How We Grew Inbound Opportunities from the AI Engines – And What You Can Do Too

By Adam Turinas, CEO, Health Launchpad 

Here’s something I didn’t expect to be writing this year: our inbound pipeline is up 89% over the past two quarters. In Q1 alone, it’s up 260% year-on-year. We’re getting more meetings, from better-fit prospects, who are converting faster than ever before. 

The reason? We stopped optimizing for Google and started optimizing for AI. 

In the latest episode of the Healthtech Marketing Show, my colleague and Chief Strategy Officer Mark Erwich and I go deep on exactly what we did, why it worked, and what you can do to see similar results. If you’re wrestling with declining organic traffic, a slower inbound pipeline, or just a growing sense that something fundamental has shifted in how your buyers find you — this episode is for you. 

The Numbers First, Because They Matter 

Before I get into the how, let me give you the what: 

• 89% increase in inbound meetings across Q4 2024 and Q1 2025, and +260% in Q1 alone compared to the same period last year 
• 3.6x increase in direct and referral traffic — the channels where AI-sourced visits are showing up in GA4 
• 35% longer session times from those AI-attributed sources, signaling dramatically higher intent 
• And the one that still surprises me: roughly half of new prospects now tell us unprompted that they found us through ChatGPT or Claude — not Google, not a campaign, not a referral 

We did not achieve this by doing more of what we used to do. We made a deliberate strategic shift, and it’s compounding. 

What Has Actually Changed, and Why It’s Urgent 

In the episode, Mark discusses two shifts that every healthtech marketer needs to understand. 

Shift one: AI is now building the buyer shortlist. Research from 6sense has long shown that buyers enter most purchasing processes with a shortlist formed on day one — and that they almost always buy from a day-one vendor. What’s changed is who’s building that list. According to G2 data released just before we recorded, AI chatbots are now the number one source influencing B2B shortlists — ahead of review sites, analyst firms, and your own website. 94% of B2B buyers are actively using AI tools in their purchasing process. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude who the leading solutions are — and they get one synthesized answer, not ten blue links to explore. 

If you’re not in that answer, you’re not in the deal. There is no page two. 

Shift two: Zero-click search is accelerating fast. Even when buyers use Google, AI Overviews now dominate the results. Without them, roughly a third of searches result in no click. With AI Overviews, that jumps to 43%. In full AI mode, it’s 93%. Your buyers are getting answers without ever visiting anyone’s website. 

Here’s the reframe that Mark offers — and it’s the one that changed how we approach everything: the role of your website has fundamentally changed. For twenty years we built websites for humans. Now your site serves two audiences: the human who shows up ready to buy, and the AI crawler that decides whether that human ever shows up at all. 

The AI visitor, by the way, converts at five times the rate of a Google visitor. They’ve already been pre-qualified and pre-advised by the AI engine. By the time they arrive at your site, they’re not asking “should I consider these people?” They’re asking “are these the right people?” 

Fewer visitors. Far more pipeline. 

The Framework We Used: Authority, Relevance, Readability 

Mark built our approach around three pillars — and he’s clear that missing any one of them will prevent you from getting cited. 

Authority is about whether AI trusts you. Third-party signals matter most here: analyst mentions, industry awards, G2 and KLAS listings, case studies with real numbers, earned media coverage, and brand consistency across every platform where you have a presence — LinkedIn, Crunchbase, G2, trade press. PR has always mattered for SEO; for AI optimization, its influence is even greater. 

Relevance is about whether your site answers the questions buyers are actually asking. This is a shift from keywords to questions — and the questions are getting more specific and more technical. Buyers now ask things like “what are the best clinical documentation solutions for practices of 50 physicians?” They’re pre-qualifying in the AI chat what used to happen in a sales conversation. If you don’t have those answers on your website, you don’t exist in that exchange. 

Readability is the technical dimension — and it’s where many companies have a silent problem they don’t know about. Are AI crawlers blocked in your robots.txt file? Do you have an llms.txt file pointing crawlers to your most important content? Are your images tagged so crawlers understand what they depict? Is your site fast enough to stay within the crawl budget these engines allocate per site? One particularly common issue we discovered: a default Cloudflare configuration was silently blocking at least one major AI crawler from many websites entirely. 

Four Things You Can Do This Week 

1. Run the AI query test. In an incognito window, not logged into any account, ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot who the leading solutions are in your category. Note who’s listed and who isn’t. Ask for a comparison matrix. See where you stand. 
2. Check your robots.txt. Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for any rules that might be blocking AI bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot. 
3. Check for an llms.txt file. Go to yourdomain.com/llms.txt. If nothing loads, you don’t have one. This is a relatively simple file to create and it helps AI crawlers understand your audience, your solution, and your most important content. 
4. Audit your top five pages. Pull up your most-visited pages in GA4 and ask honestly: do these pages answer the specific questions your buyers bring to an AI engine? If not, that’s your starting point. 

Want a Structured Roadmap? Talk to Mark. 

The four steps above are diagnostics. They tell you where you stand. The compounding results come from the structured work — question mapping at scale, entity consistency across every directory AI might consult, and building a measurement framework that tracks citation share and AI referral conversion as distinct KPIs. 

That’s exactly what our AI Audit delivers. For $2,500, Mark will take your site through a comprehensive assessment built around the same framework that drove our results: 

• Technical analysis of your current website 
• Technical recommendations and priorities (llms.txt, robots.txt, AI crawler audit) 
• Complete AEO + GEO content analysis 
• Prioritized content recommendations 
• Reference guide for AI-optimized websites 
• All with a healthcare buyer focus 

You’ll walk away with a clear 30/60/90-day action plan tailored to your situation. 

[Book a conversation with Mark →] 

The window to gain an early-mover advantage in AI search is open right now. The companies that move in the next 90 days are going to be the ones on the day-one shortlist when their buyers turn to AI — and that’s a position that compounds. We know because we’re living it. 

Sources:

• 95% purchase from day-one vendors – 6sense, 2025 Buyer Experience Report
• 94% of B2B buyers using AI in the purchasing process – 6sense, 2025 Buyer Experience Report
• AI chatbots as the number one source influencing shortlist creation – G2 The Answer Economy: How AI Search Is Rewiring B2B Software Buying, March 2026
• zero-click rates: one-third, 43%, 93% – Semrush 2026
• AI visitors converting 5x vs Google traffic – Superlines, March 2026
• Crawler budget claim – Optimize your crawl budget – Google for Developers