Cure, Google Gemini
Overview
AI tools now shape how investors, partners, and the public evaluate healthcare startups. Digital strategy leader Paul Herbert explains how AI interprets credibility and what founders can do to strengthen their visibility and trust signals.
As AI systems take on a larger role in how healthcare companies are discovered and evaluated, first impressions are increasingly shaped by summaries generated by search engines and large language models. Investors, partners, and even patients now rely on AI-mediated information before they ever visit a company’s website.
In an interview with Cure, Paul Herbert, SVP of Digital Strategy at Inizio Evoke Comms, explained why AI perception matters and shared five strategies healthcare startups can use to build credibility, strengthen their digital footprint, and ensure AI tools understand who they are and what they do.
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How AI Evaluates and Interprets Healthcare Companies
According to Herbert, AI evaluates companies through “entity understanding,” or a clear sense of who you are, what you do, and whether you’re credible.
Key signals include scientific credibility, such as peer-reviewed publications and clinical trial data; expert validation, including partnerships with established institutions; and transparent communication about development stages.
“AI particularly values third-party validation through coverage in reputable medical publications and clear communication about both successes and setbacks,” he said.
Healthcare content also receives extra scrutiny under Google’s E-E-A-T framework. ChatGPT follows a similar trust hierarchy, validated by HealthBench, where physician consensus outranks expert opinion and company claims. It rewards content that acknowledges uncertainty, presents balanced information, and cites reliable medical sources.
Why AI Perception Matters for Your Healthcare Startup
Investors and partners increasingly use AI tools to evaluate companies, and AI-generated responses now shape public perception.
“Companies building consensus-driven credibility today through multiple expert validations and transparent communication will lead tomorrow’s AI-mediated reputation landscape,” Herbert said.
But AI can make mistakes. “AI can conflate companies with similar names, mix up trial phases, or cite outdated information. Mitigation requires maintaining consistent messaging across all digital touchpoints, promptly correcting misinformation through authoritative channels, and ensuring recent accurate information appears in multiple trusted sources,” he noted.
As important as AI-optimized content is, it should not come at the expense of readability and trust. “Your website is no longer just for human visitors; it’s your single source of truth for both humans and AI,” he said. This gives companies a chance to tell their full story rather than leaving AI to piece together fragments from multiple places.
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Content and Technical Strategies for AI Visibility
Although the landscape is complex, Herbert said healthcare startups can take concrete steps to improve visibility in an AI-driven search ecosystem.
One foundational tactic is to create Q&A content that answers real stakeholder questions. Examples include: What’s your mechanism of action? What trial phase are you in? Clear headers and bullet points also help AI extract information accurately.
From there, Herbert outlined several strategies.
1. Take a Two-Track Approach
Herbert described a two-track approach. The first track centers on immediate visibility for time-sensitive needs such as funding announcements, trial milestones, and strategic partnerships. “Update your website with pipeline data and use syndicated newswires, which AI regularly indexes, to ensure critical updates appear quickly when investors search for you,” he said.
The second track focuses on long-term scientific credibility and third-party coverage. “Peer-reviewed publications and respected industry media carry more weight than owned content, but you can only influence, not control them,” Herbert said. He added that as AI evolves, trusted sources will increasingly crowd out a company’s own content.
AI-forward companies will run both tracks simultaneously. In Herbert’s experience, leveraging both owned and paid channels for urgent updates such as funding rounds, FDA milestones, and significant partnerships has proven effective. Over time, these trusted sources will shape how AI presents a company’s credibility to potential partners and investors.
2. Implement Structured Data
Another key strategy is using structured data on your website, which consists of invisible tags that tell AI exactly what it’s looking at. You can tag your CEO’s bio as “executive leadership,” your pipeline as “drug development stages,” or trial results as “clinical data.”
“Humans don’t see these tags, but AI uses them to understand and categorize your information accurately. This consistent labeling is especially critical on your own website where you have full control,” Herbert said.
3. Back Up Every Claim
Make sure all claims link to credible sources, include methodology details for any research claims, and maintain consistent medical terminology throughout your content.
“The combination of clear content structure for humans and invisible data structure for AI maximizes your visibility to both audiences,” Herbert said.
4. Consider a Website Re-Structure
When structuring a healthcare startup’s website, it’s essential to understand your audiences and the questions each group wants answered. Herbert noted that investors might ask about runway and market size, partners about mechanism of action and trial timelines, and physicians about safety and efficacy.
If you have three key audiences with five questions each, your site needs clear, thorough answers to all fifteen.
5. Invest in Specialist Tools to Monitor AI Perception
Professional monitoring requires systematic testing across multiple AI platforms with hundreds of query variations.
“Specialist tools track how often you appear in AI responses versus competitors, which sources AI cites when mentioning you, and whether AI accurately represents your development stage and capabilities,” Herbert said.
The Future of AI in Healthcare Discovery
Herbert believes that AI will become the primary way people discover healthcare companies in the next three to five years. For now, the landscape remains fragmented. Many healthcare outlets block AI from accessing content, and major platforms like Google and OpenAI are striking exclusive licensing deals with select publishers.
Each AI model has access to different sources. “Understanding which AI platforms can crawl which outlets, and how that changes monthly as new partnerships form, requires constant monitoring and sophisticated mapping,” Herbert said.
Companies that learn to navigate this complexity will have an advantage. “It’s not enough to have an AI strategy and a human audience strategy; you need to understand the specific access patterns of each AI platform and place your content accordingly,” he said.
Within five years, most reputable sources are likely to have established broader AI partnerships. Until then, success requires treating each AI platform as its own channel with its own media ecosystem.
