Executive summary
The top-line read across six verticals, coverage period January 2025 through March 2026. Where healthcare marketing economics moved, where they held, and where the leading indicators are flashing. Five themes carry the year: AI Overview citation as a leading indicator of organic revenue, the collapse of cheap paid search across concierge and specialty medical, review velocity finally displacing review volume as the operative GBP signal, HIPAA-aware paid architecture becoming table stakes, and the LTV:CAC spread widening between operators who measured retention and operators who did not.
Full breakdown coming May 2026.
Paid search CPCs by vertical
Median and ninetieth-percentile CPCs for the highest-intent keyword clusters across concierge medicine, specialty medical, dental specialty, weight loss, medspa, DPC, and general dentistry. Year-over-year deltas, geographic dispersion across top-fifty DMAs, and the impact of broad-match defaults on healthcare intent classification.
Full breakdown coming May 2026.
Organic ranking velocity by vertical
Time-to-first-page and time-to-top-three for newly published content across verticals, benchmarked against domain authority, schema-graph completeness, and editorial cadence. Which verticals reward patience and which reward volume, with the backing velocity curves.
Full breakdown coming June 2026.
Review velocity benchmarks
New reviews per month per location, median and ninetieth percentile, segmented by vertical and practice maturity. Correlations between review velocity and GBP ranking position, and the threshold at which velocity stops contributing incremental rank lift. A defensible counterargument to the review-volume arms race.
Full breakdown coming June 2026.
Patient acquisition cost medians
Blended CAC across organic and paid channels, by vertical and by acquisition stage. Segmentation by new-patient value tier: cash-pay concierge members versus insurance-paid specialty consults versus cash-pay medspa members. The CAC figures that usually show up in agency decks are blended averages; this report segments them.
Full breakdown coming July 2026.
LTV:CAC ratios
Median LTV:CAC by vertical, derived from multi-year retention curves on the client roster. Where the ratios are healthy, where they are compressed by commoditization pressure, and how the practices with the strongest ratios are structuring retention into acquisition from day one.
Full breakdown coming July 2026.
HIPAA compliance scorecard
Prevalence of common PHI leakage patterns across healthcare marketing stacks: PHI in GA4 events, PHI in remarketing audiences, non-BAA'd form processors, client-side pixel contamination, and uncovered server-side conversion APIs. The numbers are worse than the industry wants to admit; this section does not grade on a curve.
Full breakdown coming August 2026.
AI Overview citation patterns
Which healthcare content gets cited in AI Overviews and which gets skipped. Patterns across schema completeness, answer-first structure, credentialed authorship, primary-source citation, and domain E-E-A-T signals. The first longitudinal look at how AI Overview citation translates into revenue on healthcare sites.
Full breakdown coming August 2026.
Methodology and data sources
Full methodology disclosure. Client roster size and composition by vertical, anonymization protocol, data aggregation rules, what is included and what is excluded, and the limits of the sample. The reader should be able to stress-test every figure in the report against the sampling frame.
Published with the full report.
About Macbach
Macbach is a healthcare-only growth practice founded in Chicago in 2007 and relocated to Tampa Bay in 2010. We run across six verticals: concierge medicine, specialty medical, dental specialty, weight loss, medspa, and DPC. Four productized services and one fractional CMO seat. Pricing published, ad spend pass-through, healthcare-only since day one.
Read the full story at /about.