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I’ve recently noticed a lot of posts and articles around AI, and specifically how it’s supposedly changing the way clients find veterinary care online.
I’m sure some of it is useful, but a lot of it seems a bit overblown. If you’re a practice owner, this makes it hard to tell what actually matters and what’s just being packaged up to sell something new.
As I’m no AI (or SEO) expert myself, I thought I’d go to the source, so I started by asking ChatGPT the same question you might be asking right now: What role is AI really playing in Australian veterinary practices’ websites and online searches?
I added a few clarifying questions that I also felt could be useful, and after a bit of back-and-forth, this is what I discovered.
Pet owners are starting to use AI tools and AI-powered search to get answers before they ever visit a website.
Instead of typing a few keywords into Google Search and clicking through multiple sites, they’re asking full questions like “Why is my dog limping suddenly?”, “How much does a cat dental cost in Australia?”, or “Is vomiting in dogs an emergency?”
AI tools summarise answers from multiple sources. If your website doesn’t clearly answer real questions, it’s unlikely to be included in those summaries. That’s the shift.
At the same time, some fundamentals haven’t changed at all. You’re still competing locally, not globally, and clear, well-structured websites still perform better than cluttered ones. Trust also continues to play a major role, particularly through reviews and consistency of information. Your Google Business Profile is still one of the most important drivers of enquiries, and AI hasn’t replaced that.
Many clinic websites are still built around how the practice wants to present itself, rather than what clients are actually trying to work out.
In practice, that usually means broad, generic statements about “high-quality care,” very little detail about what services actually involve, and almost no guidance on pricing. Just as importantly, there are rarely clear answers to the questions clients ask every day.
From an AI perspective, there’s nothing specific enough to extract or summarise. From a client’s perspective, it doesn’t do much to help them decide what to do next.
If you strip away the hype, the priority is straightforward: make your website genuinely useful.
The easiest place to start is with the questions your team hears every day at reception, on the phone, and in consults. These are often the same questions pet owners are now asking AI tools.
For example:
Answering these questions clearly does two things at once. It helps real clients make decisions, and it gives AI tools something concrete to work with, and this overlap is where your effort should go.
If resources are limited, it’s worth focusing on a few areas that consistently make the biggest difference.
Start with your service pages. These should explain what’s involved, when a service is needed, and what clients can expect before, during, and after the service. Where possible, include a general cost range, even if it’s broad. This is one of the most common gaps across veterinary websites.
From there, add a small number of genuinely useful, client-facing pages that answer common questions. You don’t need a high volume of content. A handful of clear, practical pages will outperform dozens of generic blog posts.
It’s also important to make sure your local presence is accurate and up to date. Your Google Business Profile should be complete, consistent, and actively maintained.
Most importantly, focus on clarity before trying to increase traffic. There’s little value in bringing more visitors to your site if it doesn’t answer the questions they came with.
There’s a growing number of services being marketed around AI right now, and not all of them are particularly useful.
In general, it’s worth being cautious of anything that promises “AI optimisation” without clearly explaining what’s being done, as well as bulk AI-generated blog content that adds little real value. The same applies to technical SEO work that doesn’t improve how well a client understands your services, or strategies focused on broad keywords that don’t translate into local enquiries.
A simple way to assess any of this is to ask whether it makes your website more useful for a pet owner. If it doesn’t, it’s unlikely to make a meaningful difference.
If you’re working with someone on your website, these are the questions worth asking:
If you want to assess your own website, this is a useful place to start:
AI is changing how information is found, but it hasn’t changed what makes a veterinary website effective.
Clear, specific, genuinely useful content is what people end up seeing when they search online, whether that’s via a search engine, an AI tool, or a pet owner trying to work out what to do next.
If your website helps people understand what’s going on and what their next step should be, you’re already on the right track.
If it doesn’t, no amount of “AI optimisation” will fix that.
Do you have any other questions about AI and your veterinary practice that you would like me to uncover? Ask in the comments section, or email me directly, and I’ll start the discovery process.
After a career in HR working in a range of service industries and teaching at TAFE for several years, I then (somewhat accidentally) found myself in the veterinary industry and here I’ve stayed because I love the people and what they do. I created the Vetanswers Community to provide the support, resources and solutions to help our members build happy, successful, profitable businesses and careers.
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