AI Will Dominate in Finance and Healthcare Decisions

People talk to AI differently than they search on Google. The shift is happening fast.

Complex questions about our health and finances are moving to AI conversations.

This shift represents both risk and opportunity for businesses in these sectors. Let me explain why.

AI is Becoming the First Stop for Your Most Personal Questions

YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) has long been a designation within Google search requiring specific guidelines and guardrails. This will continue as AI search evolves across all platforms.

Regulations and legal questions about AI answering medical or financial questions persist. But individual investors and patients are already turning to AI for complex questions rather than simple ones.

The difference between asking when your doctor's office opens and whether you should seek medical help for chest pain is significant. Yet both queries are increasingly directed to AI assistants.

Google recognizes these difficult compliance scenarios in financial services and healthcare. Traffic decline at sites like WebMD suggests complex health questions, previously handled through self-diagnosis searches, are moving to AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. AI conversations at healthcare conferences centered around concrete use cases rather than theoretical applications (Fierce Healthcare, 2025).

Financial questions follow the same pattern. A recent study found that 67% of surveyed Gen Z adults and 62% of millennials already use AI tools for personal finance tasks like budgeting and investment planning, while being cautioned about the limitations of AI financial advice (CNBC, 2024).

What Financial and Healthcare Companies Must Do Now

Structure your data and provide it to AI platforms. Whether through websites, direct data feeds, or other methods, this represents your best opportunity to differentiate from competitors.

Your content strategy must shift. Websites are becoming data delivery mechanisms for AI intermediaries rather than primary customer touchpoints.

Track which complex queries in your industry trigger AI overviews. These represent the middle and top of the funnels that previously drove traffic to your site.

Accept that a significant portion of initial patient or client research, whether for a cardiologist or wealth manager specializing in family trusts, will happen inside AI conversations, not on websites.

Consider these questions:

• How are you structuring data about your services for AI consumption?

• What personal details about your professionals would matter in private AI conversations?

• Are you monitoring how AI systems currently represent your services?

The Stubborn Reality of Human Decision-Making

People don't make decisions for entirely logical reasons. This complicates the AI recommendation landscape.

Many choose physicians and wealth advisors based on seemingly irrelevant factors, such as which college they attended, what sports team they support, or their handicap at the local golf club.

These "soft factors" rarely appear in traditional web content strategies. Yet they frequently determine final selection decisions.

AI conversations mimic human conversations. They're private spaces where people feel comfortable asking about these relationship-building factors.

• Traditional factors (credentials, experience, services offered, availability)

• Soft factors (personal background, values alignment, community involvement, personality fit) highlight how AI conversations can surface both categories, while traditional web content primarily addresses traditional factors.

Traditional websites struggled to capture this dynamic. AI conversations naturally accommodate it.

The Stakes for Businesses Are Enormous

If traffic decline at medical information sites provides any indication, complex questions about health and finances are already migrating to AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.

As hallucinations in AI systems have declined, the opportunity for financial services and healthcare companies has grown. Providing structured, helpful information positions you as a cited source of record.

The alternative? Watching as other sources establish authority in AI-mediated conversations about your industry.

Sources and citations are determined by query complexity. Complex queries, typical in finance and healthcare, trigger different citation patterns than simple factual questions.

This shift represents both a threat and an opportunity. Companies that understand and adapt will maintain visibility in these crucial decision pathways.

Data Structuring for the AI Intermediary Era

All potentially decision-relevant data needs to be gathered, structured, and delivered to AI systems.

Think beyond traditional SEO. Your professionals' church or synagogue attendance might seem irrelevant to your web strategy, but such information becomes critical in private AI conversations about selecting advisors.

Your data strategy must expand to include:

• Personal backgrounds of key professionals

• Community involvement and affiliations

• Values and personal interests

• Educational backgrounds

• Client or patient testimonials structured for citation

This data must exist in structured, accessible formats that AI systems can reliably access and cite.

Remember that private AI conversations have different dynamics than public web searches. People ask different questions when they believe no one is listening.

The companies that will thrive understand this fundamental shift: your website is becoming a data source rather than a destination. Your visibility in private AI conversations depends on how effectively you structure information for these new intermediaries, as AI chatbots are revolutionizing financial services with 24/7 assistance and personalized recommendations (Netguru, 2025).

This is a tough transition after years of website investment.

But embracing this reality now provides a competitive advantage as these shifts accelerate.

Focus on becoming your specialty's most reliable, structured source of information. This positions you as the cited authority when AI systems respond to the complex, personal questions that initiate customer relationships.