Launching Health in ChatGPT.

OpenAI, July 23, 2026

OpenAI has launched Health in ChatGPT for eligible U.S. users, allowing people to connect supported medical records and Apple Health data directly to ChatGPT. More than 300 million people already use ChatGPT for health-related questions each week.

That could change the patient walking into the exam room. People can now ask about a lab result, medication or condition with more of their own health history in context, track what has changed over time and prepare questions for an appointment. HCPs will increasingly meet patients who feel more informed, have more specific questions and may already have formed views about their care. Researchers have begun describing this as a three-way relationship between patient, clinician and AI.

For pharma, that changes the questions content needs to be ready for. A patient who has spent time working through their own records may quickly get to questions like, “What does this mean for someone with my history?”, “What should I ask my doctor?” or “What might make one treatment relevant to my situation?” Healthcare organizations should be anticipating those follow-on questions now and making sure credible, useful information exists across the broader ecosystem to support them.

The Discoverability Problem Pharma Isn’t Talking About: AI Search.

PharmaLive.com, July 29, 2026

Real Chemistry’s Bre Thomlinson, Practice Leader, Social & Omnichannel, and Sean Arnell, Group Director, GEO & Search Strategy, recently authored a PharmaLive article on why AI search is creating a new discoverability challenge for pharma brands.

Healthcare providers, patients, journalists, and policymakers are increasingly using AI tools to get answers instead of clicking through traditional search results. That creates a different kind of discoverability challenge for pharmaceutical companies.

It’s no longer enough to focus solely on brand websites and product pages. AI answers are increasingly shaped by scientific publications, clinical guidelines, patient advocacy organizations, earned media, and third-party health resources. That means brand perception and stakeholder understanding are being influenced by a much broader ecosystem than most organizations actively monitor today. The challenge isn’t simply whether a brand appears in AI-generated answers. It’s whether the information shaping those answers accurately reflects the clinical evidence, educational priorities, and narratives an organization wants stakeholders to understand.

Reddit is Suddenly Showing Up Less in ChatGPT.

PromptWatch, August 18, 2026

A few search and GEO circles caught this one this week. PromptWatch says Reddit’s share of citations in ChatGPT Search fell from an average of 3.83% in late July and early August to just 0.52% between August 14 and 17.

Here’s what we know. The drop in PromptWatch’s data is real. Here’s what we don’t know. OpenAI hasn’t explained it, the timing doesn’t cleanly line up with the search-behavior change some have blamed, and PromptWatch says it can’t yet rule out a measurement issue. So it’s far too early to declare Reddit “dead” for GEO.

What makes this interesting is how quickly a source that had been consistently cited in AI search can move. For teams creating content for HCPs, patients, and other stakeholders, it’s important to remember source authority inside AI answers is fluid, varies by engine and can change without anything changing on your side. That makes strategies built around getting into one favored source pretty fragile. The better question is which sources matter for the questions your audiences actually ask, and how that changes over time.

HealthGEO Turns One.

Real Chemistry, August 20, 2026

This month marks one year since the launch of HealthGEO, and the AI search landscape has moved quickly with it.

Over the past year, we’ve seen the questions people ask become just as important as the answers, the sources shaping those answers shift in a matter of months, and GEO expand beyond website optimization into measurement, earned influence, governance and enterprise operating models.

We’ve captured five of our biggest year-one lessons in our latest article, HealthGEO, One Year Later: What We’ve Learned About AI Search in Healthcare.

And to mark the anniversary, we’re also sharing a new companion brief, What AI Trusts in Healthcare, with some of the most interesting patterns we’ve seen across the HealthGEO Benchmark Index.

Your Questions, Answered

We want The HealthGEO Pulse to be a two-way conversation. Send us your GEO questions and we will tackle the best ones each month.

Q: How do we know where to focus if AI answers are pulling from so many different sources?

Start by separating the moments when your brand is named from the moments when it isn’t. If AI systems mention your company when prompted directly, that tells you something about how your owned and branded ecosystem is being interpreted. But the more revealing question is what happens when stakeholders ask broader, unaided questions about a disease area, treatment category, innovation theme, or healthcare issue without naming you.

That’s where the real gaps usually show up. AI systems may cite clinical guidelines, journals, advocacy organizations, news coverage, government sources, third-party health sites, or competitor content before they ever cite your owned materials. For healthcare brands, that source pattern matters because it shows which information environments are shaping stakeholder understanding before your brand is even part of the conversation.

The opportunity isn’t just to create more content. It’s to understand which sources AI systems already trust, where your evidence or narrative is missing, and how to strengthen the right information across owned, earned, medical, advocacy, and third-party environments. That’s how GEO becomes more than a visibility exercise. It becomes a way to identify where healthcare stakeholders are being informed, where your story is being disconnected, and where your teams have a real opportunity to close the gap.

The HealthGEO Pulse is published monthly for pharmaceutical and healthcare professionals navigating the AI search landscape. Questions, feedback or topics you want covered? Reply directly to this email.

 

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