AI Discovery in Pharma: Evolution of AI Medical Search

by impaca.ai team

Pharmaceutical companies have long invested in search visibility, ensuring patients, healthcare professionals, and researchers find accurate and approved information. But in 2025, a new challenge has emerged: AI powered conversational search.

Instead of scrolling through results, doctors, patients, and caregivers are increasingly asking AI assistants for answers. The consequence? If your therapy or brand isn’t included in those responses, you’re effectively invisible.

A New Risk for Regulated Industries

In pharma, visibility isn’t just about brand awareness—it’s about accuracy, compliance, and trust.

Misinformation risk: AI assistants sometimes “hallucinate,” citing therapies incorrectly or recommending competitors.
Exclusion risk: If your therapy isn’t cited at all, patient and physician decision-making may skew elsewhere.
Compliance challenge: Unlike SEO, GEO requires navigating a heavily regulated environment while ensuring discoverability.

For an industry where lives are at stake, monitoring AI-driven answers is no longer optional.

The Rise of Pharma & Life Sciences Dedicated AI Search Engines

Beyond general-purpose platforms like ChatGPT or Gemini, new AI search engines tailored to healthcare and life sciences are emerging. Tools like OpenEvidence provide physicians with instant, cited medical answers, and are already used by nearly half of U.S. doctors on a daily basis. Other specialized assistants are being developed to scan biomedical literature, trial data, and treatment guidelines. For pharma marketers, this means visibility isn’t only about mainstream AI platforms—it’s also about ensuring inclusion and accuracy within these domain-specific engines that shape how healthcare professionals practice and how patients understand their care.

How Buyers Are Changing Behavior

Pharma marketing teams know the funnel is changing. Doctors, researchers, and patients are shifting from “search and compare” to “ask and decide.”

Patients are asking AI tools for symptom explanations and treatment options.
HCPs (Healthcare Professionals) are querying AI platforms for drug efficacy data, trial results, and dosage guidance.
Researchers rely on AI copilots to scan literature and generate summaries faster than ever.

This means the moment of influence has moved upstream—and it happens before anyone clicks a website.

The Discovery Deficit in Pharma

Search traffic for healthcare content has already seen double-digit declines in referral clicks. Meanwhile, zero-click searches now dominate across industries. In pharma, this creates a paradox:

Traditional SEO may still grow traffic volumes.
But AI-powered answers siphon visibility away from regulated brand sites.
The result: pharma companies lose share-of-voice at the most critical stage of decision-making.

Being omitted from an AI answer can mean being omitted from the care pathway.

Why Pharma Needs GEO

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the new mandate for pharma marketing and compliance leaders. The goal isn’t just to rank—it’s to be cited accurately in AI-generated answers.

That requires:

Monitoring inclusion across ChatGPT, OpenEvidence, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and others.
Benchmarking against competitors—who’s being cited, and why.
Auditing for compliance—flagging incorrect or misleading AI recommendations.
Adapting strategies—creating factual, citable, and trustworthy content AI models can embed.

From Risk to Opportunity

While the risks are real, so is the opportunity. Pharma companies that move early can:

Protect trust by ensuring accurate information circulates in AI-driven discovery.
Win visibility in high-intent queries where patients and doctors seek guidance.
Shape the narrative in an emerging channel that will define the next decade of healthcare marketing.

The Bottom Line

For pharma, AI visibility is no longer optional—it’s mission-critical.
If your therapies aren’t showing up in AI-driven answers, then to patients and HCPs, they don’t exist.

Welcome to the era of AI-powered discovery.
The question isn’t whether you’ll adapt, but how quickly.