI search tools daily. And as generative AI tools become part of everyday research, brands are quickly realizing discovery no longer happens only on Google.

For health-tech marketers, that means adapting traditional SEO and moving toward Gen AI engine optimization (GEO): optimizing not just for keywords, but for how large language models (LLMs) understand authority, category clarity, and credibility.

What’s less clear is how to successfully make that shift. That’s where this story starts. Below, we break down, based on conversations with growth and marketing teams across the industry, what’s really shaping AI discovery, where teams are getting stuck, and which strategies are actually working.

The new search panic

There’s a new ritual inside health-tech companies: Someone opens ChatGPT and starts testing prompts.

“Do we show up?”

“Why does that competitor appear?”

“What if I add clinic size or geography?”

Next thing you know, Slack is full of screenshots and meetings turn into live prompt-testing sessions. A single weird answer can send everyone into a spiral because nobody is sure what it means or what to do about it. Welcome to the new search anxiety.

These nerves come from a real shift in how discovery works. Search isn’t just about keywords anymore. It’s about real questions, layered context, and practical constraints—the way buyers actually think and talk. AI tools build answers by stitching together how clearly a brand fits into those conversations and how consistently that positioning is reinforced across credible sources.

And this visibility matters. Data shows that AI-cited content is driving 30–40% higher conversion rates than traditional search results, because buyers trust the answers they’re getting and move faster when brands show up clearly.

Healthcare feels this shift more than most. Trust is everything, regulations shape what can be said, and research starts long before anyone books a demo. So if your brand doesn’t surface early, you might never enter the conversation at all. And if it shows up in the wrong place, that sales conversation may not happen because a competitor gets the call instead. Because there’s a lack of information outside about what companies really do and where they sit in the market (this publication aims to be an exception), LLMs are often offbase.

The tricky part? Most teams still don’t really understand how AI search works. The tools are evolving fast, the metrics are fuzzy, and best practices are still emerging. Without a clear framework, it’s easy to fixate on individual prompt results instead of building the deeper signals that actually drive consistent visibility.

What’s really happening under the hood (and what isn’t)

ChatGPT is not replacing Google. But the two are deeply intertwined.

When tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity don’t already have a confident answer stored in their training data, they actively run Google searches behind the scenes. They then pull together their answers by leaning on the same pages that already show up at the top of Google.