This week, Google changed search forever (and dug the grave for websites)
This week, Google changed search and if you didn’t believe me before, please believe me today: they basically wrote the obituary for websites as we know them.
Unless Google has something up its sleeve, we have to admit that websites — including healthcare sites — will forever be transaction apps and content will now solely be the property of a Google summary.
Let’s back up a bit to this past Tuesday, May 20, 2025.
I eagerly awaited what Google might announce at their annual conference for developers, Google I/O. I’ve written about these announcements for years and each year, they announce something interesting that could apply to healthcare. This year was no different. Google leaned in heavily on AI.
In past years, they’ve seemed more reactive to other market announcements (especially those from OpenAI), but this year, these announcements felt not only focused, but also highly coordinated among Google products. Gemini is truly the “glue” and the thread among products and it felt like Google was finally pursuing a single product strategy with AI serving as the foundation.
Specifically, Google focused a lot of time on announcing changes to their core product, Search. We have already been experiencing AI Overviews (those AI summaries you find at the top of the search results). Some of us have had the opportunity to play around with AI Mode, the formerly-in-labs-but-now-live-to-everyone (in the US) conversational search experience where you can search in natural language and continue to have a conversation with Google about what you’re looking for. It’s a lot like ChatGPT or Gemini, but built right into the search experience. I’ve had access to it for a while and I love it. But until recently, it wasn’t that easy to find because you had to deliberately find the tab, click on “AI Mode” and then proceed with your conversational request.
Loads of people have used it, though, and Google reported seeing 2-3x longer queries on AI Mode than on traditional search. It’s no surprise that people are loving having a conversation within Google and finding direct answers (rather than hunting through blue links to find the same answers). We no longer have to speak the “language” of search - we can now speak our own conversational language to talk to Google. People love the path of least resistance.
This is great for the searcher and great for Google. It could keep people from leaving Google for ChatGPT or other platforms. Google still owns approximately 90% search market share, so perhaps this is their way of keeping people within their owned environment by tapping into ingrained behaviors that people use to find information online by first starting on Google.
But for website owners (especially in healthcare) it’s terrible. It’s a massive… a significant… a disruptive change. Until now, the way to optimize showing content, location and provider data was to feed Google’s knowledge graph through Google Business Profiles and via SEO-optimized content on your website that would drive discovery. Google would often add fields to the knowledge graph that would make it important for healthcare organizations to add that content to ensure they are up to date in feeding the right information to the graph for discovery if and when someone would search for care.
This year, Google is changing the game and drilling deeper into providing more conversational experiences via AI Mode — and this mode doesn’t send people to websites. It answers questions and promotes further discussion, on Google. The more people use AI Mode and rely on AI Overviews, the less people will need to visit any website (despite Google’s claims to the contrary).
AI Mode works a little differently, too, and it’s very important to understand how. AI Mode is designed to understand a very complex query. After someone asks a very long question, Google doesn’t just answer it, but seeks to go deeper. It enlists its “query fan out technique” to create sub-questions based on the original query. It continues to create more queries based on these sub-questions (the fan out) and seeks additional information sources based on these new queries. Information sources could include knowledge graphs, web content, local content, product graphs, etc. Once it’s satisfied with the answers it is getting, Google then pulls all of the information that it learned from the “fan out” and summarizes it into a result in AI Mode.
This is why data is now king and visits to your website are now dead.
As Google “fans out” to answer multiple questions per query, it needs a lot of data and will be consulting many more data sources (the data you feed to the knowledge graph, the schema on your website, and the specifically-curated content on your website, to name a few). If your content isn’t structured and tagged properly and you aren’t sending data to Google Business Profiles, you’ll never be part of the consideration during the fan out.
But even when you do have all of these elements optimized, Google will summarize the information and answer the question on the results page. No one will really need to go to your website any more. You might be cited and someone might want to transact. But finding information? Google will be taking care of that.
This is why earlier I mentioned that Google changed search forever and that websites are dead.
Gone are the days of blue links and knowledge cards and map packs. We’re going to see massive changes to search results and how people interact with Google. For those interactions, people will be asking longer and more complex things in a more conversational way and simply filling the knowledge graph — for healthcare — will not be enough.
One thing you can count on? While your website traffic will diminish, your website will still be extremely important because you need to provide as much information to Google as humanly possible. You just might not need the “souped up Ferrari of CMS platforms” or incredible UX designs to drive a good “experience” on your site.
If you build it, people probably won’t come.
They’ll only come to you when it’s time to transact (so you had better be ready for that as though your life depended on it). And even then, the announcements Google made about shopping on Google and Project Mariner shopping on your behalf means that the agents are coming, so you’ll need to prepare for agents to be able to transact in the future.
I’m reading the tea leaves here, so I don’t have any/all of the answers, but given what I do know, I would prioritize doing whatever you can to make sure your site, content and data is considered in the query fan-out.
Here are some things I’ve been thinking about regarding preparing your website and your knowledge graph for the immediate future:
Website:
If you have content on your website, make sure it’s written in short snippets and hyper-focused on Q&A style formats. It’s never been more important to understand what people want to learn when they are visiting your website, because in the near future, they’ll be asking Google for this information and Google will need to source it from you without rewarding you with that traffic in return.
Content on individual pages should be as connected as possible (e.g., make sure each page can answer a question, so a cardiology page should be about a condition, include doctors who treat that condition, locations where those doctors see patients and scheduling opportunities, all on the same page).
Ensure your site includes multimodal experiences — not just written content, but videos, images, etc. It’s clear Google is picking up on these and wants to make sure they can be delivered in an AI Mode result.
Schema tag your pages, making sure the machines can read your site - the verdict is out on whether schema is important, but it feels like it is and will continue to be, and it can’t hurt to have it, either.
Provider Pages should include as much information about the provider as possible - bio, photo, transaction opportunities, places where the provider sees patients, type and number of procedures for specific conditions (to showcase “expert” levels). The jury is out on whether the star ratings are really all that important any more so you may consider switching your focus from posting transparency on provider pages to real metrics of quality rather than qualitative metrics and popularity contests (e.g., instead of “this doctor was nice to me” you might want to consider adding “this doctor has performed more knee replacement surgeries than any other orthopedic surgeon at ABC Hospital” to indicate true expertise).
Structure your website to be transaction-focused on ALL pages. Now, people will need to visit your website or call your call center to book an appointment. In the future, the agents will need to do this on behalf of the patient. Make sure you are ready for this
Remember, site visits are going decline, but your content needs to feed Google and these experiences to ensure your content has a chance to show.
Knowledge Graph:
Cover the basics: name, address, phone, specialty, headshot - all should be table stakes. You MUST feed this information to Google Business Profiles. If you are not doing this today, start now. In this week’s I/O presentation, Google said they are taking information directly from the Knowledge Graph to feed AI Mode and AI Overviews, so make it easy for Google to access information about you. Don’t force it to do the work. It doesn’t want to do the work, so if it has to work to find your information, it will opt to show information for another organization if that organization has done the work.
Ensure any additional fields Google is requesting in Google Business Profiles are also complete. They are no longer optional. No data point is optional any more. Collect the information and feed it to Google Business Profiles as soon as possible. Google is craving data, so the more data you can give it, the higher the likelihood you will stand a chance of showing in an AI Mode result.
Forget about sending data to other websites. In the past, sending data to as many websites as possible was important, but not any more. Just worry about the important few: Prioritize Google for AI mode and overviews, but don’t forget about Bing (since it feeds ChatGPT), Facebook (Meta’s Llama) and Apple (Maps). Don’t worry about the rest — as I shared in an earlier Substack, Google is prioritizing only a few healthcare sites like Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic content, and they don’t accept knowledge graph information.
Identify where your data lives within your organization. Identify all of the data points you think you might need and look for it. I wrote a substack about finding other data points and mark my word, Google will be coming for this information soon, so you’ll need to know where it is, how to access it and then how to ensure you are feeding it to the graph and to your website.
Let’s not forget what’s coming up next — in her I/O presentation, Google’s Head of Search, Liz Reid all but said the agents are coming to search:
“Ask anything and a more intelligent, agentic and personalized search will take on your toughest questions and help you get stuff done. This is the future of Google Search, search that goes beyond information to intelligence.”
This is the future of search for healthcare, too. The faster organizations can deliver information (especially data and content) to Google, the better off the consumer will be. I’m not saying the healthcare organization will be better off, but at least we can trust that the consumer will be able to get information from trusted sources. And, on top of it, you’ll be preparing for the next step when the agents start to act on behalf of the patients.
Don’t walk but run to make sure you are prepared for the tectonic shift that is coming for the future of healthcare discovery. The website as we know it today is officially dead.
Such a great post. Thanks, Carrie!!