SEO is no less important today; vanity SEO metrics are less important. Stop asking, “How many people visited our website?” Instead ask: Did the right people arrive? Did they read trustworthy information? Did that information help them take a correct next step? Ten minutes of engaged attention will be worth more than a thousand bots in the AI-driven search era.
One of the most requested services I offer to clients is a review of their website metrics in language that non-digital people can understand, along with recommendations to improve performance. What has taken me back is the huge disconnect between website visitors and meaningful digital interactions. For example, total visitors is irrelevant if your bounce rate and page views aren’t good.
The other issue I’m finding is a disconnect between SEO dollars and ROI at a time when almost everything needs to ROI drivem. Pharma companies have treated website traffic as proof that their search engine optimization strategy is working, which is wrong. More visitors meant better rankings. Better rankings meant greater awareness. Greater awareness supposedly meant more patients asking physicians about the brand. That logic is rapidly becoming obsolete.
Patients are no longer moving neatly from a Google search to a pharmaceutical website. Increasingly, they are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI tools questions such as:
- What could be causing my symptoms?
- What are the treatment options?
- What are the side effects of this medication?
- How does one drug compare with another?
- What should I ask my doctor?
AI synthesizes the available information and often answers the question without requiring the user to visit a website at all. The result is a fundamental change in the economics of pharma SEO: traffic is becoming harder to earn, but the visitors who do arrive may be substantially more valuable.
Online health seekers are moving toward AI
The shift is no longer theoretical. A 2026 KFF poll found that 32% of U.S. adults had used AI for health information or advice. Among these users:
- 65% cited quick, immediate information as a major reason for using AI.
- 41% wanted information before seeing a healthcare provider.
- 36% valued the privacy of asking an AI tool.
- 29% had used AI for physical-health information.
- 16% had used it for mental-health information.
An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey found that 79% of Americans were likely to search online for information about a symptom or condition. Among online health searchers, 75% said AI-generated responses sometimes or often gave them the answer they needed.
In other words, AI is quickly becoming the front door to health information.
Pharma companies are still optimizing for a patient journey that begins with a search result and a click. Patients are increasingly beginning—and sometimes ending—their journey inside an AI-generated answer.
The click is disappearing
Google’s own evolution is accelerating the problem.
Pew Research Center analyzed Google browsing behavior in March 2025 and found that users clicked a conventional search result during only 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared. Without an AI summary, the click rate was 15%. That is almost a 50% reduction.
Only 1% of sessions that included an AI summary resulted in a click to a cited source within that summary. For pharma marketers, this means decreasing organic traffic isn’t always a sign of decreased patient interest. Patients may be finding the information they need elsewhere online, have it summarized by AI, and consume that content before they visit a brand website.
Because of this, a pharma company can rank very well for their targeted keywords and report a decline in visits. On the other hand, they can receive large amounts of traffic that has little to no meaningful engagement. Simply tracking the number of visitors provides management with very little insight into either scenario.
Pharma’s SEO traffic illusion
Large monthly visitor totals look reassuring in a presentation. But they often conceal uncomfortable questions:
- Did visitors find the information they needed?
- Did they read beyond the first paragraph?
- Did they examine risks and benefits?
- Did they visit the patient-support or savings page?
- Did they prepare questions for a healthcare professional?
- Did the content help them make a better-informed decision?
100,000 people exiting seconds after they arrive are never worth as much as 10,000 patients who read a few pages, review clinical info, and download a discussion guide. Instead, many pharma dashboards highlight impressions, rankings, clicks, and total sessions.
Agencies are incentivized to drive as much traffic as possible, even if that traffic doesn’t connect to patient intent or help achieve brand objectives. Therein lies the waste. Pharma isn’t wasting money producing helpful content that can be found through search. It wastes money when it incentivizes marketing partners to maximize visits without qualifying if those visits create qualified engagement.
Measure attention, not arrivals
Time on site and pages viewed per session are much better starting points than raw visitor totals. They indicate whether someone who reaches the website stays long enough to explore the information. This matters because visitors arriving after an AI-assisted search may already understand the basics. They may be looking for deeper evidence, validation, or a specific next step.
Evidence from other industries suggests that AI-referred visitors can be unusually engaged. Adobe reported in 2025 that AI-referred traffic in its technology and software analysis produced 28% more time on site, 20% more page views per visit and a 27% lower bounce rate than other traffic.
That research was not pharma-specific, so it should not be treated as a pharma benchmark. But it illustrates the emerging pattern: AI may send fewer visitors while sending people with stronger intent. Pharma companies should examine whether the same pattern exists on their own properties.
Time and page depth, however, should not be interpreted blindly. Spending a long time on a page could indicate interest—or confusion. Viewing several pages could represent exploration—or an inability to find a clear answer. The most useful measurement system combines attention with purposeful behavior.
A better pharmaceutical SEO scorecard
Pharma should replace “How many people visited?” with “What did qualified visitors do?” A modern scorecard should include:
Engaged time: How long did visitors actively read or interact with the content, excluding inactive browser time?
Pages per engaged session: Did users move logically from disease education to treatment information, safety content and patient support?
Scroll depth: Did visitors reach the most important evidence and safety information?
Content completion: Did they finish a video, assessment, dosing guide or educational module?
High-value actions: Did they download a doctor-discussion guide, locate a specialist, explore affordability assistance or sign up for an approved support program?
Return visits: Did the patient come back as the treatment decision progressed?
AI referral engagement: How do visitors from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and other identifiable AI sources behave compared with conventional organic-search visitors?
Answer-engine visibility: Is the company’s accurate, balanced content being cited or reflected in AI-generated answers—even when it does not produce a click?
Metrics should also be segmented by intent. A person searching for a disease symptom should not be evaluated against the same behavior as someone researching contraindications, savings eligibility or how to begin treatment.
SEO is becoming content infrastructure for AI
The answer is not to abandon SEO. Pharma still needs technically sound, authoritative and accessible websites. But SEO’s role is expanding. Content must now serve three audiences:
- Patients and caregivers
- Healthcare professionals
- Search engines and AI systems interpreting the information for them
That requires clear language, well-structured pages, transparent sourcing, current medical review, useful question-and-answer formats, and consistent information across disease, brand, and corporate properties. The objective is no longer simply to rank first for a keyword. It is to become a trustworthy source that both humans and AI systems can understand, retrieve and accurately represent.
This is especially important in healthcare, where inaccurate summaries can have consequences far beyond a lost sale. Pharma has an obligation—and a strong business incentive—to ensure that reliable information is easier for AI systems to find than speculation, outdated content or social-media misinformation.
The era of celebrating traffic for traffic’s sake is ending. Smart digital marketers understand this; DTC teams that spend money on SEO without digging deeper into metrics are wasting valuable dollars.
