One ordinary day, a practice we work with picked up two brand-new patients who both said the same thing when they called: they found the practice through ChatGPT. Not Google. Not the map pack. A chatbot pointed them to the front door. Two in a single day is easy to write off as a fluke, but it isn't.

It's the first sign of something that's already changing how patients find you.

You've probably been chasing the marketing next “thing” for years. Building a website, doing SEO, optimizing your Google Business Profile, chasing reviews, posting on social. Now, on top of all of that, someone's telling you AI is the thing you have to worry about. It’s reasonable to wonder whether the last five years of content just got torched.

The short answer is no, and Google isn't dying either. There are still around 8.5 billion searches a day, bu ...