Why we launched a healthcare-focused service

Known & Cited measures how AI talks about businesses, in any sector. So why carve out a separate service for one of them? Because healthcare is not like the others. When AI gets a streaming recommendation wrong, you watch the wrong film. When AI gets a health answer wrong, someone makes a worse decision about their body. That gap is the whole reason for K&C Vital.

Why healthcare specifically

Every business we work with cares about being cited by AI because it shapes who gets chosen. In health, that same mechanism reaches further. Citation share does not just affect acquisition. It affects patient choice and, downstream, clinical outcomes. A person deciding which clinic to trust, which supplement to take, which condition their symptoms point to, is increasingly starting that decision with an AI answer. If your brand, your charity, your provider is not in that answer, you are not in the consideration set, and the consequences are heavier than a lost sale.

Health brands, charities and providers need to know whether AI is naming them, and whether it is naming them accurately. Those are two different questions, and in health the second one matters even more than the first. Being described wrongly in a regulated category is not a branding problem. It is a compliance event waiting to happen.

AI is already the first stop

This is not a forecast. It is already happening. People research symptoms, treatments and providers through ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity before they ever speak to a professional. They ask what their symptoms might mean, which treatment is worth considering, whether a brand is reputable, which clinic to call. The AI answer is the new first opinion, and for a growing number of people it is the only one they will get before they act.

That puts a responsibility on the brands in the space. If AI is shaping health decisions at scale, the brands that hold real expertise have a reason to make sure that expertise is what AI is drawing on, rather than the loudest or the cheapest content in the category. Showing up well in health is not vanity. It is part of getting good information in front of people at the moment they are deciding.

What K&C Vital actually is

K&C Vital is not a different product. It is the same AVS engine with a healthcare-specific lens. The measurement methodology is identical to the rest of Known & Cited: the same five-band scoring, the same three-engine standard across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, the same volatility window run across thousands of prompts, the same scored framework powered by our tech partner. What changes is the lens we read it through.

Three things make the lens specific to health. The questions are sector-tuned, written by people who understand how patients, clinicians and buyers actually phrase health queries. The source reading is tuned to what matters in health, where a citation from NHS guidance, NICE or a peer-reviewed journal counts for more than a citation from a volume content farm. And the interpretation is done by analysts who understand the clinical and regulatory context, so the recommendations that come out the other end are usable rather than reckless.

What is different about the work

The mechanics of a Vital engagement differ from a standard AVS in three concrete ways.

• The query sets go where health decisions are made. Named-condition queries, treatment queries, drug and product queries, alongside the brand and category questions we run for everyone. We measure visibility on the questions a worried person actually types, not just the ones a marketing team would like to win.
• Recommendations are regulatory-sensitive. Telling a health brand to make a bolder claim to win citations would be irresponsible, and in many cases unlawful. Vital recommendations are written to hold up to MHRA, ASA and equivalent scrutiny, working alongside a brand’s own regulatory and medical teams rather than around them.
• The sub-segments are real. NHS, private and charity providers do not face the same questions, the same competitors or the same sources. We treat them as distinct, because a private clinic, an NHS trust and a health charity are answering to different audiences even when they sit in the same category.

Same standard, sharper lens

K&C Vital exists because the brands that have to get it right, clinically, legally and commercially, deserve a version of this work that takes those constraints seriously from the first query to the final recommendation. It is built for health tech and consumer health on one side, and MedTech, pharma communications and clinical platforms on the other. The standard is the same standard we hold everywhere. The lens is sharper, because in this sector it has to be.

If you are a health brand, a provider or a charity and you want to know whether AI is naming you, and whether it is naming you well, that is exactly what we built K&C Vital to tell you. You can read more about how it works on the K&C Vital page.

Be Known. Be Cited.