Securing AI Citations in Healthcare
The challenge
When Google began testing AI Overviews in early 2024, entire conversational summaries appeared above the traditional blue links. Independent analysis of more than 120,000 search results showed that on mobile these summaries and their companion featured snippets could fill almost half of the visible screen as much as 48 percent in some layouts.
For a leading not-for-profit teaching hospital that relies on organic traffic to attract patients, fellows and philanthropic donors, the stakes were obvious. If the AI summary quoted other sources, the hospital’s authoritative content would be pushed below the fold, and qualified visits could evaporate. At the start of 2024, none of the hospital’s pages were cited inside AI Overviews for its highest-volume condition keywords.
Objectives
The communications team defined three priorities:
Keep the hospital visible in AI Overviews for at least two dozen common health questions within twelve months.
Lift monthly site visits from roughly 76 million to more than 82 million without additional ad spend.
Triple the number of tier-one media stories that framed the hospital as an AI-in-medicine leader.
PR and content strategy
To hit those marks the team designed an integrated program, all driven by verifiable data rather than intuition.
Publish news in a machine-ready format. Every press release included a 100-word plain-language abstract, FAQ headings and schema.org medical Entity markup so large language models could ingest facts cleanly.
Seed authority in trusted outlets. Milestones were offered under embargo to a top-tier global newswire and a leading business magazine, ensuring wide syndication across high-authority domains that generative search engines prefer.
Refresh legacy evergreen pages. Seven thousand condition articles were rewritten with conversational “quick facts” boxes and citations to peer-reviewed studies. Short audio pronunciations of technical terms were embedded so AI systems had an accurate spoken reference.
Measure what the AI actually shows. A generative-SERP monitoring platform scanned thousands of keywords each week to record when the hospital’s pages, or articles mentioning the hospital, appeared inside AI Overviews.
Business outcomes
Twenty-nine distinct AI Overview citations were secured across eleven high-volume symptom and treatment queries in under a year.
Site traffic grew ten percent year on year, averaging more than 84 million monthly visits by February 2025.
Media velocity tripled, with more than eleven hundred tier-one articles in 2024 compared with 360 the previous year; the average domain-authority score of those outlets exceeded 80.
Backlinks from .gov and .edu sites rose eighteen percent, a by-product of academic journals referencing the hospital’s research library.
Why the program worked
Credibility plus clarity. Pairing peer-reviewed research with plain-English takeaways met both the expertise standards of AI algorithms and the comprehension needs of human readers.
Structured facts feed the model. Bullet-pointed releases and schema markup made it easy for language models to quote the hospital verbatim, reducing the risk of being excluded from summaries.
Constant feedback loops. Weekly SERP scraping kept the team focused on keywords where citations lagged, so they could deploy fresh commentary before competitors filled the gap.
Lessons for other communicators
Treat every press release as potential training data; structure it accordingly.
Monitor generative SERPs, not just ranking positions, because brand mentions inside AI answers carry influence even when users stop clicking.
Refresh evergreen pages with concise, conversational summaries; AI systems often lift passages wholesale.
Move fast on breaking stories; early expert quotes can echo through thousands of AI citations later.
