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Digital health marketing is how telehealth services, health apps, device makers and other health product brands reach and convert buyers online, and in AI search it means making sure that when someone asks ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews or another assistant which app, service, device or health product to choose, your brand is named, described accurately and linked. When someone asks AI which healthcare product or provider to choose, does your brand get mentioned? The audience is large: OpenAI said in July 2026 that more than 300 million people turn to ChatGPT with health-related questions every week (OpenAI). Curve Compliance helps digital health and healthcare product brands see how AI describes them and improve where they stand. AI Visibility is a feature in Curve Compliance, and Curve also offers it as a managed service. Curve AEO is the managed service, where Curve's team handles the strategy and execution.
Want to see what AI tells buyers about your product category, and which brands it names? Talk to Curve's team about Curve AEO. Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.
Why AI search matters for digital health brands
People now bring health questions to AI, including questions about products and treatments. 34% of U.S. adults ever use AI chatbots for at least one of eight health reasons, and 22% use them to get health information about treatments (Pew Research Center). 19% of adults used AI in the past year to understand or compare treatment options (KFF), and 46% of recent AI health users have used it to understand medication side effects (West Health-Gallup).
| What was measured | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| People asking ChatGPT health-related questions each week (global) | More than 300 million | OpenAI, July 2026 |
| Health questions asked on Google Search each day (global) | More than a billion | Google, March 2026 |
| AI Overviews monthly active users (global) | Over 2.5 billion | Google, May 2026 |
| Page-one health care Google queries in Conductor's set with an AI Overview (U.S., Sept. to Oct. 2025; drawn from about 21.9 million searches across 10 industries) | 48.7%, the highest of 10 industries | Conductor |
| Healthcare keywords in BrightEdge's tracked set with an AI Overview | 89% | BrightEdge, Dec. 2025 |
| Health care equipment and services searches with an AI Overview | 49.2% | Conductor |
| Healthcare treatment queries with an AI Overview (tracked keywords) | 100% (symptom queries 93%) | BrightEdge, Dec. 2025 |
| Share of health care AI referral traffic from ChatGPT | 83.8% | Conductor |
And the AI channel is growing: Semrush's U.S. clickstream data shows outbound referral traffic from ChatGPT to other websites grew 206% in 2025 (Semrush). West Health-Gallup found that 61% of recent AI health users had used a general chatbot such as ChatGPT or Copilot, and 55% had used AI built into web search, such as Google AI summaries (West Health-Gallup). A product brand needs to show up in both.
The questions buyers ask AI about health products
Buyers of digital health products ask AI the same kinds of questions they ask a friend, only in more detail. Each type needs something different from your site:
| Question type | Example | What AI needs from your site |
|---|---|---|
| Category | best online therapy app that takes insurance | A clear page on who you serve and how, with plan and coverage facts |
| Comparison | [your brand] vs [competitor] | An honest comparison page that states what sets you apart |
| Brand | is [your brand] legit | Credentials, clinical team, reviews and company facts in plain text |
| How it works | how does [your device] connect to my phone | Setup and support pages AI can read |
| Coverage | is [your product] covered by Medicare | Up-to-date coverage and eligibility pages |
| Clinician | which remote monitoring devices integrate with Epic | HCP pages with integration and evidence details |
Questions with no brand or place name are where AI Overviews appear most often. In WebFX's study of 130,070 U.S. health queries, those with no brand or location triggered AI Overviews 54.2% of the time, versus 34.0% for queries with only a brand name, and queries of seven or more words triggered them 73.9% of the time, versus 35.8% for one or two words (WebFX). The long, specific question a buyer types is the one most likely to get an AI Overview. See how one question becomes many searches.
What AI cites for health product questions
A brand's own site can lead its category. In Conductor's data, pfizer.com (16.40%) is the market leader in AI citations in the pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and life sciences subindustry, while mayoclinic.org (6.58%) and clevelandclinic.org (4.90%) lead AI citations in health care equipment and services. In Google AI Overviews, Healthline.com accounted for the most share of voice in health care, at 5.76% (Conductor).
Video and publishers matter too. Across all topics in U.S. AI Overviews, YouTube is the most cited site, capturing 24.5% of citations among the top 50 sources in Ahrefs' November 2026 data (Ahrefs). An audit of 3,611 health questions found AI Overviews cited only 44.4% of the top five search results and leaned toward commercial health publishers such as WebMD and Healthline (a preprint, not yet peer reviewed) (Agnoli et al.). So the work covers your site, the publishers that write about your category, and video that answers buyer questions. See where AI gets healthcare answers.
When AI gets your product wrong
AI answers about medical topics are often not fully backed by their own sources. Stanford researchers found that between 50% and 90% of LLM responses to medical questions are not fully supported, and sometimes contradicted, by the sources they cite (Nature Communications). The same 2026 audit of Google AI Overviews estimated that 56.7% of cited statements were supported by their cited page (Agnoli et al.).
For a product brand, that means AI may misstate what your product does, who it is for, what it works with or how coverage works. The fix is on the pages AI reads: plain, sourced statements of the facts, approved by your medical and regulatory reviewers, and the same facts everywhere your product is listed. See what to do when AI gets you wrong.
Do AI-referred visitors convert?
The public data is mixed, and none of it is healthcare-specific. Adobe found AI-referred visits to U.S. retail sites converted 90% better than non-AI traffic in September 2026 and generated 83% higher revenue per visit (Adobe). For a direct-to-consumer health brand with online checkout, that is the closest public benchmark. Amsive, looking at 54 websites with tracked purchases or leads, found LLM referrals converted at 4.87% on average against 4.60% for organic search, and a paired t-test showed the gap was not statistically significant (Amsive). And AI referrals are still a small share: 0.64% of health care website traffic in Conductor's benchmarks (Conductor).
So measure your own: AI visits to sign-ups, purchases or booked visits, with tracking built for health data. See Curve for digital health.
A digital health AEO checklist
- List the questions buyers ask. Category, comparison, brand, how it works, coverage and clinician questions, in your buyers' words.
- Check how AI answers them today. Ask each assistant your buyers use and note who is named and which pages are cited.
- Make your pages readable. Google says a page must be "indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet" to support an AI Overview (Google), and OpenAI says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" (OpenAI).
- Answer one question per page. Who the product is for, how it works, what it integrates with and how coverage works, stated plainly near the top.
- Show your evidence. Cite your studies and approvals, and quote your clinical team.
- Answer on video too. Short videos that answer buyer questions give AI another source to cite.
- Keep facts consistent. Match your site, app store listings, marketplaces and directories.
- Route medical claims through review. Anything about effects, safety or outcomes goes through your medical, legal and regulatory review.
- Measure to revenue. Track AI visits to sign-ups, purchases or visits, not only mentions.
Medical device and pharma brands: extra care
Device and pharma marketers answer to two audiences, clinicians and patients, and to promotional rules that consumer brands don't face. Keep HCP and patient pages separate and clearly labeled, so an assistant answering a clinician's question cites the right page. Treat condition and treatment pages as health information when you measure them, so browsing data about a condition never reaches an ad platform. See Curve for pharma and medical devices and telehealth AI visibility.
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. 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. If your developer manages your site, Curve's team hands them the exact fixes. Curve's team turns those insights into action: building your strategy, creating and optimizing content, and tracking progress.
Built for healthcare marketers, Curve connects the entire patient funnel in one platform: paid ads, web analytics, and now AI search. 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. See AI Visibility in Curve and why AI recommends a competitor.
Sources (checked November 6, 2026): OpenAI, Launching Health in ChatGPT (July 2026); Google, The Check Up 2026 (March 17, 2026); Google, I/O 2026 keynote (May 19, 2026); Pew Research Center, AI chatbots for health (August 25, 2026); KFF, Use of AI for Health Information and Advice (March 25, 2026); West Health-Gallup (April 14, 2026); Conductor, Health Care Industry: 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks; BrightEdge, Healthcare and AI Overviews (December 24, 2025); WebFX, AI Overviews in Healthcare (September 16, 2025); Ahrefs, The 50 Most-Cited Websites in Google AI Overviews (November 2026); Agnoli et al., Does the Citation Matter? (arXiv preprint, October 29, 2026); Wu et al., Nature Communications (April 16, 2025); Semrush, ChatGPT traffic analysis (April 7, 2026); Adobe, AI traffic and revenue per visit (October 29, 2026); Amsive, Does LLM Traffic Convert Better Than Organic? (September 3, 2025); Google Search Central, AI features and your website; OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is digital health marketing?
Digital health marketing is how digital health companies, such as telehealth services, health apps, connected devices and online health product brands, reach and convert patients, members and clinicians online. In 2026 it includes AI search: how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and other assistants describe and recommend your brand.
How is AI search changing digital health marketing?
Buyers now ask AI which product or service to choose. 22% of U.S. adults use AI chatbots to get health information about treatments (Pew Research Center), so being named and described accurately in those answers is part of the job.
What do AI assistants cite for health product questions?
Brand sites, health publishers and video. In Conductor's data, pfizer.com (16.40%) leads AI citations in its subindustry (Conductor), and across all topics in U.S. AI Overviews, YouTube captures 24.5% of citations among the top 50 sources (Ahrefs).
How is medical device marketing different in AI search?
Device brands answer to clinicians and patients, so they need separate, clearly labeled HCP and patient pages, and every claim about effects or safety should go through medical, legal and regulatory review.
Do visitors from AI convert better for health brands?
None of the public studies is healthcare-specific. In U.S. retail, Adobe found AI-referred visits converted 90% better than non-AI traffic in September 2026 (Adobe), while Amsive found no significant difference across 54 sites (Amsive).
What if AI describes my product incorrectly?
Correct it on the pages AI reads: state the facts plainly on your site, keep listings consistent, and have your reviewers approve anything medical. Then check the answers again over several weeks.
How can digital health brands track how AI describes them?
Curve Compliance's AI Visibility shows how often AI answers name and cite your brand for the questions buyers ask. With Curve AEO, Curve's team also handles the strategy and the work to improve it.
Talk to Curve Compliance
See how AI assistants describe your product category and your brand, and talk to Curve's team about Curve AEO. Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.