Artificial Intelligence
Integrated Communications

Credibility is King: How to Rethink Your Comms Strategy for AI

April 28, 2026

By Campbell O’Connor, Group Director, Media & Engagement

What AI-mediated discovery means for healthcare communications and what every communicator should be thinking about right now.

A recent KFF poll found that one in three American adults turned to an AI chatbot for physician or mental health information in the last year.

Increasingly, people are getting their first impression of a healthcare brand through an AI-generated summary rather than a formal webpage or press release.

But does that mean healthcare communicators have lost control of the story around their brand? When everything seems to be changing so fast, it helps to pay close attention to what is not changing.

The discovery layer has changed. The credibility standard has not.

What ultimately makes health-related content and communications credible is trusted, accurate and scientifically backed info. That hasn’t changed. And that’s great news for communicators who have always invested in building credibility.

When I think about how AI challenges us to rethink communications strategies, three things stand out:

The stakes on accuracy and specificity are higher.
AI systems summarize source material at scale. If the underlying content is vague or thin, the AI output reflects that. Precise, well-sourced communication is now a prerequisite, not a differentiator.
Where you invest in media coverage matters.
The outlets that carry the most weight with AI systems are not always the ones with the biggest audiences. Deep, authoritative and frequently cited sources carry considerable weight. Earned media strategy needs to account for that.
Message consistency is non-negotiable.
When AI is aggregating a brand’s narrative across dozens of sources, every piece of coverage needs to point in the same direction. When AI summarizes your story before any human reads it, consistency and credibility become strategic imperatives.

What about the misinformation risk?

In most industries, AI getting something wrong is an inconvenience. In healthcare, it can become a patient safety issue.

I’ve seen concrete examples: AI hallucinating medication dosing information, confusing competitor products, and resurfacing outdated clinical data. These are not hypothetical risks. They are happening now.

Whether you’re actively managing it or not, your organization already has a presence in AI outputs. The adage applies: If you’re not telling your story, someone else will. In an AI-mediated world, that “someone else” is often a large language model (LLM) drawing from outdated or inaccurate sources.

At Real Chemistry, we help clients address this in three steps:

Monitoring what AI is saying about a brand across major LLMs
Understanding what sources are driving those outputs
Sharpening content and communications strategies to improve what gets served to those AI systems

Using HealthGEO, our proprietary AI search intelligence platform built specifically for health and life sciences, we measure how AI represents brands across all major LLMs. With healthcare’s regulatory complexity, patient safety considerations, and multistakeholder environment built into HealthGEO’s design, we’re able to identify the sources shaping how brands are seen.

Three questions to sharpen your strategic edge

AI favors content that is easily digestible and gets to the point quickly. Outlets such as Axios, Reuters and Forbes, which lead with what readers need to know right up front, are frequently cited by AI systems, which should help shape how communicators think about the content they produce and the stories they pitch.

And content strategy needs to evolve, as well. Not just what topics get covered, but how information gets framed for an audience that may first encounter your brand through an AI-generated answer.

These are the three questions I challenge my team to keep coming back to when looking at our clients’ brands:

How is AI representing the brand today?
Are the communications strategies accounting for AI-mediated discovery?
Are we using AI in ways that sharpen our judgment and draw on our team’s unique expertise?

These are not one-time questions. As AI systems update, as new clinical data emerges, as platforms shift, the answers change too. The communicators who stay ahead are the ones monitoring and adjusting continuously, not those who made one round of changes and called it done.

Healthcare credibility has always been built on accuracy, consistency and trust. AI has not changed that. What it has changed is the environment where credibility is either built or eroded, and how fast that can happen. Communicators who understand and act on that truth will keep their brands visible and trusted where their audiences are spending more and more of their time.