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For several decades, your website has been your digital “home base” and your most important online marketing tool. But we’ll let you in on a little secret: your absolute number one, most essential, embiggened-est marketing asset has always been and will always be your brand.
We’ve stressed the importance of what we call a 360 marketing approach, where your online and offline marketing efforts have numerous touch points to find potential patients wherever they may be. That is more necessary than ever, as large language models (LLMs) slurp up content and generative AI becomes the tool more and more searchers rely on to get the answers they need.
So let’s take a closer look at how you can get your brand front and center in more generative AI searches. Of course, keep in mind that the generative AI landscape is changing insanely fast, but we think several of these tactics will be relevant for years to come.
1. Research Your Brand in AI Search
The first step in any AI optimization for medical practices is measuring your office’s current performance. Pick a few top chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Deepseek and start hammering them with questions about your brand, such as:
- What are the best cosmetic surgery practices in [city]?
- Is [brand] well rated?
- What do people like and dislike about [brand]?
- Should I choose [brand] or [competitor brand]?
- Who has the best prices on [top service] near me?
Seeing what comes back will help you get a sense of your brand presence on each chatbot, but more importantly will show you which sources the chatbot is using to develop its answers. Which leads us right into the next tactic!
2. Gain Brand Mentions in Cited Sources
Depending on which sources are cited in each chatbot, this task can be fairly simple or it can amount to a significant SEO or earned media effort. For instance, if your own About Us page is a commonly cited source, all you need to do is keep it fresh with recent accolades, accomplishments, and more.
However, if competitor resources come up more often, your challenge is to essentially “one up” their content by producing similar, superior content of your own. This may involve adding several new pages on your website, embarking on a dedicated review generation effort, producing some fresh video content, revamping of staff/office images, or more. And if third-party content (for instance, a local newspaper’s “Best of” awards) is often cited, it’s time for you to get crackin’ earning your way onto those sites/pages.
3. Flag Your Cons…and Your Competitors’ Pros
When looking at the answers you receive from generative AI chatbots, pay close attention to any negatives mentioned about your brand (often sourced from user reviews) and any positive aspects often raised about your competitors. For instance, competitors may be cited frequently as having a patient loyalty program. This means the chatbot finds such a program to be an important factor in which practices to recommend, and suggests that you need to think hard about starting your own.
If negatives about your practice are dominating results or you think do not fairly represent your practice, consider two approaches. One is to embark on a review generation campaign where happy patients swamp out any negative reviews you’ve received previously. Another is to think seriously about engaging in a public relations (PR) effort. And no, this is not reserved for practices that are in crisis. PR can help you earn brand mentions in local media and build community relationships that almost inevitably filter down into positive online mentions.
4. Represent Your Brand in Social Media and Online Forums
Being authentic and creating a fan community on social media not only pays dividends in patient retention, it can also help you earn new patients who dig what you are all about. The same is true on online forums like Reddit and Quora – when you interact on these platforms in an authentic way as a brand ambassador, you can gain credibility and earn positive brand mentions.
The key word in all of this is “authenticity.” Both social media and forum users are incredibly sensitive to brands that are just trying to exploit the platforms for financial gain. In short, you need to give plenty (in the form of helpful advice, trusted research, engaging perspectives, etc.) before you get.
All of this is relevant to your presence in generative AI chatbots because social media and forum content is being scraped or actively licensed to AI companies to digest as part of their LLMs. It’s one more place for your brand mentions to influence chatbot responses.
5. Make Sure LLMs Can Crawl Your Website
Let’s turn now to a few more things you can do on your website to make the content more attractive to generative AI chatbots. The first essential item is to allow LLMs to crawl your site via your robots.txt file.
We have allowed this by default for all clients, but some practices in the past have tried to block LLM crawls because they didn’t want their content slurped up. Nice idea, but that ship has sailed and your content needs to be found by LLMs so you can stay relevant.
6. Reference Stats and Quote Sources in Your Content
An oft-cited research paper from June 2024 suggests that generative AI tools may be partial to certain types of content. Mainly, content that demonstrates it is fact-based is deemed more reliable in LLMs. What this means on a practical level is that the more your own content can include statistics, quotations and cited sources, the better chance it has to be used as a basis for generative AI chatbot answers.
None of this should be seen as a revelation. After all, Google has focused its own search results on what is commonly known as “EEAT” (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) for many years. But this paper helped to quantify the potential benefit of citing sources and stats, demonstrating for instance that citing sources led to a substantial 115.1% increase in visibility for websites ranked fifth in a Google search result.
Interestingly, the paper suggests that citing outside stats and sources could actually decrease visibility for pages that currently rank first in Google search results. This surprising finding suggests that smaller players may get an outsized benefit within newer generative AI search platforms. That remains to be seen, but on the whole, combing through your current site content and adding more sources and statistics is likely to give you a long-term visibility benefit.
7. Digest Generative AI Referral Data
We are at the beginning stages of AI platforms driving website traffic, and we think AI companies will be working hard to find ways to tie their chatbot answers to decisions made by chatbot users. There are of course the usual (and increasing) privacy laws and data protections that have made online tracking much harder, but it’s simply too profitable for these companies not to find some way to get paid when their tools cause users to make purchases, book consultations, or make other financial decisions.
We are keeping a close eye on AI referral traffic and evaluating which website pages are most visited from AI search. As more data accumulates, it can indicate what generative AI chatbots find makes your brand special, and on the inverse can show where your practice may need to work harder to be relevant for key services.
Summing Up
As we’ve been saying for years, focusing only on your website is just not enough to stay relevant in online marketing. Generative AI chatbots are leveraging multiple channels and sources to answer questions and provide details about your brand, meaning that you need to have a say in what’s being said on those channels wherever possible.
We think the brands that are most successful in the transition from user-led to AI-led search will be the ones that have worked hard to relay and reinforce a consistent brand message across the web. Essentially, since so much of the content about your brand is increasingly out of your direct control, this involves providing exceptional customer service and a consistent experience both online and offline.
