Google's AI Overviews have reshaped healthcare search — but not in the way most people think. Here's how the mechanics actually work, where your multi-location practice is exposed, and what you can do about it.
AI Overviews (AIO) are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google search results. Instead of showing you ten blue links and letting you click through, Google reads multiple sources, synthesizes an answer, and presents it before the organic results. The user gets a direct answer. The websites that informed that answer may or may not get a click.
For healthcare, this matters because a significant portion of search traffic — the kind that used to drive patients to your practice websites — is now being intercepted. Not by a competitor. By Google itself.
Here's the part most AIO articles get wrong: they treat all healthcare search queries the same. They're not. Google has drawn a clear line between two types of healthcare search, and it treats them very differently.
Clinical and informational queries — symptoms, conditions, treatments, procedures — are heavily covered by AI Overviews. As of late 2025, treatment and procedure queries show near-total AIO coverage. Pain-related queries, symptom queries, condition queries — all saturated. If your practice website has pages explaining what a root canal is, what to expect after knee replacement surgery, or how Botox works, those pages are competing directly with AI-generated answers that appear above your listing.
Local provider queries — "dentist near me," "orthopedic surgeon in Tampa," "best pediatrician near me" — have gone in the opposite direction. Google tested AI Overviews on these queries and then removed them entirely. Local provider searches are now handled by traditional results: Maps, the local pack, and organic listings.
This bifurcation has a direct implication for multi-location healthcare practices: your local SEO investment — the work of ranking each location for provider-intent searches in its market — is still the primary driver of patient acquisition from search. Google has decided, at least for now, that AI shouldn't answer "who should I see" for healthcare. That's your traditional organic game, and it still works.
But the informational content on your websites — the service descriptions, the condition explainers, the treatment pages — is being actively cannibalized. The patient researching "what happens during a dental implant procedure" used to click through to your website and then maybe book an appointment. Now they read Google's summary and may never visit your site at all.
When Google generates an AI Overview, it doesn't just pull from one source. It uses a process called "query fan-out" — issuing multiple related searches across subtopics, scoring sources on semantic relevance, authority signals, and content freshness, then synthesizing the results into a single answer.
The sources it tends to cite share specific characteristics:
The structural problem for DSOs, MSOs, and PE-backed platforms isn't that AIO exists. It's that the informational content on most multi-location practice websites was never built to be authoritative — it was built to fill pages.
Consider the typical multi-location dental website. Each location has a "Dental Implants" service page. Across 50 locations, these pages are either identical (copy-paste with city name swapped) or superficially differentiated (same structure, same talking points, different introductory paragraph). Neither version is the kind of content Google's AI wants to cite. They're marketing pages, not informational resources.
This creates two problems simultaneously:
Problem 1: You're invisible in AIO. When a prospective patient in your market searches "how long do dental implants last" or "dental implant vs bridge pros and cons," Google's AIO pulls from WebMD, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and specialty dental education sites. Your practice website isn't in the conversation. The patient gets their answer, and your brand never enters their awareness.
Problem 2: Your informational traffic is declining even if rankings hold. Healthcare websites are seeing 20-30% year-over-year declines in traffic to clinical information pages while their rankings remain stable. The pages still rank. People just aren't clicking because the answer is already on the search results page.
For a PE-backed platform spending on patient acquisition, this means the top-of-funnel — the "patient is researching a condition or procedure and discovers your practice" pathway — is eroding. The patient who would have landed on your dental implant page, read about the procedure, and then clicked "Book an Appointment" is now reading Google's summary and booking with whoever shows up in the local pack.
There is no guaranteed way to appear in AI Overviews. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something they can't deliver. Google's AIO algorithm changes, its source selection criteria evolve, and what works today may not work in six months.
That said, the practices that are being cited in AIO for healthcare queries share observable patterns that can be replicated. These aren't silver bullets — they're best practices that improve your odds while also improving the quality of your web presence independent of AIO.
Build dedicated condition and procedure content, not just service pages. Instead of a "Dental Implants" service page that's really a sales pitch, create a genuine educational resource: what the procedure involves, who's a candidate, what recovery looks like, what the risks are, how much it costs in your market. Make it specific to your practice — your technology, your protocols, your providers. This gives Google something worth citing and gives the patient a reason to trust you specifically.
Attach provider expertise to clinical content. Every condition or procedure page should be attributed to a named provider with real credentials. Not a generic "reviewed by our team" disclaimer — an actual physician or specialist whose expertise is verifiable. This aligns with Google's E-E-A-T framework and distinguishes your content from generic health information sites.
Build FAQ content from real search queries. Not the FAQ sections that every website has ("Do you accept insurance?" "Where are you located?"). Build FAQ pages around the clinical questions patients actually search — "how much do dental implants cost in [city]," "does [procedure] hurt," "how long is recovery from [procedure]." These direct-answer formats are the structure AIO most commonly pulls from.
Implement advanced schema markup. Go beyond basic LocalBusiness schema. Add MedicalOrganization, Physician, FAQPage, MedicalCondition, and MedicalProcedure schema to the relevant pages. This doesn't guarantee AIO citation, but it removes a barrier — it gives Google's AI explicit, machine-readable signals about what your content covers and who created it.
Create topic depth, not just topic breadth. A single comprehensive page on "ACL reconstruction" that covers the procedure, recovery, physical therapy protocols, return-to-sport timelines, and your specific approach is more valuable — for AIO and for patients — than five thin pages that each cover one subtopic in two paragraphs.
If you're operating a multi-location healthcare platform, your content strategy now has two layers:
Layer 1: Local SEO content. Per-location, locally differentiated website content that ranks each practice in its market for provider-intent searches. This is your patient acquisition engine and it still works. Google has shielded local provider queries from AIO, so the investment in differentiated local content continues to pay off in organic rankings and local pack visibility.
Layer 2: Clinical authority content. Condition and procedure content that positions your practice as a credible source for informational queries. This content won't necessarily drive direct conversions — patients don't book appointments from an educational article about knee replacement. But it builds brand visibility in a search environment where AIO is increasingly the first (and sometimes only) thing patients see. Being cited in an AI Overview for a relevant clinical query is a trust signal, even if the patient doesn't click through.
Most multi-location practices have Layer 1 handled to varying degrees. Almost none have Layer 2 built in any meaningful way. That's the gap — and it's the gap that will separate platforms that maintain search visibility from those that watch their informational traffic disappear while their rankings technically hold steady.
We want to be direct about what AIO optimization can and can't deliver. It can improve your odds of being cited. It can build the content foundation that makes citation possible. It can create genuinely useful clinical content that serves patients and builds trust with your brand independent of whether Google cites it.
What it can't do is guarantee placement. Google's AIO is a black box that changes frequently. The practices being cited today may not be cited next month. The query types triggering AIO today may be different by next quarter. Any strategy built around AIO needs to deliver value even if AIO disappeared tomorrow — which means it needs to produce content that's genuinely good for patients, not just optimized for an algorithm.
That's the standard we hold ourselves to: build content worth reading, structured in a way that gives it the best shot at visibility in whatever format Google decides to show it.