HCIC 2026: Don't Let Declining Traffic Determine Your Website Budget

At the closing keynote on day two of HCIC 2026, healthcare marketing leaders talked about what was keeping them up at night: AI is changing how patients discover healthcare. We have less control over the information they encounter and our websites play a different part in their journey.

I'm seeing this concern play out with our own health system clients. Marketing leaders are facing pressure from CEOs and CFOs to justify their website budgets. Traffic is declining, budgets are tight and AI is raising expectations about efficiency. Leadership is asking a direct question: If fewer people are visiting our website, why should we keep investing as much in it?

It's a fair question. And difficult to answer when traffic and pageviews are the main evidence you're bringing to the conversation.

Fewer visits don't establish that your website is creating less value. To defend that investment, you need to show leadership what the website helps patients and your organization accomplish.

We have more control over AI discoverability than we might think

AI can answer a patient's question without sending them to your website. You can't control every source it uses, but you can improve the information your organization publishes.

Hackensack Meridian Health offered a concrete example. Before adding schema markup, the team improved more than 700 location pages and 500 service pages. It then used structured data to describe relationships between physicians, services and locations. It built the markup into templates so that it changes when the underlying content changes.

Keep in mind that schema can't fix unclear content. If your website says different things in different places, you're still giving AI conflicting information to work with.

Henry Ford Health described answering the patient’s question first, adding context and connecting the answer to a useful next step. Similarly, Cincinnati Children’s is developing a workflow that uses clinical experts’ questionnaire responses to draft pages with AI, followed by strategist review.

That ongoing work has value beyond human website visits.

The visits we do get need to accomplish something

Kettering Health's September 2024 analysis found around 5,000 daily on-site searches, roughly 80% of which suggested an intent to access care. People were asking practical questions about physicians accepting new patients, appointment availability and emergency room wait times.

What I found especially interesting was what happened when the team tried to improve on-site search. The technology exposed weaknesses in their content. Surfacing useful results also depended on integrations that required IT involvement and executive support. Getting those integrations took a year. That’s a substantial commitment behind what might look like a search-box upgrade.

Virtua Health's Q2 2026 visitor research offered another reality check: 41% of potential patients reported difficulty completing a task on their website.

Removing the roadblock requires understanding the obstacle. Filling in missing physician information is very different from streamlining the scheduling journey.

Give leadership a better way to measure website value

Your next performance report should connect the work you're funding with the results it is supposed to produce.

For AI discovery, Henry Ford Health measures visibility through mentions, authority through citations and references, and action through traffic and engagement from AI sources. We also want to confirm whether those answers accurately describe the care your organization offers.

Hackensack Meridian Health's data showed why volume needs context. AI referrals represented a small fraction of sessions, but nearly 50% more event completions than regular traffic. Reporting on sitewide visit volume doesn’t capture that intent.

For patient access, report completion of priority tasks and where scheduling breaks down. Keep appointment requests, confirmed bookings and completed visits separate. Look at totals alongside conversion rates. Where the data supports it (and with IT’s help), connect those outcomes to patient acquisition and revenue.

El Camino Health showed what following that path can involve. After an online lung cancer risk assessment, a navigation team answered questions and coordinated appropriate next steps. The program tracked progress beyond leads, including completed screenings. Understanding that result meant looking at the work after the form was submitted.

Not every organization can connect website activity to completed care today. So start with one priority journey and agree with the relevant teams on what success means and who holds the data. Be clear about what you can confirm and what you still need to investigate.

Then make the investment request specific. If patients can't find accurate provider information, explain the content and data work required. If they abandon scheduling, establish whether the problem is usability, integration or actual appointment availability before proposing a fix.

Now leadership can evaluate the proposed investment against a specific problem and an expected result.

Change the conversation before your budget gets cut

What encouraged me at HCIC was how much more practical the AI conversation had become. Across different sessions, I heard organizations arriving at similar conclusions about impacts and the work ahead. We have a clearer place to start than we did two years ago.

We need to bring that same clarity into our conversations with the C-Suite. 

Choose one website initiative you're asking leadership to fund and show what patients or your team can’t do without it. Put the evidence beside the traffic numbers, including what you don't yet know.

Don't wait for a proposed cut to explain what would be lost. Make your work visible while you can still shape the decisions.
 

Insights that informed this article

Thank you to the healthcare leaders and practitioners whose presentations helped shape these conclusions: John Davey, Julie Spencer Washington, Kathy Smith, Val Lopez and Stewart Gandolf; Martha van Berkel and Glenn Elliott; Dave Bartkowiak and Katie Brown; Emily Weathers and Diane Hammons; Maryn Klosterman and Brandon Scott; Ryan Younger and Rob Klein; and Shauna Bushman, Jessica Barton, Tracy Cobb and Jessica Walker.