Google Just Broke the SEO Playbook. Now What?

Find Out How Google’s AI-Powered Search Is Rewriting Healthcare Marketing

For healthcare marketers, this isn’t just a minor update.

It’s a fundamental shift in how patients search for care and how your brand shows up (or doesn’t).

What’s Driving the Shift?

Three important things:

1. AI Mode
   A new way to search in Google. Find it as a tab or button within the Google search interface next to Regular Search Results.
2. Google’s query fan-out technique
   This is a major change in how Google handles search queries – beyond simple keyword matching.
3. Multimodal content discovery
   The ability to search and find information from various content types, such as text, images, and video.

To stay competitive, healthcare marketers must treat content like a strategic asset rooted in Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) — Google’s quality framework for content — structured data and multi-format visibility.

Why It Matters Now?

When patients search online, the difference between being cited in an AI result and being buried beneath it can mean tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue every month. 

Today, it’s not enough for SEOs to strategically target phrases like “urgent care near me with X-rays.” Instead, content must be contextual, conversational, and aligned with real patient intent to adapt to more complex queries, like:

“Find me a walk-in urgent care within 10 miles, open evenings and weekends, with a pediatrician on-site who specializes in newborn care.”

See the difference?

In this four-part series, we’re breaking down the biggest changes affecting healthcare marketers and sharing practical ways to make your content easier for AI to find, understand, and elevate.

Understanding these shifts now can help protect your brand’s visibility, safeguard return on investment (ROI), and keep you ahead of competitors.

Four Search Shifts Healthcare Marketers Can’t Ignore in 2025

Google’s AI-powered search update is more than just a user experience (UX) change. It’s a significant shift in how content is discovered, measured, and prioritized in real-time.

To stay visible, healthcare marketers must understand how these changes work and what to do next.

Here’s what this series will cover:

1. Analytics Just Got Harder.
   AI is stealing slicks and hiding data. Learn why branded search visibility is the new success metric and how you can track what still matters.
   
2. Search Results Are AI-Driven and Hyper-Personal
   Everyone sees something different. Find out how to monitor your healthcare brand.
   
3. AI Mode Is Changing The Rules of Search
   Text alone won’t cut it. You’ll need a multimodal strategy to stay visible and competitive.
   
4. Paid Ads Are Losing Ground
   AI pushes ads down and blurs conversions. Get smart about measuring ROI with Performance Max.

What Can You Do Right Now?

To succeed in the AI search era, healthcare marketers must go beyond keyword optimization. It’s time to build content ecosystems designed for both users and AI models, blending clarity, context, and credibility:

• Demonstrate E-E-A-T.
• Prioritize clear, structured content that’s easy for AI to parse.
• Use semantic markup and metadata to add machine-readable context.
• Deliver high-quality, unique content tailored to your target audience.
• Develop a multimodal content strategy that includes images, video, and data visuals.
• Build smarter paid search and PMax attribution strategies to accurately measure ROI.

Note: As AI-driven personalization expands through tools like Google Discover, which pulls from user data (e.g., email, photos, playlists, etc.), healthcare marketers must balance tailored engagement with HIPAA-aligned privacy practices as trust remains a key differentiator.

Healthcare Marketing Has Entered the AI Search Era: Is Your Brand Ready?

AI-powered search is fundamentally changing how patients find, trust, and engage with your brand.If your healthcare content isn’t optimized for AI Mode and multimodal search, you risk falling behind.

If your current SEO strategy doesn’t account for AI Mode, multimodal search, and the fan-out technique, now is the time to reassess your marketing strategy so you can lead with clarity, creativity, and a deep understanding of patient needs across every format.

Stay tuned for our first deep dive in this series:
Analytics: Why Measurement Just Got a Lot Harder (And What’s Still Trackable)