AI Quick Take – The Impact of AI on Search and EEAT

In this episode of the Healthtech Marketing Podcast, we kick off our new AI Quick Takes series. Adam Turinas explains how generative AI is fundamentally changing search traffic and what healthcare technology marketers need to know about Google’s EEAT framework.

Drawing from his own experience of declining website traffic despite years of steady growth, Adam explains how AI overviews are reducing organic search traffic while creating new opportunities for brands that understand Google’s Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness signals.

The episode offers practical strategies for healthcare technology companies to refine their content marketing approach. Hear real-world examples of how proper EEAT implementation can lead to inclusion in AI overviews and offers actionable advice for maintaining visibility in an AI-driven search landscape.

Listen to the Episode

Key Topics Covered:

• “(00:00:00) Introduction to AI Quick Takes series”
• “(00:01:00) The challenge AI poses to search traffic and marketing”
• “(00:04:00) Introduction to EEAT framework”
• “(00:05:00) The importance of Experience – showcasing real-world implementations”
• “(00:06:00) Expertise – demonstrating deep subject matter competency”
• “(00:06:00) Authoritativeness – building reputation and earning citations”
• “(00:07:00) Trustworthiness – the most important E-E-A-T element according to Google”
• “(00:09:00) Practical strategies”
• “(00:13:00) Four key takeaways and expected outcomes from E-E-A-T implementation”
• “(00:14:00] Call to action and resources for further engagement”

Blog article mentioned in this episode.

Interested in exploring how to leverage AI in marketing? Reach out to Adam directly to schedule a no-obligation discussion. This isn’t a sales call—just an opportunity to talk through your LinkedIn questions and challenges.

Subscribe to The HealthTech Marketing Show on Spotify or watch us on YouTube for more insights into marketing, AI, ABM, buyer journeys, and beyond!

Video Transcript

Adam Turinas: [00:00:00] Hi there. Welcome to the Health Tech Marketing Show. I’m your host, Adam Turinas, and I want to give you a big thank you for listening. And I also want to thank. Our longtime sponsors, my friends at himss. today we’re doing something a little different.

This is the first of a series of quick takes on ai, so we’re going to keep doing the long form episodes, 30, 45 minute deep dives into topics like thought leadership and a BM where we typically have a, a guest.

This is something different, and they’re going to run on the alternate weeks. And the idea here is, is that there’s sort of a 10 to 15 minute long episode. Where we focus on one particular AI related topic. So why are we doing this? It’s pretty obvious, right? AI is the biggest issue that faces marketers.

It’s both a wonderful opportunity. There’s so much that you can do [00:01:00] with generative ai, with just, I think as an industry scratching the surface, I can only, I can barely imagine what it’s going to look like a year from now. But the other thing is, is that there’s a big challenge, and the big challenge is the impact that generative AI is having on search.

And that’s what we’re going to focus on today. It’s going to, we’re going to focus on one particular topic called EEAT,

And, uh, I’ll explain a little bit more about that in a minute, but, In terms of the impact that it’s having, I’m a case in point, so our traffic to our website has grown nine to 10% month on month steadily.

Over the course of five years. It’s really been the driver of, building awareness and building trust in our business, and it’s really helped to generate at least half of our net new clients have come in through our website and 65%. Of that traffic was driven by search. Well, at [00:02:00] least it was until about two years ago, because what’s happened in the last year and a half is that initially my traffic flattened off and then it started to decline.

And the main reason for that is I’m getting less traffic from search. In fact, now search accounts for less than half of the traffic that I get. And I, believe that number’s just going to keep going down. I wrote about the reasons why in a post, we published about called, you Know, why is Your Inbound Engine Syncing?

And there’s a link down below to that so that you can look into that. The main reason is, is that Google is just sending people less traffic and they’re doing this because AI overviews where they use generative AI to answer your questions has become. Their main focus. And so rather than sending traffic to organic search links, they’re answering users’ questions [00:03:00] through generative ai.

And most companies I talk to are saying that they’re seeing it. Not everybody, they is kind of interesting. I I might touch on that a later on. So we’re going to focus on a concept today. some, principles from Google called EEAT. And so, EAT stands for experience, expertise, authority and Trustworthiness, EEAT, and in healthcare technology, and anything frankly in healthcare.

This is in especially important, and I’ll explain why in a minute. EAT is actually an extension of a framework that Google launched in two th 2014. Back then it was just. Expertise, authority and Trustworthiness, EAT. And um, in 2022, they added the notion of experience. I think that that may have [00:04:00] been partly because of ai, but I don’t really know what that was, what it ha, why, but in the world of generative ai, that notion, that framework is especially important.

And, it’s even more important in healthcare because, they also use a framework called, YMYL, which is your money or your life. And the notion here is, is that in topics that affects people’s lives directly, like money and health, there’s an extra framework that the algorithms look at. and it’s part of how Google rates your content.

So let me just dive in a little bit more on EEAT. So first e is actually experience, and this is again, the newest edition. and that’s about firsthand real-world experience with your subject matter. So for healthcare technology companies like you guys who are listening [00:05:00] to this, this means showcasing actual implementations, customer stories, user feed feedback, and hands-on product knowledge that really demonstrates your experience in and your customer’s experience with whatever it is that you are providing.

The second E is expertise. So this is your demonstrated knowledge and qualifications in healthcare technology. this doesn’t always necessarily mean formal credentials, but it does mean showing deeper subject matter competency. And so the more depth that you can provide, that demonstrates that you go to sort of the next level and below in terms of your expertise.

The higher you are likely to rank in search engine terms, but also the greater likelihood is that your content is going to appear in AI overviews. The A is authoritativeness, and this is your reputation. [00:06:00] The recognition that you are a reliable source in the health tech space and, industry citations is an especially important part of that.

So I read somewhere that you actually want to get 10 to 20% of your content should have citations demonstrating the validity of what you’re saying, but you also want your content to appear as citations in other people’s content. So publishing things like research. is important. And then having blog posts that other people link to is also important.

So, you know, not that different from SEO, but if you are trying to get your brand to appear in the AI overview and be one of the dozen or so links that are used as reference points as citations, authoritativeness is a key element of that. the last one is the, is trustworthiness. and this is a really big one, right?

So that’s kind of what goes into to, to trust trustworthiness. you know, I really can’t stress the importance of this enough, and I actually, I’ll share a recent example. So. As you probably know about us, right, that we specialize in account-based marketing in healthcare. So I recently searched, how do you implement account-based marketing in healthcare?

I used Google to do that. And the AI overview provided a really good, long, detailed explanation. And I could see when I was going through it that some of the themes that we talk about. [00:08:00] Appeared in that, but it was clearly aggregating, content from a lot of different places. But the thing which was I was really happy to see was that the links associated with that article, so it appears just underneath the headline.

included several links to content that we’d seen, and while we’re seeing a decline in traffic, I have seen an increase to certain blog posts and I’m realizing that that’s actually coming from AI overviews. Because I hadn’t been seeing a lot of traffic to those blog posts until recently, so I’m assuming.

That’s actually coming from AI overviews, which is encouraging. so here are some practical things for you to think about. So first of all, it’s really important to showcase real experience, so you know, the content. Can’t just be sort of generic stuff using Claude. you know, it’s got to be really helpful.

it needs to, you know, the more case studies that [00:09:00] you can provide, the better. You should be able to talk in detail about things like implementation challenges. And what the actual outcomes were. And if you can quantify that, you know, all the better, right? The other thing you might want to think about, it’s like behind the scenes content that shows your team’s hands-on working with customers if your customers allow you to do it.

secondly, you establish expertise through the depth of your content. So you’ve got to go. If you think about your product pages, you know, the sort of main level at the homepage, the next level might be around a category of solutions, and then you may have individual solution pages. that’s great, but you need to go several layers deeper.

So, for example, you might have blog posts around particular technical aspects of your solution, and things. Anything that shows a next level of depth and substance to what you’re doing. And in many cases, you’re writing posts that are actually for human beings to read. [00:10:00] You know, there may be a few of the engineers at your customers that will read them.

But in the main, you are actually writing it for the AI engines to say, yeah, this site has, demonstrates real expertise. The third is around building authorit. so, you know, just as you do with SEO, you want to earn quality backlinks. But, the other types of things like speaking opportunities, press releases, mentions in articles, those can help a lot.

And in fact, I was talking to somebody the other day, a health tech, marketing leader, and he was one of the few that I’ve spoken to, said actually they’ve been seeing an increase in traffic. And he said he’s still trying to figure out and this was an increase in SEO driven traffic. And the conclusion he came to is, is that they’ve done a lot of pr, they’ve done several acquisitions, they’ve had some big product launches, they’ve been at a lot of events and they’ve really publicized those actively and got a lot of [00:11:00] pickup, both in, media outlets, but also in on LinkedIn.

And he believes that that’s been a contributing factor. And it certainly would be the type of thing that would help you build. authority. So the fourth is about being bulletproof on trustworthiness, and that’s kind of the same thing that you would do in SEO and in health tech. it’s really non-negotiable, right?

I mean, if you, kind of, of things that. Would alarm a client about the security of your website is going to completely undermine your story. But it also, from a technical thing, technical aspect, that’s equally important. But there are also things like, you know, the responsiveness on responding to customer reviews and even if it’s negative.

Feedback, being able to actually respond to that in public, that actually will help to build trust. And then the last point on trust is making sure that what you’re saying is actually right. So any factual errors [00:12:00] are going to count against you. And bear in mind with ai, there’s a greater likelihood that those errors will get, uh, found out.

So I hope that this was helpful to you. but you know, I, can’t stress to you enough the importance of being able to get a handle. On measuring those EEAT signals and understanding the types of things that are going to move the needle, and then to just keep searching the AI tools, using the AI tools to search on the types of topics that your users are, users are going to search on to see how you appear and to think about what are the types of things.

That you can do to improve it. And that’s going to go way beyond just the content on your website, right? It’s in your YouTube becomes even more important. Sites like Reddit actually, how it can be pretty, pretty influential. So I hope this is helpful to you. We’re going to do more like this. I’m going to do another one in a couple of weeks.

and then there are four practical strategies that you should think about. Experience showcases. Shows ways to demonstrate the depth of your expertise. Look at new ways to build authority, particularly things like pr frankly. And then really think about how you’re building trust, both from a technical aspect and then how you’re responding to, customers.

And, we expect that if you do that, do those sorts of things that you will come up better. In the answer engines like AI overviews, it may not stem the decline in [00:14:00] SEO, but we expect that you will see, first of all, your brand will appear when people are researching. So even if they don’t link through to your website, position, your brand in the buyer’s mind early on in their journey when they’re doing their research.

And the second thing is, is that if you, really good content get cited. that may derive some direct and referral links, that wouldn’t appear as, SEO links. So I’ve got, a few things just as sort of, calls to action if you like. first of all, there’s a link to the blog I mentioned down below.

second thing is if you think somebody else would find this helpful, uh. Send this to somebody, you know, they might thank you for it. The last thing is, is if you’ve dealing with a problem like this and you just want to kind of like say, you know, I really want to talk to somebody about this, I’m just not sure, or just looking for a second opinion, I’d love to talk to you.

There’s a link to schedule a call with me I had a call with somebody the other day, somebody I’ve, I’ve kind of known for a while, member of the Health Tech Marketing Network. [00:15:00] And, she wanted to talk about content. Actually, I should talk about, thought leadership. It, she’d been listening to the thought leadership.

podcast and, heard this and we had a chat. You know, I’m not trying to sell or anything, but I think I was able to provide some value and, it was great to catch up with this person. So, I hope these are helpful. I’m going to be doing plenty more of them. Uh, subscribe on your favorite podcast app or watch the YouTube channel.