The Patient Journey Keeps Getting Shorter, Your Ads Need To Catch Up

This week Kyle breaks down how the patient journey has compressed in 2026 and what it means for dental marketing. Patients are getting informed by AI before they ever touch Google. By the time they actually search, they're not browsing. They're picking where to book. Kyle walks through the Ahrefs data showing Google's organic traffic dropped from 35.11% to 30.53% over 10 months while paid search jumped from 13.99% to 17.15%. He explains why AI search didn't eat that traffic (it's zero-click by nature), why the real shift is businesses compensating with ad spend and why the clicks coming through on Google Ads right now are higher intent than they've ever been. He also ties it back to the full-funnel approach: Google captures the intent, Meta retargeting finishes the job.