What AI Says About Your Clinic When Vets and Nurses Search for You - 270

Veterinary Voices — Episode 270

What AI is Saying About Your Clinic When Vets and Nurses Search for You

Welcome to Veterinary Voices — culture storytelling conversations for vet clinics who want to hire their kind of people. I'm Julie South, and this is Episode 270.

Today is for you if you've ever posted a job ad and wondered why the right vets and nurses aren't applying.

It's also for you if you're wondering how AI might impact your ability to hire — and what steps you can take right now to be at the front, rather than playing catch-up later.

Stay to the end — because I'm going to ask you to do something that'll give you plenty to think about.

Today kicks off a brand new series: What Job Ads Were Never Built To Do. Seven episodes. Seven specific loads clinics are asking their job ads to carry. Seven reasons why the job ad simply cannot carry them.

Today's episode is the foundation for everything that follows.

A couple of years back, every business owner was focused on SEO — Search Engine Optimisation. Showing up in Google search results when potential clients or potential staff searched for you. Get the keywords right, get the links right, get found.

Then in late 2022, Google made a significant update. It was called the EEAT update.

E — Experience. 

E — Expertise. 

A — Authoritativeness. 

T — Trustworthiness.

What Google was saying with that update was this: keyword-stuffed pages and polished corporate copy weren't enough anymore. Google wanted evidence that real people, with real experience, were behind the content. Authentic voice. Genuine expertise. Trusted third-party verification.

That update mattered because it rewired what Google valued — and the AI engines that followed inherited exactly that bias. They were trained on content Google already deemed credible.

Which brings us to now.

SEO has evolved into something new. AEO — Ask Engine Optimisation.

You've probably noticed it yourself when you search for something. At the top of your results — on laptop and desktop at least, slightly different on mobile but the outcome's the same — there's now an AI-generated answer. Not a list of links. An answer. Synthesised, structured, served up before you've clicked anything.

That's AEO in action.

Today, vets and nurses who are considering their next career move might kick off their search from any number of AI platforms. Perplexity. ChatGPT. Copilot. Gemini. Google — as we knew it — is no longer the only default it used to be. And once they type in one search — once they ask one question — AI doesn't just answer it. It feeds them the next question. And the next. It takes them deeper, logically, progressively, into exactly the territory they're curious about.

The thing with vets and nurses today is that some are more AI-savvy than others. But all of them, at some point, are going to search to find out what it's like to work at your clinic. And the AI their search engine is using is going to build an answer for them.

Here's what I've been finding. AI isn't reading job ads to build its answers.

It's not reading your website's culture page — which is a conversation for another episode.

Instead, what AI is reading is everything else that meets its EEAT criteria:

Third-party platforms. Independent reviews. Social media posts from your staff. Podcast episodes featuring your team.

And in some cases — I've even seen dodgy Glassdoor reviews that are actively killing a clinic's chance of hiring their kind of people. But because those reviews meet the third-party credibility criteria, AI dishes them up anyway.

In other words — AI is looking for real people, real experience, real third-party voice. Content that didn't come from the clinic itself.

First-party content — you talking about yourself — is exactly what every other clinic is doing too. It doesn't differentiate you. And that lack of differentiation is going to be noticed by the AIs. It's only a matter of how long it takes — how soon that starts to happen.

My prediction — and I want to be clear this is my view based on what I'm observing — is that EEAT as a standard is only going to get more refined and more discerning as AI matures. The gap between clinics with genuine third-party voice content and those without it is going to widen. It's only a matter of when. And given how fast AI moves, my bet is sooner rather than later.

The ones waiting are handing that ground to whoever moves first in their region.

I've been watching this happen in real time across ANZ veterinary clinics. The pattern is consistent. The clinics winning the AI answer aren't necessarily the biggest, or the best funded, or the ones with the most sophisticated careers pages.

They're the ones with authentic, specific, third-party voice that gives AI something real to work with.

Next week — Episode 271 — we start the job-by-job diagnostic. First up: reviews. Why clinics reach for them, why they so often fall flat, and what genuine third-party voice does differently.

But before then — here's what I said I'd leave you with.

Open whatever search engine you use. Google, Bing, Perplexity, ChatGPT. Type: "what's it like working at" and your clinic name. If you're on Google, switch to AI Mode — and notice what the next prompt it gives you is.

One thing to keep in mind — you'll be searching on a device that knows your history. Incognito or private browsing stops your browser recording that session going forward, but it doesn't wipe existing history or account data — so your results will still be somewhat skewed. It's worth knowing that.

Look at the results. Is it your clinic talking about itself — or is it someone else's voice telling your story?

Because that difference — right there — could be the difference between a vet or nurse trusting what's being dished up and thinking maybe — or thinking yes, that's my kind of clinic — and applying to your job ad.

If you'd like to know what building that third-party voice looks like for your clinic specifically — email me. julie@vetclinicjobs.com.

This is Julie South signing off and inviting you to go out there and be your most fantabulous self.

And remember — when vets and nurses can see you're their kind of people, you stop hiring strangers. You start welcoming people who already feel they belong. Because you're their kind of clinic.

Until next week.