Google’s Search Generative Experience 101

How it will impact your healthcare website

Google recently rolled out its new search generative experience (SGE) to select users based in the United States.

In this blog, we outline what SGE is, why it matters, and how it’s predicted to impact the healthcare industry and its websites.

Before we do that, though, let’s run through a quick Google & AI history lesson:

History of Google & AI

• For 25 years, 80% of Google’s revenue came from ads. 
• At the same time, search is declining: 25% predicted as folks embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI).
• We’re trained to search through learned behavior: unnatural phrasing, lack of verbs, and unconversational. 
• AI allows us to search using full-sentence structures, following our natural behavior and conversations.

What is Search Generative Experience or SGE?

Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) is an experiment using AI to create search engine results page content. Believe it or not, Bing is already doing this and has been doing it for a while now.

Google continues to change the format, layout, content, data, and other elements in SGE results. 

What’s being displayed?

1. Collapsed view (AI-generated content is collapsed for the searcher)
2. Opt-in (a prompt appears at the top of the page, allowing searchers to opt-in to an AI-generated overview of their search) 
3. Long(er) queries (a pediatrician who accepts Aetna in Chicago) display specific locations & people knowledge cards. 
4. Informational queries (e.g. “What is stiff neck?”) display an AI-generated top-of-page snippet. 
5. Local queries (e.g. “best neurologist near me”) display doctor profile knowledge cards.

Where’s Google getting its data? 

1. Listings (Google Business Profiles)
2. Reviews (Google Business Profiles)
3. Site content, Find a Doctor (FAD) & third-party sites like Yelp. 

Search engine marketing (SEM) impact

• 23% of ads show up on top of SGE
• 32% of ads show up below SGE
• 0% of ads show up within SGE (for healthcare)

What we’re seeing 

Google continues to experiment, though we’re seeing:

• Data populating SGE directly from Google Business Profiles. This includes listings & review data.
• Website content that is more structured and sitting on heavily schema-tagged pages is showing more often.
• Google is “summarizing” page content – including patient reviews on provider pages and content on well-structured content pages.
• Paid ads are not showing most of the time (at least not for now.)

The impact is already huge

Source: BrightEdge

Organic traffic to healthcare websites is predicted to decline. An 18-75% loss could be seen overnight. Education sites should prepare for a decline as high as 44%. 

The hardest-hit sites will be content pages (such as Healthgrades, WebMD, Mayo Clinic, etc.) and any content pages on your healthcare organization’s website.

Things to consider

• Expect organic traffic to decline dramatically. 
• Already, we’re seeing changes to how websites are discovered (or not discovered).
• Queries that contain “who, what, and where” type questions will likely see the most declines in organic traffic to healthcare sites.
• Informational queries that are more research-based are now more likely to reduce organic traffic, whereas they once could have led to traffic to sites .
• Expect a focus on people over paid; your doctors, physicians, healthcare professionals, and medical school faculty will be heavily prioritized to show in SGE results. 
• Changes will affect how people (doctors, faculty, etc.) appear in SGE, making listings and reviews over paid ads all the more critical to your healthcare website’s content strategy right now.

What you can do now

1. Sign up to Search Labs and play around with it.
2. Focus on search intent, and what people mean when they search and find healthcare sites.
3. Consider ways to craft content for long-tail queries.
4. Prioritize listings and reviews. Ensure that data is robust, up-to-date, properly structured, and connected to platforms to help drive better impressions and accuracy on Google and other sites.
5. Don’t ignore Google reviews (respond, generate, etc.) 
6. Build relationships and horizontal pathways between content on your healthcare website.

Focus on E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness come from your brand. We can help you connect the dots on your website and tell your story if you fear this is currently lacking from your site.

Horizontal pathways between related site content are vital. We’ve helped a number of healthcare clients achieve this, including the award-winning UCSF Department of Surgery website and some nimble support redesigns like the UCSF School of Nursing.

With the UCSF Department of Surgery in particular, it’s about making connections between content about health conditions, people who treat them, and the places where surgeons can see patients with related conditions. 

Each page should be properly structured and display an optimized content hierarchy, taking into consideration how Google can reference information in SGE. 

And most importantly: ensure every page is schema-tagged!

Focusing on website transactions 

As your healthcare website content continues to be distributed to train AI algorithms, websites will increasingly become places where folks need to transact, not learn. 

Websites need to focus on these key transactions:

1. Phone calls to make appointments. 
2. Online appointment bookings. 
3. Other calls to action (newsletter sign-up, apply for a clinical trial, etc.) 

SEO will become SGO

As SGE continues to evolve, SEO will increasingly resemble SGO.
Healthcare websites need to pivot towards becoming transactional hubs, facilitating intuitive actions such as appointment bookings and clinical trial sign-ups directly from search engine results pages (SERPs).

While Google’s Search Generative Experience reflects a paradigm shift in search engine functionality, it also presents exciting opportunities for hospitals, clinics, and medical schools to enhance their digital strategies.

By embracing AI-driven data analyses, optimizing content for search intent, and prioritizing patient, donor, and resident engagement through transactional website functionalities, healthcare organizations can proactively adapt to the changing digital landscape and continue to thrive in this emerging AI-centered online world.