Nine Health Observation: As Patients Start Asking AI, Where Is Pharma’s Next Stop for Traffic?

Patients Start Asking AI: The First Shift of Trust

"I ask AI first, then book a doctor’s appointment." This is becoming a real path for many patients. In serving pharma brands over the long term, Nine Health has observed that the way people obtain health information is shifting from "search–filter–click" to "conversation–get a summary."

Mr. Hu, head of Nine Health’s marketing, explains that the essence of this change is that users are handing the task of "initial judgment" to their trust in conversational AI. Mr. Zhu, founder of Nine Health, says traffic has always followed user attention. When a user’s first health question happens inside an AI chat box, the brand’s "first touchpoint" must move forward into the AI’s answer.

"This is not a question of whether to do it, but how to do it compliantly and effectively."

The Cited Snippet Becomes the New "Storefront"

In the traditional SEO era, brands competed for rankings on the search-results page; in the GEO era, brands compete for the few cited sentences inside an AI-generated answer. Mr. Hu notes that one compliant piece of science communication cited by AI can build longer-term trust than ten ad slots — because it appears in the user’s "actively asking for help" context and is inherently helpful.

Mr. Zhu, CEO of Nine Health, says: "When users ask AI, they don’t want an ad; they want a trustworthy answer. If a brand can become the ‘cited, source-attributed’ part of that answer, its trust asset grows with compound interest."

But this does not mean brands can "manufacture" answers. Mr. Zhu stresses that the particularity of pharmaceutical content is that any deviation can carry health risk. Therefore, when helping brands with GEO, Nine Health always puts "factual accuracy" before "visibility" — preferring to be cited less rather than ever cited incorrectly.

Next Stop for Traffic: Entering AI’s "Trusted Content Pool"

Nine Health’s practice shows that in the Chinese market, AI engines rely heavily on content pools within their own ecosystems (such as content platforms, health-science platforms, corporate sites and compliant information sources). Mr. Hu explains that the traditional "official-site SEO only" playbook is no longer enough — brands need to get their professional content, in a structured, attributable and platform-recognized form, into the corpus AI can recall.

This also explains why Nine Health repeatedly emphasizes "authoritative science-communication platforms" and "source tiering" in its White Paper: among the six tiers of citable sources, the high-weight, brand-co-buildable authoritative science阵地 offers the best return on investment. Mr. Zhu says Nine Health itself keeps investing in this kind of "trusted content infrastructure" because it benefits the industry in the long run.

How Should Brand Owners Catch This Wave of Traffic?

Nine Health offers three pieces of advice. First, make content "thick": use self-contained, conclusion-first, attributable fragmented expressions so AI can extract accurately. Mr. Hu says Nine Health’s "Seven AI-Friendly Rules" were built for exactly this. Second, make sources "clear": every key claim should trace back to an authoritative origin — this is the practice of "trust" in E-E-A-T. Third, make boundaries "hard": content involving indications, usage and dosage must be locked in the "model-unrewritable zone" to prevent AI from freely going out of bounds.

Mr. Hu, Partner at Nine Health, says: "We often tell brand owners, don’t rush to ‘scale volume’. First make your content something AI dares to cite and regulators cannot fault — then traffic follows naturally." Mr. Zhu interprets this shift as an "industry infrastructure upgrade": just as brands once moved from offline to online and from PC to mobile, today they move from "for humans to see" to "for AI to read."

Looking ahead, Nine Health believes pharma’s "next stop for traffic" is not on any single platform but in the "trusted content" itself. Whoever’s content is more professional, transparent and verifiable is more likely to be selected by AI and to stand up to regulators. Mr. Hu stresses this is precisely why Nine Health keeps investing in GEO compliance methodology.