How Healthcare and Financial Services Brands Are Navigating AI Search and Local Discovery
A conversation with leaders from Beltone, Baptist Health, and insurance companies on what's changing — and how they're responding.
Customer Trust & Loyalty in the Age of AI Search
In healthcare and financial services, customers don't typically make quick decisions. They research. They compare. They look for trust signals before they ever pick up the phone. AI search hasn't changed that instinct — it's only amplified it. Customers are arriving better informed, with more specific questions, after a discovery journey that now happens largely out of view.
For marketing leaders in these categories, the challenge isn't just visibility. It's projecting authority and driving action. When a patient finds a hearing clinic through ChatGPT, or a homeowner gets answers about insurance options through an AI Overview, the brands that show up — and get chosen — are the ones that have done the structural work: robust listings, the right local pages, reviews, and the data infrastructure that makes all of it machine-readable.
We spoke with three leaders who are deep in that work. Leonard Sullivan leads digital and local search strategy for Beltone, a provider of hearing care services locations across the US. Lauren Anderson heads content and local SEO for Baptist Health, a healthcare system competing in a crowded market. And our other respondents manage search and digital marketing in the insurance industry, where a major purchase decision and AI search are colliding in interesting ways.
Yext: Our latest research shows that 42.7% of consumers used AI specifically for local search in the past month. What changes are you actually seeing in how customers find you?
Search and digital marketing leader, insurance: Clicks are down — and that's not a surprise to anyone. But the traffic we're getting is more qualified. AI is handling the early research stage, so by the time someone comes to us, they've already worked through the foundational questions. Insurance isn't an impulse purchase. There's a lot of research involved. Those early-stage questions are now being answered in AI overviews. The people who do come to us have moved past that.
Leonard Sullivan, Beltone: At our national meeting this year, for the first time, location owners — including front desk staff — told us about their first ChatGPT or Gemini patient. Someone would come in and say that's how they found us. We're in the hearing aid space, so our customer base skews older. We honestly didn't expect that demographic to adopt AI search the way they are — but they are, and those customers are arriving more informed. They have pointed questions about specific products and current offerings, not just general questions about the brand. The education process seems to be speeding up.
Lauren Anderson, Baptist Health: Prior leadership was hesitant to publish to every platform — there was concern about getting buried by competitors. We've taken the opposite approach: where can we show up everywhere? Coverage is the goal. That shift has changed how we think about content and data syndication entirely.
Yext: How has your team's day-to-day work shifted to keep up?
Leonard Sullivan, Beltone: We think about schema as the first layer — the foundation for an LLM to understand who a location is and how it relates to the parent organization. For us that means going all the way down to the medical clinic level, connecting to SNOMED, linking provider data, and establishing parent organization relationships in markup. That last piece matters because in our network, some locations carry a different name than the corporate entity — which creates potential for brand confusion. We've addressed that by weaving in language that explicitly clarifies the relationship, and mirroring that in schema.
Beyond schema, we use what I'd call a one-two punch: maximize every attribute at the listing level, then support and deepen that information on the location page itself. If an AI pulls from our listing and a user lands on the page, they find even more. The quality is consistent between both surfaces — and the page goes deeper.
Lauren Anderson, Baptist Health: Schema has become a content checklist for us, not just a technical spec. When our team writes a page about a medical organization, or a clinic, or a provider, we're now thinking through all the structured elements that belong on that type of page. We train to that. What also surprised us — and genuinely still surprises me — is that blogging is where we're being cited most often in AI search. That felt like old-school SEO thinking. But when we look at the data, it's our blogs leading. So we've kept at it.
We also manage about 20 different internal systems housing location and provider data, which creates real consistency challenges. We've been working toward feeding as much as possible from a single source. That centralization is what makes accurate, broad syndication possible.
Search and digital marketing leader, insurance: We're watching closely where qualified traffic is coming from and what's driving it. The key insight for us is that the research journey hasn't disappeared — it's just moved earlier, and out of our direct visibility. Our job is to make sure we're part of that journey even when we can't see it.
Yext: In a world that’s no longer just about the click, what metrics matter most to you right now?
Leonard Sullivan, Beltone: We've moved away from impressions as a leading indicator. We focus on engagements, actions, appointments, and other downstream outcomes that demonstrate real business impact. Impressions have become increasingly volatile, especially as AI changes how information is surfaced and consumed.
We've also spent a great deal of time understanding which sources AI systems rely on at different stages of the customer journey. What we've found is that owned content becomes increasingly important as consumers move closer to making a decision, while earlier discovery is influenced by a much broader set of signals. Listings, reviews, local citations, community discussions, forums, and local media coverage all contribute to how a brand is understood and recommended.
That's why we've adopted a trust-first approach. Success in AI search isn't just about ranking a website — it's about building a strong, consistent digital presence across every place customers and AI systems may look for information.
Lauren Anderson, Baptist Health: We can't use brand mention tracking in a standard way — there are too many Baptist Healths across the country with no connection to ours. So we focus on citations and sentiment. We're in a market with five major competitors including Mayo Clinic — we're not going to outrank them across the board, and we don't try. But we can compete on the topics that matter to us: stroke, cardiology, the things we're known for locally. When we look at sentiment data, we're holding our own against organizations much larger than us. That's been genuinely meaningful to see.
Ani Georgieva, World Insurance: With the decline of traffic from organic clicks, NPS is becoming a KPI for us. Our platform has NPS capability that we weren't fully using until recently. Now we're using it to trigger review solicitations — after a new client is acquired, or based on specific CRM activity. The goal is to increase Google reviews volume, which supports AI visibility. It's early, but the connection between NPS, reviews, and search presence is something we're paying a lot more attention to.
Yext: Where do you see the biggest opportunity in the search space today? And what — if any — challenges are you preparing for?
Leonard Sullivan, Beltone: The opportunity is in what I think of as smarter backlinks. AI doesn't need a direct link to your site — it can gain contextual relevance about your brand from community discussions, forum mentions, local PR coverage. Building that broad network of authoritative information is where we're investing. The question is how you do it systematically.
The risk that concerns me most is misinformation. There's nothing currently preventing someone from creating a false site and publishing inaccurate claims about your brand — and AI models can cite and repeat that content. The only defense we've found is to increase the volume of accurate, authoritative information so that the math works in your favor. It's not bulletproof, but it's the approach we're taking.
Search and digital marketing leader, insurance: The biggest thing I'm watching is how AI surfaces review sentiment. When an AI tool aggregates your reviews and produces a summary, that summary becomes part of the customer's first impression. Getting the inputs right — which means getting the reviews right — matters more now than it ever has.
Lauren Anderson, Baptist Health: The opportunity for us is in coverage. Not just showing up, but showing up with consistent, high-quality information in every place someone might be asking. Our blogs are a strong signal; our local pages and listings provide the structural foundation. The brands winning in AI search are the ones who've made sure their owned content is worth citing.
Yext: From your experience over the past year, what advice would you give to other brands navigating this shift to AI?
Leonard Sullivan, Beltone: Adopt a trust-first mindset. Your current digital foundation is your AI visibility, so ensure it is clean and accurate with consistent listings, location data, strong reviews, and clear brand information. AI systems can only recommend what they can confidently understand and trust. As AI search evolves, local authority signals like reviews, citations, community discussions, and local media coverage matter more than ever. Optimize for Trust, Optimize for Access, and Optimize for Consistency.
Lauren Anderson, Baptist Health: Think about coverage, not ranking. Where can you build more robust information and send it everywhere? That includes channels that might feel dated — blogs, local pages, structured provider content. The goal is to be a source worth citing, across every surface where someone might be asking a relevant question.
Search and digital marketing leader, insurance: Pay attention to quality, not just quantity. The traffic shift we're seeing isn't a loss — it's a filter. The people finding you through AI search are often further along. Make sure what they find when they arrive is worth their time.
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