Google answers the question for you now.
You type something into the search bar and before you see a single website, there's a paragraph at the top that already did the reading. Pew Research looked at what that does to clicks. When one of those AI summaries shows up, people click through to a website about 8% of the time. When it doesn't, 15%. Chartbeat found Google traffic to publishers dropped by roughly a third in one year, and smaller sites lost 60% of their search traffic over two.
Smaller sites. That's your clinic blog.
So I understand why so many people in our world have landed on some version of "I'm not going to use it." Writers and journalists are calling AI training the biggest theft of creative work in history, and there are more than a hundred lawsuits making roughly that argument. Some of that anger is earned, and I'm not here to argue anyone out of it.
I just don't think refusing gets us anywhere. The search bar doesn't care how we feel about it.
Does Opting Out of AI Protect Your Practice?
I wish it did. It would be so much simpler.
Choosing not to use it doesn't bring the old Google back. Your patients are still typing their symptoms into a chatbot before they ever look for a practitioner, and the summary at the top of the page still shows up whether you've made peace with it or not. Opting out mostly means that conversation happens without you in it.
It reminds me of a patient who doesn't want the bloodwork because they're scared of the number. I get it. But not ordering the ferritin doesn't bring the iron up out of the basement.
AI is here, and I think the smarter bet is that it isn't going anywhere. So the question I keep coming back to is how we get curious about it and move with it.
Assume Everything You Make Will End Up in AI
A while back I watched an agency on Instagram going back and forth with a client. The agency had built a set of Canva designs, the client took them and had AI re-create the whole look, and the agency was furious.
I understand the frustration. I also think the assumption has to flip.
Assume anything you make is going to get thrown into AI at some point. The patient handout. The blog. The six-week program you spent a year building. Somebody will paste it into a chat window and ask for their own version. Then ask yourself: knowing that, how would I build this, and how would I price it?
For an ND, I think the answer points at the part that can't be pasted anywhere. Your read on the person in front of you. The follow-up. Deciding which three of the twelve things they read online actually apply to them. That's the part worth building your pricing around, because it's the part that doesn't copy.
And honestly, I'd go one step further. For a long time, huge parts of marketing were simply out of reach for small practices because of budget. A brand, a website, a content plan, someone to write the emails. That door is open now. I'd rather help clinicians walk through it than stand at the door guarding it.
The Bet I Think Salesforce Got Wrong
Here's a big-company version of the same instinct.
According to The Information, Salesforce plans to make companies register any outside AI agent (think Claude or ChatGPT) that touches their Salesforce data, as a step toward charging every time one of those agents reads or updates something. One consultant said most of the 150 enterprises he works with are using outside AI inside Salesforce for free right now, and they're rethinking it because of the fees coming.
I think Salesforce made the wrong assumption. They assumed everyone would use the AI that came with the software.
Every app has its own AI now. Your email, your scheduler, your charting software, probably your toaster by next spring. That isn't how I use it, and I don't think it's how most people will. I don't want twelve assistants who each know one slice of my business. I want my own, with my thinking already in it, and I want to bring it to wherever the work is.
That's the practical lesson for a practice. Keep the things that make your marketing yours (how you explain things, what you'd never say, what you've already posted) somewhere you own. Platforms change their rules. Prices go up. The stuff that's yours should travel with you.
What Isn't Going to Change?
Recently I heard a quote from Jeff Bezos that stuck with me.
He's said for years that people constantly ask him what's going to change in the next ten years, and almost nobody asks what's not going to change. To him, the second question is the more useful one, because you can build a business on it. For Amazon, it was simple. Customers will still want low prices. They'll still want fast delivery. They'll still want choice. Nobody is going to wake up in ten years wishing Amazon were a little more expensive.
So what isn't going to change for the person deciding whether to book with you?
I think they'll still want to feel heard by a real person. They'll still want someone to tell them they're not imagining it. And they'll still want someone with the discernment to sort what matters for them out of everything the internet handed them. On the marketing side, the same goes for taste and judgement. AI can write you a hundred posts. It can't tell you which one is worth posting. (I wrote more about that in We All Agree Judgement Is the Human Part.)
And the thing I keep landing on is relationships. Anyone, anywhere, can produce content with AI now. What they can't produce is the community you've built: the patients who refer their sisters, the practitioners you trade cases with, the people in your town who know your name. That lives in the real world, and nobody can generate it.
Your patients can get information anywhere. They can only get you in one place.
An AI of your own, with your thinking already in it, the kind you bring with you instead of renting from every app, is exactly what I've been building for NDs. If you want to hear first when it's ready, join the waitlist.
