What Does Declining Web Traffic Mean for HCP Engagement?
Medical website traffic is down by around a third and clinicians’ use of language models has jumped towards universal. On this panel I argued we should stop optimising for channels we control, earn our way onto the channels clinicians actually use, and start writing for a third audience: the LLM itself. Business to business, business to consumer, and now B2LLM.
What were the key learnings?
Alongside an NHS consultant obstetrician and digital engagement leads from CSL and a regional pharma organisation, we looked at what AI-driven information seeking means for engaging healthcare professionals. The moderator’s firm, Syneos Health, had measured clinicians’ regular LLM use jumping from roughly 70 to 96 per cent in a year, while flagship medical websites lost around 30 per cent of their traffic.
My three measures for content that matters, replacing vanity metrics (judging content by clicks is like judging a surgeon by clinic footfall, it tells you nothing about outcomes): depth of engagement, behaviour change in the broadest sense, meaning the right patient on the right medicine and the wrong patient kept off it, and the relationship over time, the same clinician coming back across touchpoints.
On the open web: clinical content creators are filling gaps left by shrinking public health institutions, and for the industry not to engage with them is an open goal missed. When a major LLM launched its health product, traffic to pharmaceutical websites multiplied overnight, because the models treat that material as trusted source data. That is exactly why structured, credible content now has to serve human and machine readers alike. I closed with the Heart and Kidney Care Alliance, where Bayer provides the scaffolding and video frameworks while editorial control sits with twenty patient organisations around the world, as I put it on the day.
