AI-Driven Discovery Shifts Healthcare Marketing Funnels: How to Adjust

Website dashboards are looking very different these days. Traffic is down. Once reliable buying signals are fading away. Why? One big reason is the the nature of search is changing and healthcare marketers need to adapt quickly.

Alexis Pratsides, Global Head of Digital at FINN Partners, sat down with Swaay.Health to talk about the rapid evolution of search and what it means for healthcare marketers trying to protect trust, relevance, and demand in a world increasingly moving towards AI-driven discovery.

What This Conversation Revealed

• The top of the funnel hasn’t collapsed, it relocated outside owned channels
• PR has quietly become a primary input to discoverability, not a supporting one
• Structure now determines visibility more than volume ever did

Search Isn’t Sending Traffic Anymore. It’s Sending Decisions.

“What we’re seeing is the top of the funnel is moving off of your website now, and it’s into the LLMs,” explained Pratsides. “All the research and all the activity that people undertake as they are starting out on a journey to do something, that is happening off your site.”

The alarming consequence is that website traffic is dropping for healthcare vendors, precipitously in some cases. However, there is a silver lining.

“Interestingly, the conversion rates are increasing now,” continued Pratsides. “That’s because the traffic that ends up on your website, having already done their research elsewhere, is ready to do something and are highly engaged.”

Your dashboard looks worse at first glance, but if you tune your website for these visitors who are further down the funnel, then your revenue pipeline will be stronger in this new search environment.

GEO Is Putting PR Back in the Spotlight

“Generative Engine Optimization or GEO is bringing together the disciplines of SEO and Public Relations [PR],” said Pratsides. “You need to be thinking about how they interact and work together to then get visibility bumps within the AI algorithms.”

According to Pratsides, coverage of your customer success stories, executive thought-leadership, and  company announcements, particularly if they are covered by trusted, publications with high authority in healthcare or the general public, can help boost your company and your content to LLMs.

“The LLMs seem to be favoring the really big branded, authoritative places online,” said Pratsides. “These are the media outlets that our PR colleagues are working with every day.”

LLMs reward clarity, not content sprawl

“We’ve proven with some testing that the LLMs favor really well-structured pages,” revealed Pratsides. “They like bite-sized, digestible chunks of content. So, if you can have a subheading and then a small chunk of content, often that will just get almost entirely cited in the answer to people’s questions on those LLMs.”

For marketers who want their organizations to be cited by LLMs, creating content that is shorter, more structured, and more consumable is a must. It is no longer about keywords, rather it is writing content that matches how people are asking questions of LLMs.

Good Content + PR – What’s old is new again with GEO

For veteran school healthcare marketers, Pratsides words should be comforting. In this new world of GEO, what matters most is well written content that takes into consideration what the audience is looking for. It also means that getting earned (and paid) media coverage has tremendous value once again.

It’s hard not to chuckle because this is a classic marketing playbook, just modernized for LLMs. Put another way, what was valuable decades ago is just as valid today.

Time to dust off that old playbook.

*Editor’s note: Partsides shared a lot of fantastic insights and recommendations in the interview – too many to include in this written article.

What Healthcare Marketing Leaders Are Asking

If website traffic is declining, how should marketing teams judge performance without losing credibility internally?
Leaders are being pushed to defend marketing impact while familiar volume metrics weaken. The focus is shifting toward conversion quality, pipeline influence, and downstream outcomes that better reflect how buyers now research and decide.

How do PR and content teams need to change their working model as AI-driven search becomes more influential?
PR is no longer a downstream amplifier. Earned media,