Get Found at the Moment Patients Decide: Your Guide to the New Era of Search
Welcome to this month’s Digital Bulletin! Patients are no longer starting their search for care with a list of links. More and more often, they’re asking AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews first. This month, we’re showing you what that shift means for your practice, how the work we already do keeps you visible, and the smart behind-the-scenes strategies that are helping your patient emails land and get opened.
In this issue:
- Search Has Changed, and Your Practice Is Already Built for It
- The Behind-the-Scenes Strategy Behind Your Rising Open Rates: Engaged vs. Unengaged Sending
- Physical Therapy & AI in 2026
- See You in Colorado Springs! Neil Takes the Stage at the 2026 PPS Annual Conference
- Success Tip of the Month: Turn Happy Patients Into Your Best AI Visibility Tool
Search Has Changed, and Your Practice Is Already Built for It
Not long ago, a patient with back pain would open Google, type “physical therapist near me,” and scroll a list of links. That path still exists, but it’s no longer where the journey begins. In 2026, patients are asking AI assistants first (ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Siri) and forming an opinion about their symptoms before they ever look for a clinic.
The scale of the shift is hard to overstate. More than 200 million people a week ask ChatGPT health and wellness questions, and roughly 70% of those conversations happen outside clinic hours, when patients are self-serving and you’re closed. About a third of U.S. adults now say they’ve used an AI chatbot for health information, double the year before.
Here’s what that means in practice. By the time someone searches for a clinic, an AI has often already told them they likely need PT, explained whether they’ll need a referral, and estimated how long treatment takes. The clinic that wins is the one the AI names, and the one whose local listing is clearest when the patient finally does search.
So how does an AI decide who to name? It comes down to three things: consensus (how consistently your practice shows up across many independent sites, not just your own), freshness (recent, dated content: stale pages get skipped), and authority (strong traditional SEO, since roughly 97% of AI answers still cite a page from the top 20 search results). Good SEO isn’t a separate “AI project”. It’s the price of admission to being visible in AI at all.
And that’s the reassuring part. The work that earns AI visibility is the work our team already does for you every month: keeping your Google Business Profile complete and current, building a steady flow of recent reviews, publishing condition-focused content written the way patients actually ask their questions, keeping your name, address, and hours identical everywhere they appear, and making sure your site stays technically open to the AI crawlers that many practices are unknowingly blocking.
The front door to your clinic has moved. The good news is that the fundamentals still decide who gets found, and those fundamentals are exactly what we’re managing on your behalf, so your practice shows up at the moment a patient is deciding where to go.
The Behind-the-Scenes Strategy Behind Your Rising Open Rates: Engaged vs. Unengaged Sending
If you’ve noticed your email numbers trending in the right direction lately, there’s a reason for it, and it’s not something you had to do anything for. It’s happening on the back end, built into how our team manages every email program.
Here’s the problem we’re solving. Most practices think of their email list as one group: everyone who’s ever handed over an email address. But not everyone on that list actually pays attention to what you send.
Some patients open and click every single time. Others haven’t opened an email from you in months. When you send the exact same email, on the exact same schedule, to both groups at once, you’re not just wasting an opportunity with the second group, you’re actively working against yourself with the first.
This comes down to something called sender reputation. Email providers like Gmail and Outlook are constantly watching how people interact with your emails. High open rates and clicks tell them your content is wanted, so they keep delivering it to the inbox. But when a large portion of your list ignores email after email, that inaction gets read as a warning sign.
Over time, it can push even your best content into spam folders, for your most engaged patients too. So a list full of silent, unengaged contacts doesn’t just sit there quietly. It actively drags down performance for everyone on it.
Our team studies email sending best practices closely, and one of the clearest, most consistent findings is that segmentation solves this. So that’s exactly what we do for every practice on our Patient Engagement System.
We split your list into engaged and unengaged groups. Engaged contacts, the people already opening and clicking, get your regular content on your normal schedule. Unengaged contacts, sometimes called non-openers, get pulled out and sent a separate resend a few hours later, usually with a different subject line built specifically to catch their attention and pull them back in.
It’s a small structural change on our end, but it protects your deliverability, respects the patients who are paying attention, and gives the ones who’ve drifted a real second chance to re-engage, instead of just getting buried and eventually written off.
We’re not guessing at this. We track it closely across every practice we manage, and the results back it up.
One of our most engaged clients, someone who consistently sends us custom content and stays closely involved in shaping their Newsletter, saw their engaged segment hit a 68% open rate in a single month, more than three times the healthcare industry average.
At the same time, the monthly resend to their unengaged contacts recaptured 467 previously silent subscribers in that month alone, patients who would have otherwise just kept sliding further into inactivity.
Over the full year, that same practice generated 30 reactivated patient leads directly from newsletter and email activity, worth an estimated $30,000 in potential lead value, with a blended open rate of 38.9% for the quarter, nearly double the industry benchmark.
That result isn’t only about the segmentation strategy. It also reflects what happens when a practice stays engaged with us, sending real content, giving us feedback, and trusting the process.
But the underlying strategy, splitting engaged from unengaged and treating each group differently, is something every practice on our email system benefits from automatically.
You don’t need a bigger list. You need a more responsive one, and that’s exactly what this approach is built to create.
Curious how your list is segmented right now, or want to talk about ways to be more involved in shaping your own content? Reach out to your team, we’re happy to walk you through it.
Physical Therapy & AI in 2026
Our team analyzed a year of client meetings and calls across 266 practices and found that AI mentions roughly tripled in 2026, moving from a “someday” topic to a standing agenda item, with the biggest shifts in AI-driven search and smarter call handling.
Why does that matter to you?
Because the digital landscape is changing fast, and we’re monitoring AI’s impact on search and lead handling right now, while many agencies are still catching up. That means you won’t be blindsided by shifts like flat clicks or searches that get answered before anyone reaches your site.
We’re watching these changes closely so your practice stays ahead of them, not caught off guard.
We Made the 2026 Inc. 5000 — and You’re a Big Reason Why
We’re proud to share some exciting news. Practice Promotions has been named No. 4,715 on the 2026 Inc. 5000. This annual list from Inc. magazine recognizes the fastest-growing private companies in America. It ranks businesses by their revenue growth over three years, so earning a spot reflects sustained momentum, not a single good year.
This milestone belongs to more than our team. It reflects the trust that practices like yours have placed in us, and the results we’ve built together. Our growth has come from clinics that stayed with us, referred colleagues, and gave us the chance to prove that good marketing helps patients find the care they need.
Growth also means we can keep investing in your practice. It lets us keep developing our team, sharpening our strategies, and staying ahead of changes like the AI search shift featured in this issue. Our focus hasn’t changed: helping your practice get found, get chosen, and grow.
Thank you for being part of our story. We’re excited about what we’ll accomplish together next.
See You in Colorado Springs! Neil Takes the Stage at the 2026 PPS Annual Conference
We’re proud to share that Neil has been selected to speak at the 2026 APTA Private Practice (PPS) Annual Conference. PPS is the biggest event of the year for private practice physical therapy, and earning a spot on the speaking agenda is a big honor. We’d love to see you there.
AI Search: The Future of Patient Discovery – ChatGPT, Google, and AI Clinic Marketing Tips
More and more patients now find their next physical therapist by asking ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and other AI tools.
Neil will explain how AI search is changing the way patients discover clinics. He’ll also share practical steps you can take to make sure your practice is the one they find.
📅 Friday, November 13, 2026
🕟 4:30 – 5:30 PM MT
📍 International North
🎓 Earn 0.1 CEUs
Come say hello at Booth #814!
Seeing our clients in the audience and at our booth is one of our favorite parts of the conference. Stop by Booth 814 to meet the team, ask your marketing questions, and connect with us in person.
Planning to attend? Reply to this email and let us know. We’d love to save you a seat and plan a time to catch up.
View the full conference schedule →
Success Tip of the Month
Turn Happy Patients Into Your Best AI Visibility Tool: Ask for Reviews That Tell the Story
Many practices believe a five-star rating is all that matters in a review, but the words patients write can matter just as much.
AI tools and Google read review text to work out what a clinic is known for. A review that says “they helped my sciatica so I could get back to running” tells them far more than “great place!”
You can encourage these more detailed reviews with one small change at checkout. When a patient reaches a milestone, like graduating from care or hitting a goal, invite them to leave a review. Then add a simple nudge: “It really helps other patients if you mention what brought you in and how you’re feeling now.”
Keep the request natural and never tell patients what to write, since honest, varied reviews carry the most weight.
Try making this a habit for your front desk this month. Over time, your reviews will start describing the exact conditions you treat best, in the same words future patients use when they search.
Quick Links
To login to your Marketing Analytics Dashboard, visit https://practicepromotions.clientseoreport.com/.
This is where you’ll find your Total Leads Summary, Website Performance, and ROI information.
Engage… remind me where that is again? We’ve got you. Login to your dashboard at https://practicepromotions.email/app/user. If you need help, reach out to your Digital team on Basecamp.
