Ep. 247: Is Your Urgent Care Invisible to AI? | Part 1

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Hey, what's going on, Walkins Welcome family. We're glad to have you for another episode of Walkins Welcome with Nick and Michael, and brought to you by Patient Care Marketing Pros. And I could say the 30 other things that I typically start an episode with, but we're gonna pass that today because we got a big one. We have a big episode. It might become two. Well, we all know when we're done with it. Find out when we get there.

Yeah, but yeah, so this episode, we are, it's just the reality that we're in. We are looking at how AI is, as we know, is staying here, right? It's not going anywhere.

And our company was originally based on like SEO and all that stuff. And now there's this new, I say new, but like you've heard GEO, all these different AEO, all these things. Well now I think the world has at the moment settled on AI visibility.

Well, we certainly have.

We have, and then when you start doing, when I start doing keyword research, AI visibility searches have skyrocketed for it and then the GEO to AEOs have kinda like gone flat.

Correct.

So I think the best way you can tell AI visibility has now become a new standard. And why are we bringing it up in this episode? So we've had conversations with clients, we've had conversations with potential clients, and then we've had conversations with other agencies. And like this is like the next true iteration of like where SEO and all the things have moved to.

Right. One of the things that we've said in the past, in past episodes and talks that we've given at urgent care associations, is just simply nobody has cracked the code on AEO, GEO, and that may be the last you hear that in this episode.

Yeah.

As we transition to this concept of AI visibility. And I'm not making any guarantees, but our company has worked incredibly hard and worked with a lot of other agencies to develop best practices that haven't existed yet to be able to deliver your urgent care in an AI situation or an AI search.

And I'm talking, I'm actually, I'm not talking about just ChatGPT. I'm talking about Google's AI answer, which is Gemini powered.

Yeah, Gemini.

Yeah. So when you do a Google search, the first thing that pops up is the AI answers, right? Talking about Claude and Perplexity and Grok and Copilot for Microsoft, all of these different things, including ChatGPT. So all of that is encompassed when we talk about AI visibility.

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And it boils down to several things. It's not just this one and done. And there is a framework we're going to talk about in this episode.

Yeah.

It's seven different things that we have found that helps you get into these large language models. So let's get after it, man. Are you ready to rock?

Yeah, yeah.

All right, cool. So essentially the behavior shift that we're seeing is this evolution from, I think we've talked ad nauseam about a phone book to Google. Like how people have changed the way they discover businesses. That's now been around for 30 years.

Yeah. Exactly.

It's been around, it's nothing new.

Yeah.

It is older than some of the people listening right now.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's changed over time. Some of it has been like true to itself. Like the idea of a listing and the idea of just being, putting up okay content, black hat back in the day.

Right.

And so now honestly, I feel like AI visibility is just the evolution of SEO.

It is.

Because when you start, even like today, we'll go through the framework, there are a lot of SEO-esque things inside of it, to the point where your prior rankings will probably improve in addition to the AI visibility based on this. Based on what we've seen so far, right?

So where like we've actually have tested this, we're in process trying to release it to clients, but we, you know, wanna make sure we're confident. But the testing's, the results, initial results have been really good.

I wanna make the claim, at least here in 2026 and end of August going into September of 2026, make sure it's right 'cause in two months everything could change. You never can tell.

I don't think SEO is dead at all. And I don't even want to make that claim. I still think for an urgent care, search engine optimization is like the number one foundation builder. That and Google Ads. Like we're not taking anything away from it. AI visibility is there to build on it, right?

Your website, still monumentally important. The local SEO, getting found in that map three pack, still the most important piece of digital real estate, right? You're still working on authority. You're still building your reviews out, making sure that you're answering those reviews, and your Google Business Profile is still the most important digital asset that you have.

Yeah.

Right. So moving on though, there's really two sides of the AI coin here, right? So you have the one where AI just simply doesn't find you.

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Yeah, that doesn't exist.

Yeah, you're totally missing from any kind of a search. Somebody goes to Google or any AI visibility platform and they say something like, “I need to see an urgent care. What's the best recommendation you have?”

Keep in mind, AI is very conversational. Search engine is very keyword.

Yeah.

So that's, I bring that up for a very specific reason. And how somebody approaches this search will determine whether or not they're going to show your Google Map three pack listing or whether or not they're gonna answer your question.

Yeah.

Okay, cool. Anything to add to that?

Well, and I'm just thinking through when you talk about the conversational piece, and because AI is conversational, because people can just literally talk to it, don't have to type anything out. Right. It's gonna go more around the routes of, “I don't feel so good, I have this issue, I have the symptom.” It's, “You may have this or this,” and then it'll come like, “Do I need to go to doctor?” “Yes, let me recommend some urgent cares nearby that can see you today,” you know, and whatever.

Like that's how it's going versus “urgent care near me.”

Right.

I mean “urgent care near me” is still very powerful. And I think there should be a disclaimer here somewhere about, as you said, like SEO is, like you still need to own that listing and all those things because I think I saw a stat the other day where of all searches or queries, you know, AI still only represents like 10 or 12 percent of everything.

Right.

Versus Google is still, a traditional search matters. But like you're saying too, it gets kind of weird because Gemini suggests or, you know, AI Overview is now kinda like always there. It used to barely be there and it would just kind of show up. Now it's like, can you get out of my way?

Yeah, honestly, right.

The other side of that coin though is that you are showing up in these AI models, but it doesn't have accurate information.

Yes, or it's really confused about you.

Yeah, exactly.

So where it used to be you had to put accurate information to get found on SEO for just a standard Google search. In AI, you may actually populate. You may actually populate, but it is, in the absence of good information, it is pulling from everywhere.

I think a better way to say that is that AI visibility doesn't have original thought.

No, no.

And I think that's something that we, I have this like legitimate fear with AI of...

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We will get to a point where, you know, we are, we're all using AI to help build content, not just like, and as an agency, but we're, you know, people in general, right? Like they're putting content out. AI is creating that. What, at what point does AI just eat its own food and no longer knows what's original food and what's just AI food? And is this even true anymore?

Right.

I think about that sometimes where we're gonna hit this point where it only believes what it has been pushed out and it was based on wrong information from years ago and you need that actual expert to come in.

Random, but I believe we're going to fall back as a society to physical print. It's the only safe thing left.

I think it'll become that.

Yeah. This is totally a prediction. And we're going into like Blade Runner stuff here now.

A little bit.

So, well, you know, 'cause there's a whole big thing about data centers and like Claude, or not Claude but Anthropic, is burning books. And you dig into that, what they're doing is that, you know, all these AI models, they are collecting data. And the only way they can collect it, you know, legally, is that they'll buy books and then they'll remove the binds to them to flatten out the pages and throw them through a scanner.

Right.

Well, when you do that, you destroy them, right? You can't fix the book. It's like there's a big stink about that. But then you look into like, wait, Google's been doing that with Google Books for years. And they're like amazing last-copy-whatever books. They're just kind of like, it could be crap books, honestly. But they buy a warehouse of them that they're gonna rot away anyway.

But like there's that part, like, okay, the physical book's gone. If it goes completely away, we'd now have lost like control of the original version of anything.

Right.

That's why that fear comes up for like the Bible, like if it only lived on your phone.

Well, I mean, you know, I have a physical Bible, but it mostly lives on your phones.

Yeah, right. But the access is easy.

Exactly.

So, you know, there'll come a time where we're going to fall back to paper and print. Like old paper and print.

Because it's going to be their original source of information.

Yeah. It's wild the things that we're looking at now.

But, well, so let's talk about...

Well, let's buy for time. Let's make some money with it.

I was going to say, but bringing it back to urgent care specifically, I think urgent care is exposed. And here's what I mean by that.

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People are starting to use the AI models as their go-to information gathering.

Yeah.

Right. So they're going there to find out information. I do this. How do I install something on my HVAC system? How do I build...

You're doing this to repair a piece of machine right now.

Yeah. Like a four-wheeler.

Yeah.

And so, and it's real interesting how it goes because, as we all know, AI is super confident.

Right.

And it's so confident. It knows. It knows. It knows it knows.

And I have been entertained. So I'm just, as a side note, I like working on small engine stuff. I was like, I'm gonna make some money with it. So I bought a broken four-wheeler. Would not run, would not drive, whatever. And I'm slowly, and I figured out the problem last night, which I felt good about.

But it's a limited production four-wheeler, which was my mistake, shouldn't have bought that. And AI is so confused about it. It does not know anything about it because there's only like one magazine article and then Yamaha put out their repair manual and that's it, and it has no clue.

It's real entertaining because it's so confident. I was like, “I need to find this part number.” “It's this.” I click on it. “That's for a Kawasaki.” “You're right. I'm sorry. And then, no, it's this one.” “That's for a dirt bike.” “You're correct again, Mike.”

I was thinking, stop thinking.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's like, “You're right, you're right.” And then I went down, it's just so funny because I was using three different AIs to kind of get different answers.

Right.

And they were all like all over the place because they didn't have good information.

Yeah.

They had inaccurate information because there was nothing out there to confirm anything. And this particular model, it doesn't even know this. It literally figured something out based on one Reddit comment. Comment, not a post, a comment. And it was convinced this is true.

And I dug deeper. It's like, okay, that is actually true.

But this particular Yamaha's not even a Yamaha. It's a Kymco. I don't even know where it's... And a Kymco is a Korean company and they made a Yamaha and a Kawasaki and a Kymco the same thing.

Okay.

But all the part numbers are different, even though it's the same part. Anyway, and so it has no idea what's going on. But it's, the vacuum is pulling in information on whatever it can find and presenting it as facts. And being super confident that it is...

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...correct and this is what you should do.

And this is the reason I think urgent care is uniquely exposed.

Yeah.

Right? Because healthcare has this really high trust factor. Healthcare in general, you just as a consumer or patient, I just trust whatever you're going to tell me. I've lost a lot of that trust over time, but, you know, up until maybe a couple of years ago, I used to just trust everything the doctor was telling me.

And then you start to realize like they're basing it off of some research they have done, who knows how long ago. You don't do medicine. You practice it, right?

Yeah.

And, you know, you learn and like you're not, most of the time you're not the researcher, right?

That's right.

You just adopt the information and apply it.

Right.

And like we deal with this with Courtney's heart issues where she's, there is no information on some of her stuff. And they're like, “Well, we hope this works.”

But you think about that information gap, right?

So, yeah, let's just say somebody is going to the AI models and they're like, “Well, how much does urgent care cost?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, if nobody has put what it costs for urgent care, for self-pay, or for insurance pay or whatever, it's gonna assume or pull from all other different points of data.

Yep.

And that may either mean that it's making up stuff about your urgent care or it's not showing your urgent care and it's pulling in the people who actually answer that question.

Right.

Insurance, services, insurance, ages that you treat, hours, provider qualifications, X-rays, reviews, awards, accreditations, all of these different kinds of things. People are asking long questions about these types of things. And if you're not giving that information, it's just going to give you what it wants.

And a lot of that information exists somewhere, either inside of your organization or in someone else's organization.

Yeah.

And where it's well organized online on your website, AI is gonna be able to answer that with authority. And the answer that you provide is consistent.

Correct.

Like if you provide two answers to the same question, it's probably not gonna pick it. Or it's gonna get really confused and move on to the next one.

Well, we talked about that consistent, predictable, stable, and profitable, right? So like following that framework along with whatever you're putting out there, don't say two different things. Or if you're gonna say something and that has changed, and we're gonna talk about that a little bit, is things change.

Yep.

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Answers change. An example would be last year we were talking about AEO and GEO and now we're talking about AI visibility. It has changed. And we were confident about AEO, GEO.

We were.

We're like, one of these is gonna win. None of, neither, none of it happened.

So let's keep going, number five there, Michael.

So what's actually gonna fix all this? You know, what are we supposed to be doing on AI visibility? Like I'm the consumer or the urgent care owner. You keep talking about all these fixes, all these things. What are we, what does this even mean?

I thought I was paying a service to do all this, but I don't know how to even check this. Like what am I supposed to do?

So as an urgent care, how do we move from this is a problem until let's move to the strategy, how to fix it, right? So this is the next phase of it.

Correct.

And it starts with an audit.

Yeah.

Like you have to audit. Just like we do everything else.

Exactly.

I mean, we get your baseline. When somebody comes to us, when we get an urgent care inquiry, “Hey, we want to work with you,” we start with an audit.

And I'm not even just talking about AI. We're talking about auditing your Google Ads account, auditing your Google Business Profile, auditing your website, auditing all the things.

But if you're gonna do this yourself for AI visibility, it starts with an audit.

So before you change anything, I'm just gonna read through some bullet points here, right? So what does AI currently know about your clinic? What does it know? Just do a search. “What do you know about my clinic?”

Yeah.

Right. It's fast as it's gonna tell you what it knows. And then you can even ask it, “How did you find this information?”

Well, most of them now will link it.

Well, cite it. Cite the source. You remember back in the day where you had to cite the old Dewey Decimal System and ADA compliance?

Yeah.

Not ADA. Right. APA writing where you had the little numbers.

And they see that now too, because you have those little links now you can click on it, goes to it.

And it's nice.

But right, yeah, like that's the first step. “Hey Chat, hey Claude, hey Gemini,” whatever your choice is, “What do you know about Nick's Urgent Care in this city?”

And it will tell you something. It will never say, “I know nothing about it.”

No.

It's gonna make crap up if it doesn't.

We even, as a side note, we had kicked off a new client talking about AI just not knowing it. So it's a brand new client startup. They launched, opened their doors in July. Business Profile was right, certified. They had booking links, they had everything. And the Business Profile looked great.

AI Overview: “You cannot book online with this clinic.”

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Right, what?

And so we, and I argued with it and I said, “No, you can.”

It's like, “Yeah, I guess you are. Like that is the link that works. Great.”

Wouldn't change it. We had to go submit a thing to Google, say, “Hey, fix this.”

Yeah.

Because the AI Overview for Google Business Profile was above the profile.

Yeah.

So it was, I was like, my God. Wild West.

Yeah. We're still trying to figure it out properly.

Yeah.

But you had brought it up, and that is which platforms are you actually showing up on? Because there's a multitude of them.

I would say you want to start with the ones that you think are most common in your industry. Gemini is absolutely one of them. The Google Answers part is Gemini. So that's the context there.

ChatGPT is still for the general public, probably the most used.

Yeah.

Right. If you drive a Tesla, you're using Grok. This is built into it, right? So maybe Grok is something that you want to check.

Yeah, and the fact that Apple is now taking on Gemini as for their AI solution.

Wise decision, to be honest with you.

They did, I'm glad they admitted like, “We can't figure this out.”

I was gonna say you might as well let the people who are doing it.

Is the information accurate that's being presented, right? What sources are being cited? We talked about that. Like not only is the information accurate, but like where is it pulling this information from?

Hey, here's an important one. What competitors are showing up in that exact same search? 'Cause it loves to list competitors.

Man, I tell you what, it is, it's gonna hedge its bet.

And AI is gonna pull everything that it thinks you need, not just what you want it to do. And that is a difference, in my opinion, on how AI is going to work versus how general search is gonna work.

When I do a general search for my company, Nick's Urgent Care, okay, I only want Nick's Urgent Care to show up.

Yeah.

Right. I want my Google ad, I want my Google Business Profile, I want everything. That is not, today, how AI works.

When it says, “Tell me about Nick's Urgent Care,” it's gonna tell you about you, your friend, your best friend, your competitor down the street, everything it knows about everything in that world, right?

So totally different response. So you need to take note of the competitors and then study what they're doing.

Yeah. Yeah, because they may have some.

And then you say, if it does list a competitor, you'll say, “Well, tell me about that competitor.”

Yeah.

And you start seeing the differences because what we know is that there's some commonalities.

Like I even did a search the other day on Gemini saying...

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“Tell me what you use to determine what is the best urgent care in Birmingham.”

And it gave like five or six things it looks at. Now, was it lying to me? I don't know. But thankfully our client showed up in two of the three tops. So it was like super nice.

But it was interesting because it looked at reviews. “Hey, do you have the actual service? Could you book?” It even said need to be able to book online. Like that was a criteria to it.

Right.

Which, it makes sense because the consumer, because I think that's a reminder, the consumer kind of drives the demand. Where if a consumer expects this, you should probably do it.

And AI is going to adapt to that over time because that's what's been fed to it all these years, like what we want.

Right.

And it's trying to give us what we want, whether it's lying or not, but it tries.

Well, going in and figuring out what these things, what AI is telling you about your own clinic, that is establishing the baseline.

Yeah.

Like at least you know where the starting point is. You know where you are.

Especially if it's all wrong.

Especially if so. But you can take a note of that.

Right.

And the good news is in all of these, it saves these threads. And so one of the things that you can do is just like as you make improvements, “How am I looking today? Can you see this now? How am I looking now?”

Yeah, the Verizon commercial. “Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?”

Dude, that was so epic when that was, that Sprint or Verizon?

I can't remember.

Verizon did, then Sprint hired him away.

Yeah.

And then he like, “Can you hear me now?” He turned yellow or whatever.

Yeah, that's right.

That was wild. Anyway, Sprint's out of business. Verizon's not.

And that guy made money.

Yeah, yeah.

All right. Now we wanna give you, now we want to give you what we have found to be the solution today. August, end of August 2026.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a moving target. But here's what we found to be consistent and we've been testing this and we've been working on it and we've been implementing it. And boy, are we gonna sell it, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

And that's a side note too. What we're presenting to you today will become some type of paid package with us.

Yes.

I mean, well, Patient Care Marketing Pros, not Walk-Ins Welcome, but Patient Care Marketing Pros.

But we are going to give it to you. Then we're going to tell you what it is. Now whether you go do it or not is a completely different story.

And the funny part to that statement is that's how we've done everything.

Yeah.

If you want to know our general Google Ads strategy and what we look for, there's a video out there.

That's right.

If you want to, we used to have a wonderful SEO checklist for Google My Business...

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...before it became Google Business Profile, that we just gave away to people.

That's right.

And we still have that story with the travel agent.

Yeah.

During COVID, travel agents, like travel agents got screwed during COVID. We all know that. Like that was a rough time. And so they were like out of business.

And we're like, “Here you go. You can try it. Since you have nothing to do, why don't you try this out? Let us know how it goes.”

And it like fixed their business.

Dominated.

Yeah, like they dominated the area and changed their world. It was amazing. And when COVID backed off, it was like this is a... anyway.

So like we've been on this road of like we're just gonna give you what you got. There are, there's always gonna be a couple of little things that we keep close to our hearts that you have to figure out. We don't just blatantly give you, but 90% plus we're just gonna hand it to you.

If you do it, we know it'll work because we hear it all the time.

But that's how it is today. Like we're actually gonna sell this thing, but we're gonna give you as much as we can.

And of course we're doing all the testing too. So if something changes after this episode, sorry. Can't go back.

We'll strap in. Let's get after it.

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