By Kristin Ryan, EVP, AI Transformation & Acceleration
One of the clearest themes emerging from this year’s Google I/O announcements is that Search is no longer just a destination for finding information. It is rapidly evolving into an AI-powered personal operating layer - where people ask complex questions, continue conversations, compare options, generate outputs, delegate tasks, and receive increasingly personalised guidance.
Google announced a major expansion of AI-powered Search capabilities, including:
An upgraded AI Search experience
Gemini 3.5 Flash as the default model in AI Mode
Follow-up conversations within AI Overviews
Multimodal inputs across text, images, video, and files
AI agents designed to reason across information
Expanded “Personal Intelligence” integrations across Gmail, Google Photos, and Calendar
Google also shared that AI Mode has now surpassed 1 billion monthly users.
For healthcare marketers, these developments significantly sharpen the conversation around Generative Engine Optimization (#GEO).
A GEO mindset means creating content that is clear, structured, medically accurate, credible, and genuinely useful - so AI systems can understand, synthesise, and surface it in the moments that matter most to patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals, and other stakeholders.
A few key implications stand out:
Search behaviour is becoming more conversational
Audiences are moving beyond short keyword searches and asking increasingly nuanced, context-rich questions. Content strategies must evolve to address real-world information needs across the full patient and healthcare journey.AI agents will reshape information discovery
Google’s AI agents are being designed to monitor, reason across, and synthesise information on a user’s behalf. The question for brands is no longer simply “Can people find our content?” but “Can AI systems accurately interpret and responsibly use our information?”Multimodal content is becoming essential
Search is expanding beyond text to include images, video, documents, and live browsing contexts. This raises the importance of machine-readable video repositories, transcripts, metadata, captions, visual explainers, and structured content architectures.Personalisation raises the stakes for responsible communication
As AI Mode becomes increasingly context-aware, educational content must be precise, evidence-based, and transparent about what it can - and cannot - say. In healthcare, trust and accuracy will become even more important differentiators in AI-mediated discovery experiences.
The announcements around Ask YouTube are particularly notable for marketers focused on conversational discovery and ensuring video content is optimised for AI interpretation and retrieval.
The shift underway is bigger than search optimisation alone. It represents a fundamental change in how people discover, evaluate, and engage with health information - and how brands ensure their expertise is visible, trusted, and useful within AI-driven ecosystems.
Interested in hearing more? Connect with us here.