What Is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) for Health and Medical Brands?
If you’re here, you might be wondering:
Why isn’t my blog driving clicks like it used to?
What is this “AI Overview” box and how do I get in it?
Is SEO still relevant, or is this AEO a whole new game?
Let’s clear it up.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) means setting up your content so that search engines and AI tools (like Google’s AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice assistants, or AI chatbots) choose it as the best answer to a user’s question. On Google, this often puts your answer at the very top of the page, even above paid ads, in what's called “position zero.”
In this article, you’ll learn:
What AEO actually means (in plain language)
How it differs from SEO and why you need both
Why AEO is critical for health and medical content
Whether you're a health marketer, content writer, or clinician-led brand, understanding AEO is now essential to stay visible, build trust, and future-proof your authority.
TL;DR: What Health Brands Need to Know About AEO
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is about helping your content become the actual answer that shows up in search results and AI chatbots.
It helps your content appear in AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice searches, and even tools like ChatGPT.
AEO doesn’t replace SEO: you need good SEO to make AEO work well.
For health brands, AEO is a way to build trust and help patients find clear, expert answers. Even if users don’t always click, your brand still gets seen as a trusted source, and that can lead to more traffic and a stronger reputation.
What Is AEO in Health?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your health content so it can be selected and cited as a direct answer by search tools — like Google’s AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice assistants, and AI chatbots (e.g. ChatGPT, Bing Copilot).
Example of AI Overview for the query “primitive reflex integration exercises” where my client’s blog is cited as a trusted source (and ranks #1 in organic results).
While SEO helps your content rank in search results, AEO ensures it’s:
Easy for bots and AI systems to find
Clearly structured to be understood
Trusted enough to be cited as an authoritative answer
AEO involves:
Writing in a natural, question-based format
Structuring content for scannability (H2s, lists, TL;DRs)
Using schema markup (like FAQPage or MedicalEntity)
Showing expertise and clarity, especially in health content
In short: when you write high-quality, structured content that answers real patient questions, you’re optimizing for both SEO and AEO.
Why AEO Matters for Health Brands
If your health content is showing up at the top of Google’s search engine results page, in features like AI Overviews, here’s what that really means for your visibility, trust, and reach:
People are searching differently. Instead of broad keywords like “best probiotics,” users now ask specific, conversational questions like “Which probiotics are safe for women over 50?”. AI Overviews are designed to answer these directly, which means understanding human search intent is more important than ever.
Trust is non-negotiable in health content. Because healthcare is a “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) category, Google and AI tools hold your content to higher standards. Only expert-led, EEAT-optimized content gets featured, and that’s something AI-generated blogs usually can’t deliver (ironically).
Citations build authority — even without clicks. Being mentioned in an AI Overview positions your brand as a trusted source. Not every user clicks through, but many still do, especially when they want more detail or are making important decisions about their health.
Smaller brands can compete (and win). I’ve seen it firsthand: health blogs with clear topical focus, real expertise, and smart structure are already showing up in AI Overviews — often above larger, more well-known sites. If your brand has a niche and strong messaging, you’re not too small to get noticed.
Why Zero-Click Searches Are Not Actually That New
When I first saw AI Overviews in action, I honestly thought they weren’t that different from Featured Snippets, which Google introduced in 2014. So I used the same formatting techniques — mimicking its format into clear definitions or bulleted lists into Key Take Away messages summaries. For example, here it is for the article displayed in AI Overviews above:
Example of Key Take-Away Messages Box from one of the blogs I worked on, with a quick answer to the main user’s query - similarly to a featured snippet or AI Overview on Google
Yes, AI Overviews take up more space and may reduce clicks. But zero-click searches aren’t new, and they didn’t kill SEO the last time either.
What’s changed is how much content Google’s AI pulls in, and how it chooses what to surface.
Let’s go back to 2023 so that you can see what I mean. I did this screenshot to explain Featured Snippets to writers in my SEO mentorship program:
Example of a Featured Snippet for the long-tail query “what is the longest someone has lived with liver cancer”, showing a quick answer in a paragraph at the top of search results, with one source mentioned (CyberKnife Miami blog).
Back then, Google pulled a short answer directly from one blog post: this is the featured snippet format. It answers the user’s question in just one sentence, which is great for visibility but offers little context or depth.
Here’s the same query in 2025, now showing an AI Overview:
In 2025, Google’s AI Overview gives a longer, structured answer from multiple sources for the same query.
Can you tell the differences?
AI pulls this information from multiple sources, including this top-ranking result from CyberKnife. Instead of one sentence, it summarizes treatment, tumor size, survival rates, and more, all in a structured format. This shows how AI Overviews look for depth, clarity, and content that answers follow-up questions too.
The table below explains how AI Overviews compare to Featured Snippets, so you can see the evolution clearly and adjust your strategy without panic.
| Feature | Featured Snippets | AI Overviews (AIOs) |
|---|---|---|
| Where they appear | Top of Google SERP, in a single answer box | Top of Google SERP, often covering more screen space |
| Format | One excerpt (text, table, list) from one source | AI-generated summary combining multiple sources |
| How they’re selected | High-ranking, well-structured page | Content with strong EEAT, clear structure, and relevance to intent |
| Click behavior | Likely to be zero-click, but can drive clicks (1 source shown) | Higher chance of zero-click, but includes more links |
| SEO impact | Both aim to satisfy the search intent quickly. They build authority and recognition, even without a click. | |
AI Overviews Haven’t Killed Educational Content: They’ve Made It Even More Valuable
AI Overviews are now covering most informational queries in health.
“But Val, isn’t informational content dead?”
“Why spend time on blogs and informational content if no one clicks anymore?”
The truth is, informational content is still essential to build trust, but SEO is not about traffic anymore (it’s never been, in fact).
AI Overviews still cite real websites. Even if users don’t always click, being included builds brand awareness and authority. Think of it as digital PR. And most of the content AI Overviews are pulling from are… blogs.
Health is a trust-driven niche. If your brand doesn’t show up in informational results, it risks being invisible when consumers are forming opinions and choosing providers.
Trust depends on educational content with high EEAT signals. Without high-quality, informational posts authored by experts, readers (and Google) have no reason to trust your site for commercial pages, either (like product listings or service pages).
Clicks still happen. Not all, but some people do click the supporting links in AI Overviews when they want more depth.
Informational content fuels your funnel and your content marketing. This is what my clients (and myself!) love about their blog content: it feeds their content marketing. They repurpose their blog content into their social media, emails…. all of this brand presence is seen by AI as an authority signal, and likewise, they still gain a ton of traffic on the blog via traditional searches and their other marketing channels.
Businesses having this misconception will stop producing educational content - or rely on AI to do it in high volumes = more opportunities for you to differentiate yourselves!
Do I need to choose between AEO and traditional SEO, or can I use both?
Some health businesses ask whether they should be “doing AEO instead of SEO.” The truth is: you can’t separate the two.
Traditional SEO lays the foundation: it gets your site visible, crawlable, and trusted.
AEO is like a subset of SEO that takes that foundation and makes your content the kind AI tools and Google’s AI Overviews want to pull from.
You need both to thrive – and there will still be people searching on Google and other search engines, although there might be more and more searchers using AI instead, so we need to prepare for it.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison to help you spot what to keep, what to evolve, and where both AEO and SEO strategies meet:
| Aspect | Traditional SEO | Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) | Where They Overlap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank high in organic SERPs | Be cited directly in AI-generated answers | Increase visibility & authority |
| Keyword focus | Keywords: what people type in the search bar | Conversational, long-tail, and question-based keywords (e.g. “Do vitamin D supplements help with fatigue?”) | Both require understanding search intent |
| Content style | Long-form guides, optimized product pages, blog posts | Short, scannable answers; FAQs; definition sections; summaries | Content must be clear, authoritative, and useful |
| Authority signals | Backlinks, reviews, mentions, domain authority | Brand mentions across platforms (even without a link), digital PR for brand and authors | Both build EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) |
| Measurement | Organic traffic, rankings, conversions | AI Overview citations, brand mentions, visibility in AI search tools | Some overlap between top-ranking results and AI mentions |
Instead of choosing one over the other, smart health businesses are adopting a hybrid approach:
Summaries + Authority → Provide quick answers up top, then deeper content that earns authority and backlinks.
Schema + Content Depth → Use FAQ and MedicalEntity schema, but also publish well-researched, long-form health articles when users are asking for it.
Conversational Keywords + Clusters → Answer patient-style questions, while clustering supporting blogs for topical authority.
EEAT Proof → Show author credentials, cite studies etc.
This way, health brands are becoming the source that readers trust (most importantly), and that both Google Search and Google’s AI recognize and trust as well.
Real-World Example: How a Small Health Blog Got Featured in AI Overviews
To show you how AEO works in practice, let me share a quick example from one of my clients — a health-focused blog that now appears directly in Google’s AI Overviews for queries like “movement activities for kids with ADHD.”
Example of AI Overview for the query “movement activities for kids ADHD” showing my client’s blog as a trusted source.
The blog wasn’t written for AI Overviews (they didn’t exist yet!). But because it followed core AEO principles — like question-based headings, clear structure, and expert-backed advice — it was selected by Google’s AI as a trusted answer source.
Here’s what we did:
Used a clear headline and conversational subheadings based on what parents actually search for.
Wrote in a trust-building tone (in line with the EEAT framework), including personal experience: “With years of experience working with kids, I know how important it is to choose activities that are both fun and helpful.”
Included bullet lists of activity types (e.g., aerobic games, nature walks) with simple descriptions.
Added a short FAQ section answering direct parent questions in clear language.
Despite being a smaller site, the blog now ranks above Healthline in organic search and is cited by Google’s AI as part of its answer box.
👉🏼 If you want to see the full strategy behind this result, including the 6-step framework I used:
Read this guide to getting featured in AI Overviews.
Final Thoughts: What Is AEO Really About?
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) means making your content easy for search engines and AI tools (like Google’s AI Overviews or voice search) to find, understand, and trust as the best answer.
For health brands, this means writing content that:
Answers real patient questions clearly
Shows expert knowledge and experience
Is well-organized with summaries, FAQs, and a helpful structure
If you’re already doing SEO with a content strategy, you should keep focus on being clear, trustworthy, and easy to understand for people, search engines and AI.
If you want to learn how to actually get your content featured in Google’s AI Overviews:
Check out my step-by-step strategy with real health blog examples here: How to Get Featured in AI Overviews
Do you know if your blog is AEO-friendly?
If you're wondering whether your content meets the highest EEAT standards, I offer mini content audits for health businesses.
You’ll get personalized, practical recommendations to help your blog show up in AI Overviews and support your wider SEO and brand goals. Submit your contact details below and I’ll be in touch 👇🏼
Val ✍🏼
FAQ: AEO vs. SEO: What Health Marketers Need to Know
-
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization: a content strategy that helps your site become the direct answer selected by search and AI tools like Google’s AI Overviews, featured snippets, chatbots or voice assistants. While SEO focuses on ranking links in search results, AEO focuses on structuring your content to be cited by AI systems as a trusted, authoritative source for health-related questions.
-
Traditional SEO helps your page rank on search engine results pages (SERPs), while AEO helps your content be the answer that search engines and AI platforms display directly.
SEO = visibility via links and clicks
AEO = visibility via summaries, snippets, and voice replies
Both are essential to show medical credibility.
-
If your content is already properly optimized for SEO, then it should do great in AEO, as I’ve seen health blog content I wrote before AI Overviews now getting featured. To make sure your health content is optimized for AEO, focus on clarity, credibility, and structure. Start by identifying real patient questions and answering them directly under clear, question-based headings. Use bullet points, TL;DR summaries, and FAQ sections to make content easy for both users and AI to scan. Add schema markup (like FAQPage or MedicalEntity) and always highlight EEAT signals — such as expert bios, medical references, and trustworthy sources. This makes your content easier for skimmers, search engines and AI systems to find, understand, and trust. To know more, consult my guide about how to get featured in AI Overviews.
Share this article:
About the Author
Valérie Leroux, MSc, is a bilingual SEO health writer and founder of Bioty Healthcare since 2022, helping health brands and medical writers create high-ranking, trustworthy content backed by science and empathy.
