I am feeling energized after speaking at the Healthcare Internet Conference (HCIC) 2025 in Las Vegas. Why? Because HCIC has always been about connection. It’s where members of the healthcare marketing community gather to share insights, experiences, and learn from one another. I’ve had the opportunity to attend HCIC for the last three years, immersing myself in learning about the challenges marketers face in health systems and the people who help consumers discover and find care.
This year, I had the opportunity to contribute to the learning in two ways:
Once on stage with Sean Schumacher from Johns Hopkins Medicine on the topic of ensuring your Health System websites and content are visible across AI experiences and platforms. Watch the full recording.
And the second time on a panel with amazing women who are leading in Marketing Tech. While these two presentations were quite different, they share a common theme – building meaningful connections.
Let’s start with how you can build meaningful connections in your data so that your website is understood by AI.
How to Future-Proof Your Healthcare Website and Content with a Semantic Data Layer
Increasing Visibility Across AI Experiences and Platforms
The way we search for answers is changing. While Google continues to lead with over 90% of the global search market, AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini are quickly influencing how consumers discover and interact with content.
For those who continue to search on Google, answers in the form of AI overviews summarize content and provide answers without the need to click through to your website. In ChatGPT, the answer is provided in response to a prompt.
How do you show up in these answers, and ensure it’s correct?
The answer is Schema Markup. Schema Markup is data that you can add to your website, translating the content into a common vocabulary (Schema.org) that is understood by search engines, AI, and other machines. Microsoft and Google both reaffirmed in 2025 that Schema Markup, also known as structured data, is crucial for visibility within AI-enhanced search experiences, helping AI become more efficient (source).
For healthcare marketers, this evolution presents an urgent need to ensure that websites are easily understood. No longer is Schema Markup a nice-to-have; it is a must-have. Schema Markup enables marketers to articulate the meaning, connections, and context of their content, allowing AI to connect them with their target audience.
What do I mean by meaningful connections in the data?
Over the last decade, SEOs used Schema Markup to achieve rich results, such as physician review snippets, by optimizing a single page with Schema Markup. In the new world of AI, optimizing a page is no longer sufficient. We must also define the relationships between pages so that AI can make accurate inferences.
What do I mean by defining relationships between pages? Let me give you an example. If we were looking at a provider page, instead of only optimizing it for a physician, we would also want to explain that this physician works at a specific hospital, in a specific service line, and has a specific specialty. While all this information may be available on the provider page, there is likely a separate page on the website that provides a more detailed description of that concept or entity.
To understand why this matters, it helps to look at how digital marketing has changed. For years, digital marketers focused on keywords. A keyword is just a word. It is a one-dimensional concept. In the world of AI, a keyword is not enough. Machines need to understand the broader concept behind that word and all the properties that describe it. These richer concepts are known as entities.
Let me illustrate the difference between a keyword and an entity.
If I told you I have a favourite shoe, you might find that interesting, but you wouldn’t know much about it. If I told you that the shoe is hot pink, sparkly, strappy, and a high heel, you could suddenly picture it with far more clarity. Those extra details, or properties, turn a simple keyword into a well-defined entity.
Let’s bring this back to healthcare.
Entities are at the core of how AI understands the world. They represent clearly defined concepts such as pediatric neurology, knee replacement, or Dr. Eric Jackson, MD, and they include the relationships between them.
In the past, healthcare SEO focused on keywords. Today, AI models rely on entities and context to deliver relevant and trustworthy answers. By using Schema Markup on your website, you provide the clarity, context, and connections that AI needs to deliver more accurate and relevant answers.
This shift to semantic structured data enables a more accurate digital representation of your organization’s offerings and expertise. It’s how you ensure your content is both human-friendly and machine-readable.
The Value of Schema Markup in an AI World
Multiple studies presented in our HCIC session reinforced the measurable value of structured data:
- Citation rates in Google’s AI Mode increased by 78–94% for sites with rich, connected Schema Markup.
- Authoritative, well-structured content is three times more likely to be cited by AI than narrowly focused pages.
These metrics tell a clear story: Schema Markup is no longer just about rich results. It’s the foundation of Entity SEO, powering brand visibility and authority across AI-driven search environments.
Building Toward the Agentic Web
The future is already unfolding. OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google are pioneering the Agentic Web—a new phase of the internet where intelligent agents will act on behalf of users.
In the paper “The Semantic Web” in Scientific American from 2001, the authors described a world where an AI assistant supported two siblings in scheduling a doctor’s appointment, taking into account their busy work schedules, ensuring it was within their health system and covered by their insurance, all within a single interaction.
Industry leaders at Microsoft, including RV Guha, the creator of Schema.org, have introduced NLWeb, a standard that allows AI agents to interact directly with the Schema Markup on a website. At Schema App, we’re already testing this on our own site to understand how it can prepare our customers for this next era of Search.
What’s exciting is that the work we are doing today to optimize websites with schema markup, is already preparing Health Systems for the future.
Measuring SEO Success in the AI Era
With a new search era, however, comes new measures of success. Traditional KPIs like impressions, clicks, and conversions still matter, but healthcare marketers should also monitor:
- AI Overview citations and visibility
- Referral traffic from AI assistants
- Engagement from AI-driven content discovery
- Entity coverage and topic authority
These metrics help you understand not only how people find you, but how machines interpret and surface your brand’s expertise.
The Connection Between Human Collaboration and Structured Data
HCIC 2025 served as a reminder that healthcare marketing is ultimately about human connection. The Women in Marketing Technology Panel was a great example of this, featuring me alongside:
- Pamela Landis, SVP, Digital Engagement, Hackensack Meridian Health System)
- Mona Baset, Vice President, Digital Services, Intermountain Health
- Cathy Connolley, President, Doctivity Health
- Jean Hitchcock, Senior Healthcare Advisor, Hitchcock Marketing & Communications
I was honoured to have been asked to share my insights from working in tech over the last 25 years.
This panel shared authentic stories and valuable lessons from navigating careers in tech. I loved how Mona talked about her passion for learning and how she gravitates toward industries where there is a lot of change or where things are “happening.” Good news! Things are happening in digital marketing like never before, thanks to AI. I also appreciated Pam’s point about connecting with others who make things happen in organizations. I call this ‘gumption.’
When I was young, I wanted to be a doctor so I could help others. Through our work at Schema App and our focus on building semantic data layers, I now have the opportunity to help connect consumers with health networks that can provide them with care. In some ways, I get to fulfill that early dream by helping people find answers, one search at a time.
When your content is structured with clarity and context through schema markup, you help AI systems understand your story, improve your brand visibility, and make it easier for patients to find the information they need with confidence.
Helping Your Organization Build Meaningful Connections
At Schema App, we believe meaningful connections start with meaningful structured data. By building your semantic data layer today, you are not only future-proofing your website; you are shaping how your organization will be found, understood, and trusted tomorrow.
If you’re ready to explore how Schema Markup can strengthen your healthcare brand’s visibility and authority in the AI era, connect with us or download our free eBook, Definitive Guide to Healthcare Structured Data in SEO.
Watch our full HCIC session on How to Future-Proof Your Healthcare Website and Content with a Semantic Data Layer.
Martha van Berkel is the co-founder and CEO of Schema App, an end-to-end Semantic Schema Markup solution provider based in Ontario, Canada. She focuses on helping SEO teams globally understand the value of Schema Markup and how they can leverage it to drive search performance and develop a reusable content knowledge graph that drives innovation.
Prior to Schema App, Martha was a Senior Manager at Cisco Systems for 14 years, responsible for the global online support strategy. She has a degree in Applied Mathematics and Engineering, attended MIT for Innovation and Strategy, is a Mom of two, as well as an avid rower.