Blog
AEO for Telehealth: How to Be the Top Choice in ChatGPT Search
Sean Dorje
Published
October 16, 2025
3 min read
AEO for Telehealth: How to Be the Top Choice in ChatGPT Search
AEO for telehealth is now table-stakes: one in six U.S. adults already use ChatGPT for care queries, and Google's share of health look-ups is slipping fast.
Why Telehealth Can't Ignore Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
The shift to AI-first search is accelerating at unprecedented speed. One in six adults (17%) say they use AI chatbots at least once a month to find health information and advice, rising to one quarter of adults under age 30. Meanwhile, traditional search dominance is eroding: Google's share dropped from 73% to 66.9% in just six months.
The most striking evidence comes from patient adoption patterns: Within 2 months of its online public release, ChatGPT gained 100 million monthly users, outpacing the adoption rates of both TikTok and Instagram. For telehealth providers, this represents a fundamental shift in how patients discover and choose care options.
As conversational AI becomes a primary source for medical information, telehealth brands that fail to optimize for these new discovery channels risk becoming invisible to a growing segment of patients actively seeking virtual care solutions.
AEO vs. SEO: What's Different for Telehealth Brands?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the science of getting your content chosen and included in AI-generated answers. Unlike traditional SEO that focuses on ranking positions, AEO requires telehealth brands to restructure their entire content approach for machine comprehension and citation.
The fundamental difference lies in how content is discovered and presented. While SEO targets Google, GEO optimizes your website content for AI-generative answer engines. AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity scour widely, citing official sites, news outlets, patient forums, even second-page Google results. This means your telehealth content needs to be structured for extraction, not just ranking.
The stakes are particularly high for healthcare: GEO can boost a business's online visibility up to 40% in generative engine responses. For telehealth providers competing in crowded markets, this visibility gap can determine market leadership.
Case Signal: Hostie AI's 19 % boost in AI rankings
Hostie AI's transformation demonstrates the concrete impact of strategic AEO implementation. Starting from near-zero visibility, Hostie partnered with Relixir to implement comprehensive GEO optimization across their content ecosystem.
The results exceeded industry benchmarks: "Average AI Search Rank: 2.1, an improvement of 19.4 percent, ensuring Hostie consistently appeared in the top three answers." Their mention rate increased by 33.9% compared to the prior period, while maintaining a 77.4% sentiment score, reflecting strong positivity when AI engines discussed their brand.
Most notably, "Total Citations: 1,339, with a peak of 963 citations on August 28, showing explosive bursts of reach." This citation velocity demonstrates how properly optimized telehealth content can achieve exponential visibility growth in AI-generated responses.
Implement Medical Schema Markup the Right Way
Schema markup serves as the foundational layer that makes your telehealth content machine-readable. The MedicalOrganization schema provides comprehensive properties that AI engines rely on for accurate information extraction, including the critical isAcceptingNewPatients field that directly impacts patient acquisition.
For telehealth platforms, implementing proper medical schema goes beyond basic markup. You need to embed fields like availableService, which lists medical procedures, tests, or therapies offered virtually, and medicalSpecialty to specify your clinic's medical focus areas. These structured data points enable AI engines to confidently recommend your services for specific patient queries.
The performance impact is substantial: research shows that adding inline citations was one of the top-performing GEO strategies, yielding roughly 30-40% higher visibility in generated answers. By combining comprehensive schema implementation with citation-optimized content, telehealth providers create a powerful signal that AI engines prioritize.
Craft Citation-Ready Content for ChatGPT Answers
Creating citation-ready content requires a fundamental shift from keyword-focused writing to evidence-based, structured information design. Your telehealth content must provide canonical answers (40-50 words): concise responses that engines can quote and attribute directly.
The key is simplifying language while maintaining medical accuracy. As research demonstrates, simplifying language ensures the AI can digest your points quickly and translate them into an answer for users. This approach led to roughly a 17-30% improvement in visibility for optimized content.
Every piece of telehealth content should follow this structured approach: clear topic sentences, evidence-backed claims with inline citations, and concise summaries that AI can extract verbatim. Remember that adding statistics essentially hands the generative engine proof points on a silver platter, making your content the preferred source for factual medical information.
Leverage FAQPage for zero-click visibility
FAQPage schema represents one of the most effective tactics for capturing AI citations. By structuring FAQs that match real queries, telehealth providers can dominate zero-click results where patients get immediate answers without clicking through.
The implementation must be precise: FAQPage Schema provides a structured format that AI engines can easily parse and cite. Each question should mirror actual patient search patterns, while answers remain concise yet comprehensive, ideally between 40-50 words.
Schema Markup is a code and SEO strategy that helps engines understand the content on your web pages. For telehealth FAQs, this means structuring answers that directly address symptoms, treatment options, insurance coverage, and appointment booking, the core queries driving patient decisions.
Track & Improve Your AI Search Share of Voice
Measuring AI search performance requires new metrics beyond traditional SEO analytics. You need to track your AI Brand Score, Sentiment Score, and Brand Share of Voice across high-impact sources to understand your true visibility in AI-generated responses.
The healthcare AI market is moving rapidly, with 60% of execs reporting AI budgets outpacing general IT spend. This investment surge means competition for AI visibility will intensify, making continuous monitoring and optimization essential.
For telehealth providers, key performance indicators include mention rate across different query types, citation frequency in medical advice responses, and comparative rankings against direct competitors. These metrics reveal not just visibility, but also how AI engines position your brand relative to alternatives.
Proof in Numbers: Telehealth AEO Case Studies
Real-world implementations demonstrate the transformative impact of strategic AEO for healthcare organizations. Reframe, a behavioral health app, achieved 99.5K clicks in just 3 months after implementing comprehensive GEO optimization, while maintaining a 7.0% mention rate that surpassed all major competitors.
DocuBridge's results further validate the approach: their impressions surpassed 218,000 in six months, with mention rates reaching 6.4%, the highest among tracked competitors. Most importantly, they achieved a 67.7% head-to-head win rate in AI search matchups, meaning they were favored in two-thirds of direct comparison queries.
International success stories reinforce these patterns. Veris, a leading medical service provider in Ecuador, saw their conversion rate multiply by four, jumping from 17% to 67% after implementing AI-powered patient engagement systems. This dramatic improvement came alongside a 77% reduction in incoming calls and 35% decrease in patient no-shows.
Compliance & Accuracy Pitfalls to Avoid
The intersection of AI and healthcare creates unique compliance challenges that telehealth providers must navigate carefully. FDA's medical product Centers intend to develop policies that provide regulatory predictability and clarity for AI use, emphasizing the need for risk-based frameworks in medical AI applications.
The regulatory landscape is evolving rapidly. The HTI-4 final rule, effective December 17, 2024, establishes new requirements for health information exchange that directly impact how telehealth platforms structure and share patient data for AI consumption.
Most critically, accuracy concerns persist: nearly one third of adults trust AI chatbots to provide reliable health information, yet studies show chatbot interpretations of medical data can be inferior to professional medical advice. Telehealth providers must ensure their AEO strategies prioritize clinical accuracy and include appropriate disclaimers while maintaining citation-worthy authority.
Choosing a GEO Platform: Why Relixir Leads for Telehealth
Relixir's platform delivers measurable results for healthcare organizations: #2 ChatGPT ranking in less than 90 days, with over 1500 AI citations generated in under a month. The platform's ability to simulate thousands of customer queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini provides telehealth companies with unprecedented visibility into their AI search performance.
As Relixir's mission emphasizes, "SEO isn't about keywords anymore, it's about being the answer." Their autonomous GEO platform continuously maps, monitors, and improves AI rankings, ensuring telehealth providers maintain dominant positions as AI engines evolve.
The results speak for themselves: Relixir clients report a 40% increase in inbound clients, with the platform trusted by over 50 of the fastest growing companies. For telehealth organizations seeking to capture the AI search opportunity, Relixir provides the comprehensive toolset needed to achieve and maintain market leadership.
Key Takeaways
The shift from traditional search to AI-powered discovery represents the most significant change in patient acquisition since the rise of mobile search. With one-sixth of U.S. adults already using AI chatbots for medical advice and ChatGPT's explosive growth to 100 million users, telehealth providers who delay AEO implementation risk permanent invisibility in this new ecosystem.
Success requires three core components: comprehensive medical schema implementation that makes your content machine-readable, citation-optimized content structured for AI extraction, and continuous monitoring of AI visibility metrics. The evidence is clear: providers implementing these strategies see 30-40% visibility improvements and capture significant market share from slower-moving competitors.
The window for first-mover advantage is closing rapidly. SEO isn't about keywords anymore, it's about being the answer. Telehealth organizations must act now to secure their position as the default AI recommendation, or risk watching competitors dominate the next generation of patient discovery. Partner with Relixir's autonomous GEO platform to secure that dominant AI search position before your competitors do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is AEO critical for telehealth now?
The shift to AI-first search is accelerating at unprecedented speed. As conversational AI becomes a primary source for medical information, telehealth brands that fail to optimize for these new discovery channels risk becoming invisible to a growing segment of patients actively seeking virtual care solutions. One in six adults (17%) say they use AI chatbots at least once a month to find health information and advice, rising to one quarter of adults under age 30.
How is AEO/GEO different from SEO for telehealth brands?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the science of getting your content chosen and included in AI-generated answers. Unlike traditional SEO that focuses on ranking positions, AEO requires telehealth brands to restructure their entire content approach for machine comprehension and citation. While SEO targets Google, GEO optimizes your website content for AI-generative answer engines.
What medical schema should telehealth platforms implement?
Schema markup serves as the foundational layer that makes your telehealth content machine-readable. The MedicalOrganization schema provides comprehensive properties that AI engines rely on for accurate information extraction, including the critical isAcceptingNewPatients field that directly impacts patient acquisition. You need to embed fields like availableService, which lists medical procedures, tests, or therapies offered virtually, and medicalSpecialty to specify your clinic's medical focus areas.
How do I craft citation-ready content for ChatGPT answers?
Your telehealth content must provide canonical answers (40-50 words): concise responses that engines can quote and attribute directly. Every piece of telehealth content should follow this structured approach: clear topic sentences, evidence-backed claims with inline citations, and concise summaries that AI can extract verbatim. Remember that adding statistics essentially hands the generative engine proof points on a silver platter, making your content the preferred source for factual medical information.
Which AI search performance metrics should telehealth teams track?
Measuring AI search performance requires new metrics beyond traditional SEO analytics. You need to track your AI Brand Score, Sentiment Score, and Brand Share of Voice across high-impact sources to understand your true visibility in AI-generated responses. For telehealth providers, key performance indicators include mention rate across different query types, citation frequency in medical advice responses, and comparative rankings against direct competitors.
Why choose Relixir as your GEO platform?
Relixir's platform delivers measurable results for healthcare organizations: #2 ChatGPT ranking in less than 90 days, with over 1500 AI citations generated in under a month. As Relixir's mission emphasizes, "SEO isn't about keywords anymore, it's about being the answer." The results speak for themselves: Relixir clients report a 40% increase in inbound clients, with the platform trusted by over 50 of the fastest growing companies.
Sources
https://gensearch.io/docs/guide/generative-engine-optimization
https://medicinalmarketing.com/blog/generative-engine-optimization-for-healthcare/
https://schemaapp.com/solutions/schema-markup-solution-healthcare
https://www.bessemertrust.com/insights/navigating-ai-adoption-healthcare-2025-the-builders-guide
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196070925000213
