How AI Searches Are Changing Senior Living Digital Marketing

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Senior living operators have in recent years revamped their online footprints with a big focus on search engine optimization. New digital search trends mean those efforts could be less effective.

I recently covered A Place for Mom’s pivot from focusing on keywords and SEO to AIO, or artificial intelligence optimization. In a nutshell, the company is refocusing its online marketing efforts to a strategy aimed at getting into the AI-powered “answers” that platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini provide.

As I wrote in that story, the New York City-based senior housing and care referral company is doing so amid rapidly changing online search trends from users doing research online. Recent data has shown that organic click-through rates for searches with Google’s AI Overviews have dropped significantly since the middle of 2024.

To be clear, SEO is not dead, and I think marketing strategies built for online search engines can serve operators in the era of AI. That still might come as cold comfort to senior living operators given that the tech is substantially changing the way their prospects get information online, and in short order.

In theory, a search that might have led a prospective resident to an operator’s website a few years ago now might lead them somewhere else, and that is an issue for companies that have spent their marketing dollars improving their websites and SEO scores in recent years.

I recently had a conversation with Paul Boethel, who took the reins at senior living operator Watermark Retirement Communities in April. Simply put, he believes that AI search will “dramatically change how marketing is done” in senior living.

“SEO is still important given our older audience,” Boethel told me. “However … we’ve already started heading down the path of thinking through how AI impacts our marketing efforts.”

In this members-only SHN+ Update, I analyze recent trends in online searches and recent conversations to offer the following takeaways:

• How AI searches are affecting web traffic
• Senior living marketing strategies for the AI age

AI’s impact on online searches

SEO still has a place in online marketing, but its place is changing.

Recent data suggests that AI-powered tools like Gemini’s “answers overview” are pushing viewers to click on fewer search engine results. A Pew Research survey of 900 U.S.-based adults found that users who encounter an AI summary during an online search “are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one.”

According to the data, “users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits.” By comparison, users clicked on results in 15% of searches that lacked an AI overview.

“Google users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary,” Pew wrote about the survey. “This happened on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages with only traditional search results.”

Furthermore, click-through rates are “at their lowest levels in 15 months,” according to a November article from Search Engine Land, a publication that tracks online web search functions.

The article’s author cited data from a study by marketing agency Seer Interactive showing that organic click-through rates for searches that featured Google AI Overviews dropped 61% compared to the middle of 2024. Paid searches for the same results fell 68%.

That data certainly seems dire for SEO, and I’ve seen multiple headlines heralding its death in the last year. I’m no marketing expert, but I do sense that the news of SEO’s demise is premature. 

For one, search engines have underpinned the entire internet since the earliest days of Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. SEO and the need to rank highly in search results have shaped countless websites, from video game guides and movie reviews to online retail sales and news articles, including those found on Senior Housing News.

Even while Google and ChatGPT are generating unique “answers” to specific questions from users, the platforms are drawing that information from specific websites. According to Search Engine Journal, under Google’s model, standard SEO practices – especially useful, timely, correct web copy relevant to a search – should help companies appear in answer overviews.

To test this concept, I searched Google for “How do I know if I need assisted living?” The query generated an AI overview that was more or less correct and cited changes with activities of daily living, cognitive difficulties, social isolation and family caregiver burnout as top reasons to consider a move into senior living.

Interestingly, the AI overview linked to multiple senior living operator websites as evidence for its answers, seemingly without much rhyme or reason as to what it chose for sources. I am based in Chicago, but the AI overview cited information on websites including for communities based in California and Kentucky.

That might not matter much in the end, as Pew Research data showed that just 1% of Google users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a link in that summary. But, I thought it was notable compared to the fact that my first actual search result was an ad for Senior Lifestyle, which is based in Chicago and has multiple communities in the area.

Senior living strategies for AI marketing

Zooming in the lens at Watermark, Boethel said the company is not abandoning its SEO practices with the move to AI. But it is changing how it markets to prospects online.

During my TALKS interview with him, he explained that FAQs are a tool the operator can use to rank higher in AI overviews or in answers from LLMs. And indeed, my cursory web search seemed to prioritize sites with lists of questions and answers.

“It is as easy as updating the content in your FAQ pages and making sure that you’ve got important, pertinent buzzwords in there that attract the audience that’s looking for senior housing,” Boethel told me.

In addition, Watermark has shifted from handling all of its marketing in-house to outsourcing some of those services to third parties who can “keep up with the change that’s happening in AI a little bit faster and better.”

“We’re making sure we’re not getting left behind,” Boethel said. “This will dramatically change how this all looks probably five years from now.”

Watermark is specifically leaning on partners like A Place for Mom, which is devoting sizable amounts of resources and time to reshaping its online marketing practices for AI. The company is embracing AI tools for caregivers, social media, content with online influencers and other methods to help stand out among web searchers.

“To be a consumer company, you have to embody the customer,” APFM CEO Tatyana Zlotsky told me. “So, for us, it’s just following and leading the customer to where they are with regard to operators.”

I believe many senior living operator websites are already equipped to stand out in AI overviews and with LLM answers, and that winning over prospects will continue to happen inside communities, especially during tours. Senior living prospects no doubt will weigh answers from LLMs and AI overviews in their search. But at the end of the day, they will still need to visit communities to make a choice.

So, while AI tools are changing how senior living marketing happens online, the real work of giving families empathic advice and expertise is unchanged.

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