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After years of AI hype, you’ve probably wondered exactly how you can measure if AI tools and assistants are helping you build your medical practice. And thankfully, we continue to get more and more insight and more shared data to see what’s working best in the world of generative AI.
The latest resource, introduced worldwide in Google Search Console at the beginning of September, is a “Generative AI features” report. This report allows you to see which of your website pages are generating impressions in AI features in Google search, where the users reside, impression trends, and much more.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the common insights across our cosmetic and medical industry clients.
The Common Thread: Blogs Build AI Impressions
Across all our clients, one thing stands out loud and clear: if you want AI tools to reference your site, you need to give them meaty, authoritative content on very specific topics.
We put a lot of work into the procedure pages on your site, the pages about your services that are front and center in your website’s navigation. And they still get oodles of organic search traffic – but for most clients, they are absent from the list of top reference pages for AI answers. Why? Well, procedure page content is positioned as a helpful overview of the services you offer, but only rarely does it provide enough nitty gritty to be cited as a resource for the complex conversations and deeper dives that are possible in AI tools.
But blogs are different. Blog topics highlight current trends, answer extremely specific questions, and provide details for the user who wants to know anything and everything about a topic. We’ve carefully crafted blog content for our clients since we started over 15 years ago, and the cumulative power of that content is what’s now driving the bulk of site impressions in Gemini.
Measuring Brand Awareness through Homepage Impressions
While blogs are doing the heavy lifting to get your website impressions on AI search, most clients still see their homepage itself being referenced somewhere within the top 10 pages. In most cases, homepages are cited when AI tools make a suggestion, recommendation, or general citation about a practice (“If you’re looking for top breast lift doctors near you, Jones Plastic Surgery is a top rated option.”)
Tracking homepage impressions can give us a few different insights:
- Comparing the ratio of homepage impressions to total impressions can be used as a shorthand for how much brand engagement your practice is receiving within Google’s AI tools.
- Homepage impressions can be tracked over time to get a better sense of whether your brand is losing ground or gaining ground in AI mentions.
What about Photo Gallery Pages?
When we look at the most popular pages on our cosmetic/plastic surgery client websites, photo gallery cases almost always dominate the top 50 pages. Which is why we’ve been saying for years and years that building out your gallery is one of the best things you can do to grow your practice online.
But when looking at the “Generative AI features” report in Search Console, you’re simply not going to find gallery case pages showing up. The explanation is simple: AI tools don’t want to send their users directly to pages with nudity on them. Google’s traditional search functioned much the same way.
But changing technology does not at all mean that user desires have changed. People absolutely still want to see your results, and will go out of their way (and off social media, Google search, or AI tools) in order to get the full experience. In this way, your photo gallery remains probably THE MOST VALUABLE area of your website, so make it count.
Are AI Impressions Leading to Site Visits and Bookings?
Here we start to get into a bit of a fuzzier area. Google’s Generative AI features report is not yet robust enough to allow us to track user engagement with cited content. So we can’t entirely measure who is visiting your site from a guided AI search.
But as we’ve been saying for the past 2 years, the most important thing for your practice in AI tools is to be part of the conversation. If you stand out from your competitors, and do the right things to get that message out, your practice will be in the best position when users of AI tools inquire about topics in the cosmetic space and services you offer.
