July 29, 2026
NEW YORK. James Tannahill, president of Plocamium Holdings and founder of 1ness Strategies, said the paid-acquisition playbook that health-technology companies used for a decade is breaking as patients start health searches in large language models rather than Google.
The comments came in a conversation with Rodrigo Hutt of Health Tech Builders, a fellow member of Young Presidents' Organization (YPO), published July 29 on Substack under the headline “Patient Acquisition Is Being Rewired by AI Search.”
Hutt put three figures next to each other: healthcare paid-ad costs up 23% in 2024, conversion rates down 15% over the same period, and nearly half of adults under 40 now using AI chatbots as their first stop for health information. ChatGPT crossed 200 million weekly active users in 2024, he wrote, while Google search queries fell about 3%, the first quarterly decline in the company’s history.
“The days of relying solely on paid acquisition, the playbook of the last 10 years, is being rewritten,” Tannahill said. “Costs per click are going up, conversion rates are going down, and at the same time, patients are increasingly starting their health searches somewhere Google can’t reach them.”
He told Hutt that for 2026 he would advise clients to “forget SEO” as the necessary foundation. “You need a website, but your website needs to be GEO-optimized first. SEO is nice to have.”
GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the term the industry is using for showing up in AI-generated answers rather than only in blue-link search results. Tannahill said AI models “don’t care about traditional SEO signals” and instead weigh whether they can “confidently understand what you do and why patients should trust you.”
Asked what he would do in the first 90 days as CMO of a multi-specialty New York health system, he said spend about 90% of the time on original research and credentialed content: PubMed papers, named clinical bylines, thought leadership that cites the people who did the work, and the rest on the EEAT layer: verified reviews, FAQ schema, third-party citations and press. He said FAQ schema can raise AI citation probability by as much as 300%, and mentions on high-authority domains make a brand 8 to 9 times more likely to appear in AI recommendations.
“You can’t just create that authenticity overnight, no matter how much money you have,” he said. “Money doesn’t get you in the door, and AI rewards that.”
He also pushed back on the idea that brands need three separate GEO strategies for OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. “You actually don’t need three strategies. You need one really solid foundation. Then you can distribute across other ecosystems.” Prompt testing, he said, accounts for less than 5% of AI visibility; the rest is high-trust content.
The full conversation is published on Health Tech Builders.
