We ran the same original study across two industries: SaaS and healthcare. The SaaS results showed real fragmentation — only 20% of top-ranking companies also got AI-recommended. Healthcare told a different story entirely.
Half of top-ranking healthcare marketing companies also showed up when AI was asked the same question directly. Full methodology and data in our press release on the industry gap.
What We Actually Tested
We searched 10 real questions a healthcare marketing decision-maker would type — "best healthcare SEO agency USA," "best AEO agency for healthcare companies," "top healthcare CRM software," "best hospital marketing agency," and similar. For each, we recorded the top 3 organic Google results, then asked ChatGPT and Perplexity the identical question in a fresh, non-personalized session, checking whether the same companies came up.
A Much Tighter Overlap Than SaaS
Out of 10 healthcare searches, 5 showed a genuine match — the same company both ranking in Google's top 3 and named directly by AI. First Page Sage appeared in both for two separate searches ("best AEO agency for healthcare companies" and "best healthcare SEO agency USA"). Healthcare Success matched for "best hospital marketing agency." Salesforce Health Cloud matched for "top healthcare CRM software." Onely matched for "best AI visibility agency for healthcare."
That's a meaningfully tighter overlap than SaaS showed running the identical method — and the pattern suggests something specific about how this market is structured, not just which companies happened to do well.
Why Healthcare Shows More Overlap Than SaaS
The most likely explanation is market size, not content quality. Healthcare marketing and AEO services are a smaller, more specialized field than general SaaS categories like CRM or project management software — there are simply fewer established, broadly-recognized names competing for the same searches. When a market has fewer dominant players, Google's rankings and AI's recommendations are more likely to converge on the same handful of names, since both systems are drawing from a smaller, more concentrated pool of genuine authority.
This has a real, practical implication worth sitting with: in a smaller market, being one of the few established names carries outsized advantage across both channels at once. But it also means the bar for a newer or smaller healthcare marketing company to break into either channel — let alone both — is real. The companies currently showing up in this data aren't incidental; they're established, frequently-referenced names with real market presence built over time.
What This Means for Healthcare Companies
- A stronger overlap doesn't mean a lower bar. If anything, it suggests AI recommendation in healthcare currently leans on the same accumulated authority signals that drive Google rankings — meaning newer entrants face a similar challenge in both places, not an easier one in either.
- Being named consistently, across genuinely well-established channels, appears to matter more here than in a fragmented market like SaaS. The companies that matched in our data (First Page Sage, Healthcare Success, Salesforce) all have long-standing, widely-referenced market presence.
- The compliance dimension we found in our earlier healthcare research still applies. AI systems can also misrepresent healthcare claims when content is ambiguous — a real risk on top of the visibility question this study measures. See our companion piece on whether AEO matters for healthcare technology companies for that data.
If you're weighing whether AI Search visibility matters here at all given the higher baseline overlap, see how the SaaS side of the same study looked — only 20% of top-ranking SaaS companies also get recommended by AI. Tracking your own overlap rate over time is also part of what we cover in AI visibility tracking.
Frequently Asked Questions
Likely due to market structure. Healthcare marketing and AEO services represent a smaller, more specialized field with fewer dominant, well-established competitors, giving Google and AI more reason to converge on the same names. SaaS categories are far more crowded, creating more room for the two channels to diverge.
Not necessarily easier — different. The overlap suggests AI recommendation in healthcare currently favors already-established, broadly-recognized names, which can make it harder for a newer company to break in, even though the overall match rate is higher.
We checked whether the same company that ranked in Google's top 3 was also named directly in ChatGPT's or Perplexity's response to the identical question — not whether an exact source link was cited, since AI tools didn't consistently display clickable citations across these queries.
Yes — a 50% overlap still means half of top-ranking companies are missing from AI recommendations entirely, and the companies currently appearing tend to be long-established names, meaning a deliberate, structured approach is likely necessary to break into that group rather than assuming visibility follows naturally from good SEO.
This particular study focused on healthcare marketing, AEO, and related service searches (plus some software category searches like CRM and clinic management tools). The underlying pattern — smaller markets showing tighter overlap — is a reasonable hypothesis to extend to healthcare technology broadly, though it would need its own dedicated study to confirm.
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