On some health searches, around half the clicks have simply disappeared. The clinic sitting in the top spot usually has no idea why its enquiries went quiet.
Pew Research Center tracked real Google searches in 2025 and found people clicked a regular result in 15 per cent of visits when no AI summary appeared. When one did, that fell to 8 per cent. Just 1 per cent clicked a link inside the summary itself.
Health questions are exactly what those summaries are built for. Someone worried about a rash at 11pm gets a tidy paragraph from Google and maybe a bit of relief. The page your practice paid to write about rashes gets nothing. For anyone investing in healthcare SEO, that's a hard thing to hear.
The Searches Google Now Keeps for Itself
For years the trade was simple. Write helpful articles about conditions, rank for them, and some of those readers would book in. That trade is shrinking. Questions like "what causes lower back pain" or "how long does a cold last" now get answered before anyone scrolls.
It stings for practices that spent real money on that content. The articles weren't wrong. Google just found a way to keep the reader.
Seer Interactive's tracking across 42 organisations shows how steep the slide got. Organic click-through on informational searches with an AI Overview fell from 1.76 per cent in mid-2024 to 0.61 per cent by September 2025. Their 2026 update showed some recovery. Nobody is calling it a return to normal.
Bookings Still Come From a Different Kind of Search
The split comes down to what the person wants next. Someone asking what sciatica is wants an explanation. Someone searching "physio near me open Saturday" wants an appointment, and Google can't book it for them. So it still sends the click.
A medical SEO strategy built for 2026 puts its weight here. A proper service page for each treatment you actually offer. Location pages that read like they were written by someone who knows the suburb. A Google Business Profile with current hours, real photos and replies to reviews. None of it is glamorous. All of it sits closer to the moment a patient picks up the phone.
Blunt version. A site can rank for 200 health questions and none of the booking searches in its own suburb. The traffic report looks healthy. The appointment book doesn't.
Getting Quoted Instead of Skipped
Informational content isn't dead, but its job has changed. Seer found brands cited inside an AI Overview earned 35 per cent more organic clicks than brands that weren't, while noting that might reflect brand strength as much as the citation itself.
Google leans heavily on trust signals for health topics, and the pages it quotes tend to share a few habits. A named practitioner wrote or reviewed the page, with their qualifications listed. The advice fits Australian care, Medicare and local referral pathways rather than a US insurance system. Claims stay inside AHPRA's advertising rules, which also keeps the content honest enough for Google to trust.
So the rash article still matters. It needs a GP's name on it, and an answer the summary can't fully give, like the signs that mean a rash should be looked at in person this week.
Traffic Can Fall While Appointments Hold
Plenty of practices still judge SEO for healthcare by visitor numbers. That figure can now drop while bookings stay steady or even climb, because the people Google does send are further along in deciding.
Track calls from your Google Business Profile, online bookings by page, and which suburbs those bookings come from. Healthcare website rankings are only worth chasing when they sit on searches that fill appointments. Fewer sessions with steady bookings isn't a crisis. Fewer bookings is.
Good healthcare SEO services should already be reporting on those numbers. At Clickpilot, work for dental, medical, allied health and pharmacy practices is judged on enquiries and bookings first, with traffic kept as context rather than the headline.
What a Search Summary Can't Do
Google can tell someone what a symptom probably means. It can't notice they're more worried than they're letting on, or tell them the clinic two streets away has a spot at 9am tomorrow. Searches built around that second kind of need are the ones still worth ranking for, and on most practice websites, they're the pages that get the least attention.
Google now answers a lot of health questions itself, right at the top of the page, and far fewer people click through to any website at all. The clinics still getting found are ranking for a different kind of search, and it's worth knowing which kind.
On some health searches, around half the clicks have simply disappeared. The clinic sitting in the top spot usually has no idea why its enquiries went quiet.
Pew Research Center tracked real Google searches in 2025 and found people clicked a regular result in 15 per cent of visits when no AI summary appeared. When one did, that fell to 8 per cent. Just 1 per cent clicked a link inside the summary itself.
Health questions are exactly what those summaries are built for. Someone worried about a rash at 11pm gets a tidy paragraph from Google and maybe a bit of relief. The page your practice paid to write about rashes gets nothing. For anyone investing in healthcare SEO, that's a hard thing to hear.
The Searches Google Now Keeps for Itself
For years the trade was simple. Write helpful articles about conditions, rank for them, and some of those readers would book in. That trade is shrinking. Questions like "what causes lower back pain" or "how long does a cold last" now get answered before anyone scrolls.
It stings for practices that spent real money on that content. The articles weren't wrong. Google just found a way to keep the reader.
Seer Interactive's tracking across 42 organisations shows how steep the slide got. Organic click-through on informational searches with an AI Overview fell from 1.76 per cent in mid-2024 to 0.61 per cent by September 2025. Their 2026 update showed some recovery. Nobody is calling it a return to normal.
Bookings Still Come From a Different Kind of Search
The split comes down to what the person wants next. Someone asking what sciatica is wants an explanation. Someone searching "physio near me open Saturday" wants an appointment, and Google can't book it for them. So it still sends the click.
A medical SEO strategy built for 2026 puts its weight here. A proper service page for each treatment you actually offer. Location pages that read like they were written by someone who knows the suburb. A Google Business Profile with current hours, real photos and replies to reviews. None of it is glamorous. All of it sits closer to the moment a patient picks up the phone.
Blunt version. A site can rank for 200 health questions and none of the booking searches in its own suburb. The traffic report looks healthy. The appointment book doesn't.
Getting Quoted Instead of Skipped
Informational content isn't dead, but its job has changed. Seer found brands cited inside an AI Overview earned 35 per cent more organic clicks than brands that weren't, while noting that might reflect brand strength as much as the citation itself.
Google leans heavily on trust signals for health topics, and the pages it quotes tend to share a few habits. A named practitioner wrote or reviewed the page, with their qualifications listed. The advice fits Australian care, Medicare and local referral pathways rather than a US insurance system. Claims stay inside AHPRA's advertising rules, which also keeps the content honest enough for Google to trust.
So the rash article still matters. It needs a GP's name on it, and an answer the summary can't fully give, like the signs that mean a rash should be looked at in person this week.
Traffic Can Fall While Appointments Hold
Plenty of practices still judge SEO for healthcare by visitor numbers. That figure can now drop while bookings stay steady or even climb, because the people Google does send are further along in deciding.
Track calls from your Google Business Profile, online bookings by page, and which suburbs those bookings come from. Healthcare website rankings are only worth chasing when they sit on searches that fill appointments. Fewer sessions with steady bookings isn't a crisis. Fewer bookings is.
Good healthcare SEO services should already be reporting on those numbers. At Clickpilot, work for dental, medical, allied health and pharmacy practices is judged on enquiries and bookings first, with traffic kept as context rather than the headline.
What a Search Summary Can't Do
Google can tell someone what a symptom probably means. It can't notice they're more worried than they're letting on, or tell them the clinic two streets away has a spot at 9am tomorrow. Searches built around that second kind of need are the ones still worth ranking for, and on most practice websites, they're the pages that get the least attention.
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