Introducing Curve AEO for Healthcare Brands

Introducing Curve AEO: Helping Healthcare Brands Get Found in AI Search. 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. Curve AEO is the managed AEO service from Curve Compliance, built for healthcare brands that want to know whether AI assistants name them and want a team to do the work of improving it. AI Visibility is a feature in Curve Compliance, and Curve also offers it as a managed service.

Want to see where your brand stands in AI answers right now? Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.

Why Curve AEO, and why now

When someone asks AI which healthcare product or provider to choose, does your brand get mentioned? For a growing share of patients, AI is now part of how they choose. In rater8's 2026 survey, 47% of patients said they had used an AI tool to research healthcare providers, up from 31% in 2025. Among patients who searched for a new doctor in the past year, 36% said AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude influenced their decision, ahead of Google search results (34%) and doctor referrals (32%) (rater8).

National polling points the same way. KFF found 32% of U.S. adults used AI for health information and advice in the past year (KFF), and 29% now use AI tools or chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude for health information at least monthly, up from 17% two years earlier (KFF). Many of those people still end up with a clinician: 58% of adults who used AI for physical health advice in the past year later followed up with a doctor or health care provider (KFF).

Search itself is changing. Conductor found AI Overviews on 48.7% of the page-one Google queries in its health care set, the highest of the 10 industries it studied (Conductor). Studies that measure it differently find other rates: BrightEdge found AI Overviews on 89% of the healthcare keywords it tracks, a chosen keyword set rather than all searches (BrightEdge). In Semrush's U.S. clickstream data, outbound referral traffic from ChatGPT to other websites grew 206% in 2025, comparing January 2025 with January 2026 (Semrush). And asked which part of Google's results they trust most when searching for care, 37% of patients picked the AI Overview, versus 20% for organic links (rater8).

The shift, in the numbers healthcare marketers ask about most:

Finding	Figure	Source
Patients who have used an AI tool to research providers	47%, up from 31% in 2025	rater8, 2026 Patient Choice Report
Searchers for a new doctor who said AI tools influenced their decision	36%	rater8, 2026 Patient Choice Report
U.S. adults who used AI for health information and advice in the past year	32%	KFF, March 2026
U.S. adults who use AI for health information at least monthly	29%	KFF, June 2026
Page-one Google queries in Conductor's health care set that show an AI Overview	48.7%	Conductor
Share of health care AI referral traffic sent by ChatGPT	83.8%	Conductor
Growth in outbound referral traffic from ChatGPT, January 2025 to January 2026 (U.S. clickstream data)	206%	Semrush
People who turn to ChatGPT with health questions every week	more than 300 million	OpenAI, July 2026

Conductor's figures come from U.S. Google searches and the traffic of its enterprise customers, and OpenAI's count is its own global platform data, so read each with its source (Conductor, OpenAI). For more of the data, see AI search statistics for healthcare marketers and the data on patients using AI to research providers.

The blind spot

Patients are asking AI these questions at scale. Yet most healthcare marketers still lack visibility into whether their brand is part of those answers, or whether competitors are being recommended instead. That's a blind spot. And knowing where you stand is only the first step. Someone has to do the work to improve it.

The answers patients get are not always right, either. Among patients who used AI to research providers, 66% said they had encountered incorrect provider information from an AI tool, and 60% said they trusted the summary they received without verifying it (rater8). A wrong address, phone number or insurance detail in an AI answer can reach a patient who never checks it. See what to do when AI gets your practice wrong.

One look at an answer also says little. Ahrefs tracked about 37,500 citations for 20 days and found that 50% to 83% of them were gone the next day, though about 75% of those came back within 20 days (Ahrefs). Knowing where you stand takes steady tracking, not a screenshot.

Why being in the answer matters

When Google shows an AI summary, fewer people click through. In Pew Research Center's browsing data, Google users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, versus 15% when there was no summary, and clicked a link inside the summary itself in just 1% of visits (Pew Research Center).

Being cited helps. Seer Interactive found that being cited in an AI Overview brings 120% more organic clicks per impression than not being cited, though still 38% fewer than when no AI Overview appears. Seer is clear that this is a correlation, and that higher-authority brands are also more likely to be cited (Seer Interactive).

What the work involves

Getting found in AI search is ongoing work, and much of it builds on SEO. Google says its generative AI features "are rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems," and that from its point of view, optimizing for generative AI search "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO" (Google Search Central). In practice, a program has five parts:

• Strategy. Pick the questions that matter: the ones patients and buyers ask AI before they choose a provider or a product, by service and by topic.
• Technical access. AI search features need to reach a page before they can show it. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet to appear in its generative AI features (Google), and OpenAI says sites opted out of its search crawler "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" (OpenAI).
• Content. Google's advice is to "Create non-commodity content that's helpful, reliable, and people-first" (Google). In the GEO study presented at KDD, adding citations, quotations and statistics to a page improved its visibility in AI-generated answers by 30% to 40% on the researchers' benchmark, and by up to 37% in a test on Perplexity (Aggarwal et al.).
• Clinical review. In healthcare, anything medical needs a clinician's sign-off before it goes live, so the plan has to fit the time your clinicians have.
• Measurement. Track the answers over time, see who gets recommended instead of you, and connect AI answers to visits and bookings.

Curve AEO pairs a dashboard with a team that does this work for you, with your clinicians approving anything medical. For the plan behind it, see AEO strategy for healthcare brands and what done-for-you AEO services cover.

Built for healthcare

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. That matters to patients too: KFF found 77% of U.S. adults are concerned about the privacy of personal medical information provided to AI tools (KFF). See HIPAA-compliant AI visibility tracking.

AI Visibility turns what it finds into a weekly roadmap sized to what your clinicians can publish, with medical topics flagged for clinical review. It ties AI answers to the visits and bookings they bring you. It catches what AI gets wrong about your practice, so you can correct it on the pages AI reads.

Who Curve AEO is for

Curve AEO is for healthcare brands, whether patients ask AI about a provider or a product. It's available to practices and clinics, health systems and multi-location groups, and agencies. Agencies can use AI Visibility for their clients, or have Curve's team run it for them. See Curve Compliance for healthcare practices, hospitals and health systems and marketing agencies, and AI visibility for healthcare marketing agencies.

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. Introducing Curve AEO: a service that helps you understand how your brand appears in AI search, with a team that handles the strategy and execution for you.

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.

Curve's team turns those insights into action: building your strategy, creating and optimizing content, and tracking progress. 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.

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. Every week you also get a plain-language summary of what changed.

Built for healthcare marketers, Curve connects the entire patient funnel in one platform: paid ads, web analytics, and now AI search. Read what the feature shows on the AI Visibility product page, or the AI Visibility launch article. Curve AEO is rolling out to select customers, and spots are limited.

Sources (checked November 6, 2026): rater8, 2026 Patient Choice Report (June 3, 2026); KFF, New KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust (March 26, 2026); KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust: Use of AI For Health Information and Advice (March 25, 2026); KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust: Use of Social Media and AI For Health Information and Advice (June 17, 2026; the earlier figure is from June 2024); Conductor, Health Care Industry: 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks; BrightEdge, Healthcare and AI Overviews: How Google Sharpened Its Approach Over Three Years (December 24, 2025); Semrush, ChatGPT traffic analysis: Insights from 17 months of clickstream data (April 7, 2026); OpenAI, Launching Health in ChatGPT (July 2026); Ahrefs, How Stable Are AI Citations? (October 29, 2026); Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results (July 22, 2025); Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update (April 24, 2026); Google Search Central, Google's Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features on Google Search; OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers; Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024).

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Curve AEO?

Curve AEO is Curve's managed AEO service, helping healthcare brands get found in AI search. Curve's team handles your AEO strategy, content creation and optimization, with a dashboard that shows how your brand appears in AI answers and tracks progress over time.

How is Curve AEO different from AI Visibility?

In Curve, the feature is called AI Visibility (AEO), and the managed service is Curve AEO. AI Visibility is a feature in Curve Compliance, and Curve also offers it as a managed service. With Curve AEO, Curve's team does the work for you.

What do I get with Curve AEO?

AI visibility tracking, so you see how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers. Technical improvements that help AI assistants find, read and understand your content. Competitive insights into who's getting recommended instead of you. A content roadmap that identifies gaps and prioritizes opportunities. Curve's team turns those insights into action: building your strategy, creating and optimizing content, and tracking progress.

Who writes the content, and who approves it?

With the managed service, Curve's team writes the pages on your roadmap. Your clinicians review and approve anything medical before it goes live.

Does Curve AEO send patient data to AI assistants?

No. 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.

What if our developer manages our site?

If your developer manages your site, Curve's team hands them the exact fixes.

Is Curve AEO available now?

Yes, for select customers. Curve AEO is rolling out now, and spots are limited. AI Visibility is available on request: book a call to get started.

What is AEO?

AEO (answer engine optimization) is the work of getting your brand named and cited in the answers AI assistants give, such as ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. See what AEO is in healthcare marketing.

Talk to Curve Compliance

Want Curve's team to handle your AEO strategy, content and optimization? Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.