Google and SearchGPT veracity study, health sector, 2025

/ Where the study came from

Since I started out in SEO, back in 2002, I've watched how the drive by SEOs and companies to rank a website in search engines has pushed the quality and veracity of its content into the background.

Techniques that are now obsolete, like keyword stuffing or spinning text generated from other content, meant users kept running into endless SEO content with no real value every time they searched for something.

I've always fought against the "anything goes" mindset for ranking or getting clicks. That's the stance I laid out in my books "Quiero que mi empresa salga en Google" (don't buy it, it's quite old by now) from 2009, and "Posicionamiento y reputación en Google a través de link building ético" from 2022.

In both, I make my position clear:

• Not anything goes in on-page SEO to achieve rankings
• Not anything goes in content creation to get traffic
• Not anything goes in link building to gain authority

Today, in an era where AI is thoroughly embedded in everything and generating automated content is faster and easier than ever, I believe that regardless of whether we're journalists, SEOs, copywriters or content managers for a website, it's a good time to shift our mindset — and however much or little we lean on AI, we should focus on delivering real value to users through our content.

But beyond whatever SEO implications this all carries (let's not forget E-E-A-T isn't a ranking factor as such), our responsibility as professionals should be to foster an environment where content is truthful, reinforces the credibility of brands and the people behind them, and builds a more trustworthy, honest and beneficial internet for everyone.

/ Goal of the study

With all this in mind, to better understand the current landscape, at Link Affinity we ran a comparative study, analysing 100 queries on Google and another 100 on SearchGPT. For Google, we analysed the top 10 results for each search along with the "People also ask" block it returns by default. On SearchGPT, we evaluated the citations and sources the tool itself indicated it had used.

In total, we analysed more than 2,000 URLs.

The main goal of this study is to objectively assess to what extent both Google and SearchGPT take into account the presence of specialists behind the information they surface. We start from the premise that working with specialists benefits the credibility of our content — and that should be our mission — but we wanted to find out whether that effort is also reflected in greater visibility within today's search results.

/ Some data and conclusions

Some of the results from the study really caught my attention.

For example:

• More than 70% of general media content in Google's top 10 for health-related searches is NOT backed by specialists
• Among corporate media outlets in Google's top 10, backing from nutrition specialists is minimal, at just 19.26%, with 74.8% of authors unidentified

For the study, we worked with a number of great SEO professionals to get their take on the data and on E-E-A-T. We were joined by the fantastic Aleyda Solís of Orainti, who shared her thoughts on how showing expertise matters more and more, whether to gain visibility on Google or on ChatGPT.

Juan González Villa of USEO, who left us a conclusion on the diversity of sources across both Google and SearchGPT

And other great professionals in the industry, such as: Cesar Aparicio of Craneo Previlegiado, Luis M. Villanueva of Webpositer, and Clara Soteras of AMIC.

I invite you to download the full study, completely free, to see all the data and conclusions.