Lodestar Research · 2026
The State of AI Visibility in Healthtech Software
Your buyers stopped scrolling ten blue links. When they need software, they ask ChatGPT or Perplexity — and get a shortlist of five or six names. I wanted to know who makes that list, and who doesn't. So I scanned six healthtech software categories. The pattern is stark.
Across 6 categories, the same 5–6 tools get recommended by AI again and again — while the majority of real vendors never appear at all.
Method. I ran the real buyer queries for each category ("best [category] for [buyer]", "top [category] 2026", "[leader] alternatives") and recorded which vendors surface in the answers and which sources those answers are built from. Categories: patient intake, telehealth, mental-health EHR, physical therapy, acupuncture & integrative EMR, and medical billing.
Finding 1 — It's winner-take-few, in every category
Visibility isn't a spectrum. In each category the same small set of tools appears over and over; everyone else is simply absent. SimplePractice showed up in four of the six categories — cross-category presence compounds into a default recommendation.
| Category | Tools that get surfaced |
|---|---|
| Patient intake | OhMD, Klara, NexHealth, Luma Health, DoctorConnect, SimplePractice |
| Telehealth | Doxy.me, SimplePractice, VSee |
| Mental-health EHR | SimplePractice, TherapyNotes, Practice Better, Tebra, CharmHealth, Upheal |
| Physical therapy | Jane, WebPT, Prompt, SimplePractice, Noterro |
| Acupuncture / integrative | OptiMantra, ClinicSense, Practice Better, Power2Practice, Pabau |
| Medical billing | CareCloud, Tebra, Athenahealth, DrChrono, CureMD, Kareo |
Finding 2 — The answers are built from a small set of sources
Which tools get named comes down to which pages the engines cite — and that set is smaller and more gameable than most founders assume. Ranked by how often they surfaced:
- Vendor-published "best of" roundups — the single biggest source (see Finding 3)
- Niche software aggregators — SoftwareFinder, EMRFinder, EMRSystems, Gitnux, ZipDo, WiFiTalents
- Review platforms — G2, Gartner Peer Insights, Capterra
G2 and Capterra matter, but the long tail of aggregators and vendor blogs carries surprising weight — and it's far easier to get placed on than the big review sites.
Finding 3 — Vendors who publish their own roundups get cited
The strongest, most repeatable pattern in the whole scan: companies that publish their own "best [category]" comparison content get cited in their own category.
- OptiMantra publishes "Top EMRs for Functional Medicine" — and ranks in it.
- Noterro publishes "Best Physical Therapy Software."
- Behave Health, Curogram, CareNiva, OhMD, Pabau, CureMD — all publish their own category roundups, and all surface in answers.
They aren't waiting to be listed. They're manufacturing the citations themselves. Most companies don't — and stay invisible.
What this means if you sell healthtech software
If your buyers ask AI which tool to choose and you're not one of the names, you're losing pipeline you can't even see — it never touches your analytics. The good news: visibility here isn't bought with ad budget. It's earned by controlling the sources AI cites — structured content, the right placements, and your own comparison pages. That's a game a focused company can win, even against bigger incumbents, because most of them aren't playing it yet.
Where does your product stand?
I run a free AI-visibility audit for healthtech companies — the exact queries your buyers ask, scored across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI, with the sources you'd need to get into.
Get your free audit →