Direction.com tracked 102,392 non-paid leads across 20 healthcare practices, comparing the second half of 2025 against the first half of 2026.
The practices spanned dental, therapy, telehealth, primary care, preventive care, and concierge medicine. Every lead was a real conversion on the practice’s own website: a form fill, a phone call, or a booking request.
The full study is worth reading. Here’s the short version, and then what it means for health coaches specifically.
What the data found:
Organic search is still the biggest channel, but its share is falling. It dropped from 40.8% to 35.8% of the lead mix. The total number of leads from organic still grew. The share fell because everything around it grew faster. AI Overviews now appear on a large proportion of health-related searches and absorb informational traffic before it reaches a website.
Direct traffic grew 23.5%, the biggest jump in the study. On the surface, Direct means typed addresses and bookmarks. In practice, a large share of it is AI traffic that tracking tools mislabel. One 2026 attribution study found 70.6% of AI-referred visits arrive in GA4 labeled as Direct. Someone reads a practice name in a ChatGPT answer, then types it directly into their browser.
The study author calls this branded demand. A patient can only type your name if they already know it. The 23.5% jump in Direct says more people knew these practices by name in 2026 than in 2025. The practices with the strongest growth in Direct were also the ones present across the most channels.
AI Assistants grew 55%, from a tiny base. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot collectively account for 1.9% of leads. That sounds small. The context makes it less dismissible: OpenAI reported that 230 million people ask health questions on ChatGPT every week. KFF polling found 29% of US adults now use AI tools for health information monthly, up from 17% in June 2024.
The gap between usage and lead conversion suggests most AI health interactions are still informational, not transactional.
That’s the current state, not the destination.
Referral directories lost 14.4%, the steepest drop in the study. ZocDoc, Psychology Today, Healthgrades, WebMD – all declining. The mechanism is straightforward: these directories ranked well on Google, intercepted health searches, and sent traffic to practices. Now Google’s own AI answers and local results come first. The directory never gets the click. Healthline lost around 30% of its organic visibility in Google’s December 2025 Core Update. The platforms are under real structural pressure: being a middleman is not a good model.
Multi-channel presence produced significantly better results across all channels. The practices active across SEO, paid search, paid social, directories, and offline advertising showed double or more the growth in organic and AI search compared to practices running SEO alone. The study flags this as correlation, not causation, across 20 practices. The pattern is consistent enough to be worth noting: visibility in one place appeared to compound into visibility in others.
What this means for health coaches
The study covers medical practices, not coaching businesses. The products are different, the decision cycle is different, and the ticket price varies a lot. But the mechanisms are the same, and the signal is useful.
The Direct traffic finding matters more than the AI figure. If 70% of AI-referred visits land as Direct, the 1.9% AI share in the study is probably closer to 6 or 7% of actual AI-influenced leads. A health coach whose name appears in a ChatGPT answer about their niche will see that conversion register as a branded search or a direct visit, not as an AI referral. Your analytics are almost certainly underreporting how much AI is already driving interest in your practice.
Branded demand is the actual goal. The practices that grew fastest were the ones people already knew by name. That’s what getting cited in AI answers builds. Someone asks ChatGPT about sleep coaching, reads your name in the answer, and comes back to you later via a direct visit or a branded search. You don’t see it as AI traffic. You see it as a person who already knows who you are and wants to book.
Directories are in decline, but not useless yet. A listing on a relevant health coaching directory still has value for AI visibility specifically: directories are third-party platforms that AI tools index and cite, and a listing there contributes to your entity footprint.
The multi-channel finding supports what the AI visibility research already shows. As covered in our post on AI visibility fluctuations, distributing your presence across more surfaces makes it more durable. The Direction study found the same thing from a lead generation angle: practices that showed up in more places grew faster in every individual channel, including organic and AI search.
Organic search is not dead. It lost share because other channels grew. The practices in the study got more organic leads in 2026 than in 2025. For coaches, this means the case for content and SEO work has not disappeared. Content that targets specific, commercial, and local-intent queries still converts. That’s where writing in your clients’ actual language matters most.
The study’s conclusion fits coaching as well as it fits medical practices: build the signals that every channel has rewarded across every era of search. Trust, recognisability, and a presence in the right places. The channel mix will keep shifting. Those fundamentals won’t.
If you want to understand where your coaching practice sits across these channels right now, get in touch.
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