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AEO services are done-for-you programs that help a brand show up in the answers AI assistants give, such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity: tracking those answers, making the site easier for AI assistants to read, and creating the content those answers draw on. For healthcare brands, Curve Compliance offers this as Curve AEO, with clinicians approving anything medical. AI Visibility is a feature in Curve Compliance, and Curve also offers it as a managed service.
Comparing AEO services for your practice, health system or healthcare brand? Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.
What AEO services include
A complete AEO service covers seven pieces of work, each backed by evidence:
| Service | What it involves | Why it matters | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI answer tracking | Asking AI assistants the questions your patients and buyers ask, over time, and recording who they name and cite | 50% to 83% of citations were gone the next day in one 20-day study, so one check is a weak measure | Ahrefs |
| Competitive insight | Seeing which brands get recommended instead of you, and which sources AI cites | 36% of patients who searched for a new doctor said AI tools influenced their decision | rater8 |
| Technical optimization | Technical improvements that help AI systems reach, read and understand your pages | Sites opted out of OpenAI's search crawler "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" | OpenAI |
| Content roadmap | Finding the questions where you are missing from answers and ranking them by value | On average across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, only 12% of cited links ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt | Ahrefs |
| Content creation | Writing and updating pages that answer patient questions with sources, quotes and data | In the GEO study, adding citations, quotations and statistics lifted visibility in AI answers by 30% to 40% on the researchers' benchmark | Aggarwal et al. |
| Clinical review | Clinicians approve anything medical before it goes live | Researchers found 50% to 90% of LLM answers to medical questions were not fully supported by the sources they cited | Nature Communications |
| Reporting | Mentions, citations and share of voice, plus the visits and bookings AI answers bring | Being cited in an AI Overview brought 120% more organic clicks per impression than not being cited | Seer Interactive |
Tracking: measure over time, not once
AI answers move. Ahrefs asked the same questions daily for 20 days in five AI tools and found 50% to 83% of citations were gone the next day, though about 75% of those came back within 20 days. Its advice: "Don't judge AI visibility from one check" (Ahrefs). A good service shows trends across assistants and weeks, not a single screenshot. See what to measure in AEO tracking.
Technical work: make the site readable, skip the hacks
Google says "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary" (Google Search Central). What counts is the basics: a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet to appear in Google's generative AI features, and your content has to be crawlable (Google Search Central). OpenAI recommends allowing its search crawler for a site to appear in ChatGPT search results (OpenAI).
Be careful with services that sell special files or markup as the fix. Google says "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities)," and that "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search," though it still helps with rich results (Google Search Central).
Content: answer the question, with evidence
In the GEO study, a peer-reviewed paper presented at KDD, the top methods (citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics) improved a page's visibility in AI-generated answers by 30% to 40% on the researchers' benchmark, and by up to 37% in a test on Perplexity, while keyword stuffing gave little to no improvement (Aggarwal et al.). AI assistants also tend to cite fresher pages: Ahrefs found the pages they cite are 25.7% fresher on average than the pages in Google's organic results (Ahrefs).
In health, you compete with large publishers. Conductor found mayoclinic.org (6.58%) and clevelandclinic.org (4.90%) earned the largest shares of AI citations in health care equipment and services (Conductor). A practice or brand wins on what those sites can't say: its own services, providers, locations, insurance and first-hand expertise. See AEO content for healthcare.
Reporting: tie answers to patients
Clicks from AI answers are still a small share of traffic. AI referrals made up 0.64% of all website traffic for the health care industry in Conductor's benchmarks (Conductor), and Pew found that, across all topics, Google users clicked a link inside an AI summary on just 1% of visits to pages with one (Pew Research Center). So a good report shows mentions, citations and share of voice, plus the visits and bookings AI answers bring.
Why healthcare brands are buying AEO services now
Patients use AI to choose care. In rater8's 2026 survey, 47% of patients said they had used an AI tool to research healthcare providers, up from 31% in 2025 (rater8). Among recent AI health users in the West Health-Gallup survey, 61% used general chatbots like ChatGPT or Copilot and 55% used AI built into web search, such as Google's AI summaries (Gallup).
Health searches are among the most likely to show an AI answer, though each study measures it differently:
| Study | AI Overview rate | What was measured | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conductor | 48.7% of page-one health care queries | Page-one Google queries in its health care set, drawn from about 21.9 million U.S. Google searches across all 10 industries it studied, fall 2025 | Conductor |
| WebFX | 51% of health queries | 130,070 U.S. health-related searches, July 2025 | WebFX |
| Ahrefs | 44.1% of medical YMYL queries | 146 million desktop SERPs, global, September 2025 | Ahrefs |
| BrightEdge | 89% of tracked healthcare keywords, up from 59% two years earlier | BrightEdge's own healthcare keyword set, December 2025 | BrightEdge |
BrightEdge's figure runs higher because it tracks a chosen keyword set rather than all searches (BrightEdge). For more figures by source, see AI Overviews statistics for healthcare.
AEO services vs SEO services
Google treats AEO as part of SEO. Its guide says optimizing for generative AI search "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO" (Google Search Central). Strong SEO helps, though estimates vary: BrightEdge found about 24% of the sources cited in healthcare AI Overviews also rank in Google's organic top 10, the highest of nine industries it tracked (BrightEdge), while across all topics Ahrefs found 37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews appeared in the first 10 results (Ahrefs).
AI assistants beyond Google Search draw from a wider set. In Ahrefs' study of 15,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, only 12% of cited links ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt on average; Perplexity was highest at 28.6%, and the others hovered around 8% (Ahrefs). That gap is the work an AEO service adds on top of SEO:
| SEO services | AEO services | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank pages in search results | Be named and cited in AI answers |
| Main measures | Rankings, clicks and organic traffic | Mentions, citations and share of voice, plus the visits and bookings AI answers bring |
| Where it looks | Google and Bing results | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini |
| Content focus | Pages that rank for a keyword | Pages that answer the full question, with sources and data |
See AEO vs SEO for healthcare and AEO vs GEO vs SEO for the full comparison.
What healthcare adds to an AEO service
Three things set a healthcare AEO program apart. First, accuracy: among patients who used AI to research providers, 66% said they had seen incorrect provider information from an AI tool, and 60% trusted the summary without verifying it (rater8). Your pages need to state the facts AI repeats, clearly. Second, clinical review: anything medical needs a clinician's approval, so the content plan has to fit their time. Third, patient data: 77% of U.S. adults are concerned about the privacy of medical information given to AI tools (KFF), so ask what a service sends to AI assistants and whether it signs a BAA.
Questions to ask before you sign
- Which AI assistants do you track, and how do you report change over time?
- Who writes the content, and how do our clinicians review it before it goes live?
- What technical changes do you make, and who makes them on our site?
- What do you send to AI assistants, and will you sign a BAA?
- How do you connect AI answers to visits and bookings?
For the full checklist and the red flags to watch for, see how to choose an AEO agency for healthcare. If you are weighing software against a team, see AEO tools vs a managed AEO service.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In one AI Visibility program we've run, for a HIPAA-focused healthcare software brand, Curve's team tracked the questions buyers ask AI assistants, found where competitors were named and the brand wasn't, and published pages to close those gaps. About five weeks in:
- AI assistants named or cited the brand in 53% of their answers to its 40 core buyer questions (104 of 196), across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Claude.
- Across 184 real buyer questions and 912 AI answers, its site was cited in 236 answers, more than any competitor's and more than 2.5 times as many as the nearest one (89).
- 47 of the new pages were already cited by AI assistants within six days of going live.
- One new page brought in more than half of the brand's unpaid ChatGPT visits in its first week.
How Curve Compliance helps
AI Visibility is a feature in Curve Compliance, and Curve also offers it as a managed service. In Curve, the feature is called AI Visibility (AEO), and the managed service is Curve AEO. Curve AEO is built around the services above, for healthcare brands. We handle your AEO strategy, content creation, and optimization, with a dashboard that shows how your brand appears in AI answers and tracks progress over time.
What You Get with Curve AEO:
- AI Visibility Tracking. See how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers.
- Optimize Your Site for AI. We make technical improvements that help AI assistants find, read, and understand your content.
- Competitive Insights. Understand who's getting recommended instead of you.
- Content Roadmap. Identify gaps and prioritize opportunities to improve performance.
With the managed service, Curve's team sets up your questions, competitors and topics, writes the pages on your roadmap, and makes the technical fixes that help AI assistants read your site. Your clinicians review and approve anything medical before it goes live. Curve's team turns those insights into action: building your strategy, creating and optimizing content, and tracking progress.
If your developer manages your site, Curve's team hands them the exact fixes. Each month, Curve's team walks you through your results on a call and sends a one-page report.
AI Visibility is built for healthcare: only the marketing question you track is sent to AI assistants, screened for PHI first, and never anything about a patient. Curve is SOC 2 Type II and signs a BAA on every plan. It ties AI answers to the visits and bookings they bring you.
Built for healthcare marketers, Curve connects the entire patient funnel in one platform: paid ads, web analytics, and now AI search. See the AI Visibility product page and the Curve AEO launch. Curve AEO is rolling out to select customers, and spots are limited.
Sources (checked November 6, 2026): Ahrefs, How Stable Are AI Citations? (October 29, 2026); rater8, 2026 Patient Choice Report (June 3, 2026); OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers; Ahrefs, Only 12% of AI Cited URLs Rank in Google's Top 10 for the Original Prompt (August 11, 2025); Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024); Wu et al., An automated framework for assessing how well LLMs cite relevant medical references, Nature Communications (April 16, 2025); Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update (April 24, 2026); Google Search Central, AI Features and Your Website; Google Search Central, Google's Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features on Google Search; Ahrefs, New Study: AI Assistants Prefer to Cite Fresher Content (July 28, 2025); Conductor, Health Care Industry: 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks; Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results (July 22, 2025); Gallup, Americans Turning to AI to Supplement Healthcare Visits (April 14, 2026); WebFX, AI Overviews in Healthcare: A Study of 130K+ Health Queries (September 16, 2025); Ahrefs, What Triggers AI Overviews? (November 10, 2025); BrightEdge, Healthcare and AI Overviews: How Google Sharpened Its Approach Over Three Years (December 24, 2025; baseline December 2023); BrightEdge, AI Overviews at the One-Year Mark (February 12, 2026); Ahrefs, Update: 38% of AI Overview Citations Pull From The Top 10 (March 2, 2026); KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust: Use of AI For Health Information and Advice (March 25, 2026); Google Search Central, Google Search's guidance on using third-party SEO tools, services, and advice; HHS, Business Associates FAQs.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are AEO services?
AEO services are done-for-you programs that help a brand get named and cited in AI answers by tracking those answers, making the site easier for AI assistants to read, and creating the content the answers draw on.
What does an AEO specialist do?
An AEO specialist tracks how AI assistants answer your buyers' questions, finds where competitors are named instead of you, fixes what keeps AI systems from reading your site, and writes the content that fills the gaps.
What is AEO vs SEO?
SEO aims to rank pages in search results, and AEO aims to get a brand named and cited in AI answers. Google treats AEO as part of SEO, but studies find many pages AI assistants cite sit outside Google's top 10 (Ahrefs). See AEO vs SEO for healthcare.
How do you measure AEO services?
Use three measures, tracked over weeks rather than one check: mention rate (how often AI answers name you), citation rate (how often they cite your site) and share of voice (your share of the mentions among the brands you compete with). Then connect AI answers to the visits and bookings they bring.
Can an AEO service promise AI citations?
No one controls what AI assistants say. Google warns that third-party tools "don't have access to our internal ranking data" (Google Search Central), so be wary of any provider that promises a place in AI answers.
Do healthcare AEO services need a BAA?
Yes, whenever the service will create, receive, maintain or transmit PHI for you (HHS), so ask each provider what it sends to AI assistants. Curve is SOC 2 Type II and signs a BAA on every plan.
Does Curve offer AEO services?
Yes. In Curve, the feature is called AI Visibility (AEO), and the managed service is Curve AEO. With the managed service, Curve's team handles your AEO strategy, content creation and optimization. AI Visibility is available on request: book a call to get started.
Talk to Curve Compliance
Want a team to run AEO for your healthcare brand? Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.