Google is enriching its health search results with AI Overviews and launching a new, groundbreaking feature: “What People Suggest.” The goal? To better answer your complex medical questions while giving you access to the experiences of other patients who have similar health concerns.
Key points:
- Until now cautious about AI Health Overviews, Google is expanding the health questions that AI Overviews answers.
- The feature is available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and on mobile.
- Google launches “What People Suggest” to highlight advice from other sufferers.
- Google promises information that is always verified and relevant: be careful with this kind of promise…
Google Strengthens Its Health Responses with AI Overviews
At its annual Check Up event, Google announced new health features for its search engine. From now on, its famous AI Overviews will cover thousands of new medical topics, where previously only certain popular themes had been covered. Since health is a YMYL topic, it was previously subject to increased precautions.
This improvement is based on advances in the Gemini model, designed to better understand complex queries and synthesize relevant, verified and clinically accurate medical information.
This will allow users to ask longer, more nuanced questions, such as: “What treatments are available to relieve chronic pain related to endometriosis?”, and obtain a clear answer from reliable sources.
International and mobile expansion
These AI Health Overviews extend beyond the English-language realm. Google is gradually rolling out this feature in Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese, with priority given to mobile devices (and no, still not in French).
By making these summaries available in other languages, Google’s stated goal is to reduce inequalities in access to quality medical information worldwide. Let’s hope this doesn’t lead to misinformation and that the sources are properly verified by Google.
The new “What People Suggest” feature
A major new feature unveiled by Google is the “What People Suggest” feature . Using artificial intelligence, this feature analyzes online discussions on Reddit, Twitter, Quora, and other platforms to extract patient feedback on a specific topic.
For example: Do you suffer from arthritis and are looking for ways other sufferers cope with their workouts? Google will offer you tips and tricks shared by other people with the same condition, grouped by theme and accessible with just one click.
Currently available only on mobile in the United States, this feature highlights the patient experience. But here too, it’s difficult to verify the veracity of patient comments from forums and social media. Advice should be taken with caution and potentially verified with a doctor.
A challenge for the visibility of health sites
With this new feature, health-related websites will have to adapt their SEO strategies. Indeed, these AI Overviews and the highlighting of patient testimonials could change the way websites appear in search results, relegating them to the background.
But it also opens up new opportunities for visibility , notably by integrating the What People Suggest system by highlighting patient opinions or by becoming a source of AI Overviews.
A Global Health Strategy for Google
These developments are part of Google’s broader strategy around digital health:
- Medical records API to better manage your health data.
- Pulse detection on Pixel Watch 3 certified by the FDA.
- Co-scientific AI to accelerate biomedical research.
- TxGemma, open AI models for drug discovery.
- Capricorn, an AI tool dedicated to pediatric oncology.
