Health Care Industry: 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks

*This data comes from the 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks Report. To explore insights across all 10 industries, access the full report here.

Executive summary

There’s a new search experience for brands to prioritize: AI answer engines.

The rise of AI answer engines and Google’s integration of AI Overview (AIO) results directly onto traditional SERPs means users are increasingly getting answers from AI-generated summaries directly rather than clicking a link, leading to a surge in zero-click searches.

While organic search still fuels the majority of discovery, AI has introduced what we’re calling a parallel surface of visibility—an invisible layer that determines which brands are seen before anyone clicks.

The data shows that AI referral traffic currently represents just over 1% of total web visits and is growing by roughly 1% each month, on average. It will never rival traditional organic search traffic—but that’s not the point. In this new model, visibility no longer begins on your website; it starts within the AI experiences that answer questions, guide intent, and shape perception in real time. If your brand isn’t cited, mentioned, or referenced in these AI answers, it’s effectively absent from the modern customer journey.

AI visibility is becoming its own performance channel, one that signals which brands are trusted enough to enter the answer. Winning in this space isn’t about clicks; it’s about credibility.

The following findings provide the first layer of industry-specific benchmark data essential for navigating the new search landscape and ensuring credibility (and visibility) of your brand. It moves beyond traditional website analytics to provide key context for evaluating your total search performance, identifying accurate KPIs for both organic and AIO, and implementing the right strategies to drive results.

Top takeaways for Health Care

• AEO, GEO & AI Search benchmarks:
  • The Health Care sector sees .64% of its website traffic from AI referrals.
  • While overall AI referral traffic is still growing (around 0.5% MoM), the rate of growth has decelerated since May.
  • ChatGPT is the primary source of AI referrals (83.8%), but Perplexity (7.8%), Copilot (4.7%), and Gemini (2.8%) also contribute.
  • In the health care equipment & services subindustry, mayoclinic.org (6.58%) and clevelandclinic.org (4.90%) lead AI citations, while pfizer.com (16.40%) is the market leader in the pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, & life sciences subindustry.
• AIO benchmarks:
  • AI Overviews (AIOs) appear on a massive 48.7% of all page-one Google queries for Health Care, significantly higher than average.
  • News articles are the most frequently cited page type in Health Care AIOs.
  • Healthline.com (5.76%) accounted for the most AIO share of voice in the entire Health Care industry.

Methodology

Using Conductor, we analyzed 13,770 domains from leading brands. Each domain was categorized into 10 industries and then further segmented into 22 subindustries to provide additional insights, which map directly to the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) framework. This research identifies emerging traffic trends, separating traditional organic traffic from new AI referral patterns and zero-click visibility at a granular level.

For the purposes of this industry-specific report, the Health Care industry was split into two subindustries:

• Health care equipment & services
• Pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, & life sciences

AI search methodology

The AI search market share and brand leaders are sourced from our analysis of 13,770 domains being cited against our index of 3.5 million unique prompts between May and September 2025. We focused on these domains as they aligned with the 10 GICS industry categories we are reporting on. The analysis included 17 million AI-generated responses and over 100 million citations sourced from our AI Search Performance (AISP) and AIO reporting index.

The findings on AI search traffic, organic Google traffic, and referral traffic by answer engine type were sourced by analyzing anonymized and aggregated traffic patterns across 1,215 of our enterprise customer domains to assess how users of answer engines are reaching websites.

Ultimately, we analyzed more than 3.3 billion sessions across all of our data sources. Of that traffic, AI traffic from LLMs and chatbots accounted for more than 35.7 million sessions across the 10 industries analyzed.

The following benchmarks are averages sourced from an analysis of monthly AI search traffic data in the U.S. over a five-month period (May 2025-September 2025) in Conductor.

AI Overview methodology

We analyzed AI Overview data in the U.S. over a four-week period from September 15 to October 12, 2025, to gain insight into how AI-powered search is affecting Google’s traditional search experience. To do so, we analyzed approximately 21.9 million unique Google searches from Conductor’s traditional search index. Of those Google searches, nearly 5.5 million generated an AIO result.

AEO & AI search visibility analysis for Health Care

This analysis provides a granular, data-driven benchmark for true visibility in the AI search landscape.

This section focuses on:

• AI referral traffic by subindustry
• Month-over-month (MoM) growth
• AI referral traffic by answer engine
• AI vs. Traditional channels
• AI market share

AI referral traffic for the Health Care industry

The results:

• AI referral traffic accounts for .64% of all website traffic for the Health Care industry.
  • AI referral traffic usually has high intent and is more likely to convert than traffic from traditional channels. That shift means that AI search visibility is becoming the new key currency for enterprise AEO.
• The Health Care (.64%) industry had a below-average amount of AI referral traffic out of the 10 analyzed industries.

AI referral traffic by Health Care subindustries

The results:

• .65% of traffic from queries related to health care equipment & services comes from AI.
• The pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and life sciences subindustry saw .59% of traffic come from AI referral traffic.

Month-over-month growth in AI referral traffic change

The results:

• AI referral traffic in the Health Care industry fell .34% from May to September 2025.
• The rate of month-over-month growth decreased by -.34% over each of the last 5 months.

This decrease could be caused by a number of factors, but one possibility is that as the quality of AI output improved between May and September 2025, the summaries more effectively satisfied user needs within the overview itself, so users were less likely to need to follow a citation.

AI referral traffic vs. Traditional SEO traffic benchmarks for Health Care

The results:

• Established channels like organic search, paid, direct, social, and any other referral traffic aside from AI still drive the vast majority of website visits across all industries.
  • AI traffic made up just .64% of all traffic in the Health Care industry.
• Organic Google traffic makes up a significant 42.36%, and other traffic sources contribute over 57%.

This significant organic traffic benchmark for Health Care (42.36%) underscores the continued importance of a strong traditional SEO strategy. Even as AI search grows, optimizing for visibility in standard Google results is essential for improving brand visibility and relevance. This potential overlap reinforces the need for a dual approach of traditional SEO and AEO / GEO strategies.

AI referral traffic by answer engine source: Health Care industry

The results:

• On average, ChatGPT drives 83.8% of all AI referral traffic in the Health Care industry.
  • If you're not being cited on ChatGPT, you're losing out on the lion's share of high-intent AI referral traffic.
• Perplexity drove nearly 8% of AI traffic to the Health Care industry.

That said, while ChatGPT is the engine you should prioritize, it’s not the only answer engine you should pay attention to. Copilot, Perplexity, and Gemini specifically are driving notable traffic and could continue to expand their influence. Prepare for future volatility by tracking your brand presence across all of these answer engines and then optimizing as needed if your mentions and citations drop.

Health Care market share: Domain citations and brand mention leaders

This section is our analysis of the brands and domains that won the most market share in the Health Care industry. Our analysis was based on AI citations and brand mentions for May through September 2025. The results are split across two key Health Care subindustries:

• Health care equipment & services
• Pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and life sciences

Health Care industry: Top 5 domains by AI citation market share

1. mayoclinic.org
2. clevelandclinic.org
3. healthline.com
4. goodrx.com
5. webmd.com

For Health Care, a critical your money or your life (YMYL) category, AI models overwhelmingly prioritize expertise and authority. The list is led by world-renowned medical institutions, such as mayoclinic.org and clevelandclinic.org, which are cited for their trusted, expert-written health information. Following them are massive, dedicated health publishers like healthline.com and webmd.com, which AI relies on for their vast libraries of medically reviewed, accessible content.

Health Care industry: Top 5 brand leaders by AI brand mention market share

1. Mayo Clinic
2. Cleveland Clinic
3. Pfizer
4. Labcorp
5. Baptist Health

The brand mentions list confirms the dominance of Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, as AI models recognize them as primary authorities. Their success is driven by comprehensive "Health Libraries" that function as massive, well-structured glossaries, making it easy for AI to source accurate answers. The high ranking of Pfizer and Labcorp also reveals a significant B2B and financial component to health-related AI queries.

Health care equipment & services subindustry market share leaders by domain citations

Below, we have the top five domains in the health care equipment & services subindustry based on their share of domain citations in AI search.

This subindustry list is identical to the overall Health Care industry leaders, with mayoclinic.org (6.58%), clevelandclinic.org (4.90%), and healthline.com (4.42%) holding the top spots in both. This confirms that queries about equipment and services are the primary driver of AI citations for the entire industry. As a YMYL category, AI models are clearly prioritizing these world-renowned medical institutions and trusted, expert-driven health publishers as the most authoritative sources.

Pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, & life sciences subindustry market share leaders by domain citations

This list shows total domination by a single brand, Pfizer. The company's domains, including pfizer.com (16.40%) and its professional-facing portal pfizerpro.com (11.23%), take four of the top five spots. This indicates that for highly specific YMYL queries about pharmaceuticals, AI models bypass general health publishers and go directly to the manufacturer's own technical and medical domains as the ultimate source of truth.

AI Overview benchmarks for Health Care

Despite the rise of AI answer engines, billions of searches still happen on Google, and every day, AI Overviews are appearing for more of those searches. That means it’s essential for brands to optimize their site to rank on page 1 in Google and increase their chances of winning an AIO result.

Below is our analysis of the AIO visibility in the Health Care industry.

AIO visibility analysis: Health Care industry

The results:

• AIO results appeared for 48.7% of all Google queries in the Health Care industry.
• Health Care had the highest AI Overview visibility of all 10 industries.

AIO visibility analysis: Health Care subindustries

The results:

• More than 48% of all Health Care queries trigger an AI Overview in Google.
  • If you’re in the Health Care industry, you need to find a way to win AIO results or risk disappearing from nearly half of key queries.
• Health care equipment & services (49.2%) searches trigger an AIO result most often out of Health Care subindustries.
• Insurance (31.7%) had a slightly lower, but still significant, share of AI Overviews among all Health Care subindustries.

Our analysis shows that the Health Care industry is well above the average for AIO results. Nearly half of all Health Care queries trigger an AI Overview in Google. This makes sense since Health Care queries are usually complex, multi-faceted, and informational, which is the exact use case AIO was made for, synthesizing complex information into a digestible summary.

It’s also interesting to note that the presence of AI overviews is significant for both subindustries, although the equipment & services sector triggers more AI Overviews. Despite that difference, if you’re in the Health Care industry, you need to find a way to win AIO results or risk disappearing from almost half of Health Care queries.

Page types cited most often in AIO results for Health Care

The results:

• News content was by far the most cited page source in AI Overviews, with over 46,000 pages being cited in the result.
• The next closest page type in AIO results was a blog page with just over 36,000 citations.

The key takeaway here is that your content is much more likely to appear in AIO results for Health Care queries if it’s news-related. AI Overviews likely favor news content over blogs for Health Care queries due to Google's strong emphasis on E-E-A-T for YMYL topics. The editorial standards of many news sites send positive signals to Google, making them more likely to be cited for important, complex topics like Health Care.

Health Care AIO share of voice winners by subindustry

The following tables show the top 5 domains in each subindustry that were cited most often in an AI overview.

Health care equipment & services subindustry: Winning domains for AIO share of voice

The results:

• Healthline.com (5.76%) accounts for the largest AIO share of voice.
• Clevelandclinic.org (4.55%) and mayoclinic.org (4.13%) follow, securing the next two spots.

As a critical YMYL topic, AIOs are clearly trained to cite sources with the highest E-E-A-T. Healthline and WebMD lead due to their vast libraries of accessible, medically reviewed articles, while Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic are cited for their deep, institutional expertise.

Pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, & life sciences subindustry: Winning domains for AIO share of voice

The results:

• MERCK MANUALS (.10%) leads this highly fragmented subindustry.
• Pfizer (.07%) takes the second spot. Definitive Healthcare (.05%), SIGMA-ALDRICH (.05%), and MERCK VETERINARY MANUAL (.03%) complete the list.

The extremely low market shares show that AIO citations in this technical field are highly fragmented. The leaders are not general publishers but specific, professional-grade resources. MERCK MANUALS leads as a foundational medical reference, while the presence of B2B players like Definitive Healthcare (data) and SIGMA-ALDRICH (chemical supply) indicates AIOs are sourcing answers for a specialized, scientific audience, not just patients.

Summary

The future of digital discovery belongs to the Health Care brands that understand that AI visibility isn’t a nice-to-have metric—it’s the next frontier of search performance. Having informed, data-driven KPIs for both SEO and AEO / GEO enables digital teams to measure their total search visibility and adapt their strategies from clicks to zero-click citations.

Leverage the Health Care industry benchmarks featured here to understand how your brand performs and where there are opportunities to improve.

Remember, the shift to AI is accelerating. While AI referral traffic is a small (but high-intent) channel today, now is the time to secure your market share in these new, answer-driven results to ensure you show up first—and keep showing up first.