How Do AI Engines Decide Which Senior Living Community to Recommend

It’s a Monday afternoon and while I’m sitting down to eat my lunch at work, I’ve got a couple of personal tasks to research: schedule a rug cleaning appointment and research assisted living options for my elderly grandparents. I was tasked with this assisted living research since my family knows that I work in the senior living industry. But even working in this industry, I still have to put in some research. So I open Google on my phone and, just like anyone else, type in “Assisted living near [city my grandparents live].” And lucky for me, the AI summary displays a few succinct options.

But what crosses my mind next may be different from a usual searcher: how do AI engines decide what to recommend and what not to recommend? If you’re the marketing director or administrator of an assisted living facility or another senior care business (or any business for that matter), you should be thinking through the same thing, and you probably already have!

In the old days of search—and by “old days” I mean really only a few short months ago, but things change fast in the world of AI—you’d type in the question “assisted living near me” and get a list of Google results links. Today, while the links are still there, the increasingly popular option is simply referring to the conversational response from the AI summary. Digital marketers and even many administrators and business owners generally understood that there were things you could do in your digital efforts to rank higher in that link-list-of-old. Now with the changing landscape, it’s gotten more confusing, and even the most experienced business people feel lost.

In the senior living world, which is a high-trust, high-emotion decision making process, being able to show up confidently in the search results, whether a list of links or an AI response, is critical. So how do AI engines decide their responses and how can you reverse engineer this to make sure your business shows up when and how you want it to?

5 Things AI Engines Are Looking for Behind the Scenes

AI is crawling the web to find fresh, corroboratable, consistent information about your business from you as well as other highly trusted websites (Yelp, Google business profile, government agencies). The algorithms are dialed in to look for information that is easy for the code to read and gives strong experience, expertise, authority, and trust signals. I’ll go into more details on each of these below and link to some of InyoCare’s other articles that touch on these topics even more.

1. AI platforms value corroboration over creativity. Having the most persuasive copy and using the right keywords isn’t the winning formula for digital visibility anymore. AI wants to see that the same piece of information about your business is found in multiple places across the web. Just because you say you’re the best on your website, do your residents or patients say the same thing in your Google reviews? AI engines are combing through high trust sources to learn the most common, corroborated information about your business as it formulates its response.
2. Above I mentioned that AI platforms are looking for repeatability and corroborability across the web when looking for information about you. But it’s not only looking for trusted repetition, it’s looking to form a “consensus of truth” which is the most true narrative it can formulate based on the amount of trusted information across the web. If something like your name or address vary across different platforms, for example, your name is “Meadow & Main Assisted Living” but your Yelp account says “Meadow and Main Assisted Living,” it can confuse the AI crawlers and make your community less visible and therefore show up less. For more information on the NAP rule (Name, Address, Phone), see this article.
3. Freshness signals are important to AI. In the “eyes” of AI, real businesses keep their sites up to date, they make additions to their Yelp and Google pages, they are included in local lists of great facilities, and so on. So unfortunately, the big website update you did back in 2018 is not going to be enough to signal to the AI crawlers that you are open for business and keeping up with your online presence.
4. As much as AI is doing a great job of seeming like real intelligence in its confident answers, it’s still artificial intelligence that requires code to learn. So what does this mean for us? Structuring your content in a way that aligns with the code AI crawlers use to find and summarize information across the web makes you more findable and more likely to be cited. This comes in the form of “schema markup” which is the backend way your site is structured that is most readable by AI, AI-friendly snippets and headers in your website content, and FAQ pages (an AI favorite) that are super easy to turn directly into citable responses.
5. E-E-A-T signals, otherwise known as expertise, experience, authority, and trust signals, are super important for AI credibility. If your business and website are all about rehabilitation and recovery and you decide you want to start offering snow cones and want to show up in AI responses for best snow cones in the area, good luck. Your authority signals are likely pretty strong around the topic of rehabilitation, especially if you regularly share updated blog content, have a robust website with great resources and links to other great resources, and your online reviews also mention how great you are at providing rehabilitation services. But your trust signals are zero when it comes to snow cones. This is a silly example of course, but use this mindset as you approach your content and online presence, especially if you have specific, relevant services and expertise you provide and wanted to be cited for.
6. Additionally, having photos of real people, having verifiable credentials, licensed staff bios, quotes from the experts at your facility—all of these things can also positively impact your E-E-A-T signals.

Some Specific Signals That Tip the Scale for Senior Living

While your name or signage or community reputation may make it obvious to you that you’re an independent living community rather than an assisted living facility, this may not be as clear to the AI crawlers. Be clear and specific and make sure your expertise signals you’re giving on your website align with the specific services you offer.

1. Your reviews matter. A lot. You must keep tabs on the sentiment, volume, and recency of the feedback you receive because AI is keeping track of this and it impacts how it speaks about you in its responses. Maybe you think that just because you haven’t claimed your Yelp account so real people should be smart enough to tell that it’s not necessarily a reliable place for feedback—think again. Whether or not you’ve claimed the profile, AI sees Yelp as a super reliable source of community opinion. You should highly consider getting on Yelp, claiming your account, keeping it up to date, and responding to your reviewers whether they have something good to say about you or not.
2. Make sure your licensing and accreditation information on your website is readable by the AI crawlers. If it’s just a badge image, this can sometimes be overlooked by AI. Which is a huge bummer considering your accreditation can be a massive authority signal. Remember, websites now have to be tailored to AI-readability and human-readability.
3. Including local information like proximity language, the name of the city and neighborhood you’re located in or serve can have a huge impact on your visibility in “near me” searches. If you are part of a larger group of communities that largely share a website template provided to you at a corporate level, this kind of community-specific information may be lacking and could really hurt your visibility.
4. If people are asking a question about cost, AI is going to do its best to give a reasonable answer. Sometimes this answer is not going to be accurate if you’re not providing this answer clearly on your website. Historically, this may have been intentional. It’s a lot easier to talk about some topics, like price, on the phone, but that’s a luxury that’s disappearing. Gain control of your information by sharing it explicitly on your website. If someone searches “How much does memory care cost at [XYZ] facility?” make sure you don’t inadvertently lose customers by choosing not to share this information and having AI provide a wrong answer or point your prospect to a competitor instead.

Summarize this for me like I’m 5: How do AI engines decide to cite me in a response?

In short, AI algorithms have a checklist to determine if the answer it’s compiling is accurate and helpful and whether or not your business is citable. This is over-simplified but it’s a helpful way to begin thinking about the digital signals you give off. Below is a checklist that you can use to start to evaluate your citability.

1. Are you a digitally trustworthy source? Does your business seem like an expert in this field from your online presence?
2. Does your business have fresh content on your website and new reviews on other platforms showing that it’s actively in business and providing great service?
3. Is your website readable by AI?
4. Is your website content formatted in AI-friendly ways?
5. Do multiple sources across the internet say the same things about you? Whether that’s about your reputation or simple details like your phone number or address.
6. Is your website clear about exactly what services it provides, the community it serves, and its accreditations?

Here’s an A vs. B example:

Community A and Community B are both awesome Independent Living communities. Both communities have similar ratings and rankings in their city so we’re comparing apples to apples in terms of quality. So how do AI engines decide which of these two amazing communities to cite when generating a response?

Community A has a strong marketing team that works to get it included in local community newsletters, ranking lists on other reputable websites, and local positive news stories. They regularly publish relevant SEO- and GEO-tailored articles/blogs on their website. The marketing team also responds to reviews on Google and Yelp from claimed profile accounts. They’ve also claimed their Apple Business, Bing Places, and Facebook pages to make sure their name, address, and phone number are consistent across all of the “big 5” platforms. Community A has decided to share a strong FAQ style page on their website, which is dialed in with the proper schema markup to be readable by AI. This FAQ page addresses cost questions as well as others in a format that is favored by AI crawlers. Community A’s website also includes accreditation information in text form and badge form.

Community B, while still an amazing independent living community, has taken a hands-off approach digitally. They want to “let their reputation speak for itself” but unfortunately, that’s not how works anymore. Their amazing staff is putting in hard work but they have vacancies they can’t manage to fill. They have claimed their Yelp page, but they don’t respond to reviews because they can’t remember the login information. And they didn’t even know they could claim their Google, Apple, or Bing pages. An intern a few years ago started a Facebook page for them, but again, no one knows the password anymore. They occasionally update the photos on their website and always make sure their accreditation badge is visible on the homepage.

So we’ve got two amazing communities here that are functionally equals, but digitally one stands out far above the other.

Community A is far more likely to be cited by AI because they have chosen to prioritize their online presence and strategy.

What This Means for Your Marketing Strategy

InyoCare has been in this industry for over 20 years and we get how it works. Most boots-on-the-ground folks do not have time to be worrying about this stuff. It’s not sustainable to always be thinking about the question how do AI engines decide who to cite in their response. But unfortunately we’re entering a period of time where having precise control of your information, or worse, not having precise control of your information, can have a huge impact on your business.

If you’re overwhelmed reading this article or have found yourself frustrated by what the AI summaries are saying about your business, InyoCare can help. It’s our job to always be thinking about and helping our clients answer the question how do AI engines decide who to cite in their response. We offer a profile management service where we can audit the consistency of your presence across the main online profiles and make updates for you. We can help write and publish fresh content about your specific offerings through our SEO- and GEO-tailored blogs. And we can also help with Reputation Management as reviews become super important AI-readable trust sources.

So when you’ve got a prospect like me looking for an assisted living center for her grandparents in an AI summary on her lunch break, let’s make sure that your business shows up in the AI summary. Your business deserves to be highlighted for the great services it provides and these tips in this article are a great place to start as you audit your online presence and start taking steps to become more visible in AI search.