Tampa Firm Drops Traffic Reporting Entirely as Patients Shift Searches to ChatGPT

TAMPA, Fla. – A marketing firm here has stopped reporting website traffic to its clients altogether, a break from standard agency practice that its founder says reflects how differently patients now find a doctor.

Animal House Marketing, which works exclusively with medical practices, reports two figures and no others: manually verified rankings for commercial keywords, and the number of new patients who told the front desk they found the practice online. Founder Jan Cankusic says the industry’s reliance on traffic graphs pulled from tools such as Ahrefs obscures more than it reveals.

“High traffic numbers almost always come from informational blog posts, which are exactly the pages that do not produce patients,” he said. “Those posts are not location-specific, so they rank nationally. A practice can get a few thousand visitors a month and almost none of them live anywhere near the office.”

Operating as a medical SEO company, the firm checks rankings by hand in Google’s Anonymous Ad Preview with the location set to the client’s city, which returns results as a local searcher without browsing history would see them. Every keyword is baselined before work starts, a practice Cankusic says prevents an agency from claiming credit for rankings a client already held.

The firm applies the same method to AI assistants, opening ChatGPT in an incognito session and recording whether the client appears among the three to six providers the model typically names for a commercial query. Cankusic says that compression is the central change facing practices, because an AI response offers no equivalent of a second page.

The approach has produced results the firm reports across several specialties. A podiatry practice in St. Petersburg, Florida, reached page one of Google in five days and the top citywide position for its core terms by day 49, and now attributes three to five additional new patients per day to Google and ChatGPT. A podiatry practice in the Dallas suburbs holds top-three positions for wound care terms across roughly eight surrounding cities, with 50 to 60 keywords ranking at the top. In an August spot check of a long-running dermatology client in suburban Chicago, the firm pulled a list of roughly two dozen condition and treatment searches and found the practice at position one for most of them, including acne, eczema, psoriasis, skin cancer screening, mole removal and several cosmetic procedures.

A brand-new chiropractor in St. Petersburg with 15 reviews reached second position citywide in 35 days and subsequently canceled a $1,500 per month Google Ads campaign that had been generating fewer than three quality new patients a month. All figures are reported by the firm rather than independently audited.

Animal House Marketing sells a $97 entry test in place of the multi-month contracts common in the sector. A practice selects a keyword cluster it does not currently rank for and receives finished pages within 24 hours. If no keyword in the cluster reaches page one of Google or earns a ChatGPT recommendation within 10 days of publication, the firm refunds the fee and issues $500 in credits. Ongoing work begins at $495 per month, month to month, with a 60-day money-back provision on qualifying packages under which the firm restores the client’s site to its previous state. Cankusic says roughly 95 percent of clients operate without a contract.

Measurement remains the open problem sector-wide. No standard exists for auditing how frequently a business appears in AI-generated answers, and the major model providers publish nothing comparable to Google Search Console. Firms selling AI visibility are largely asking clients to take their word for it, a gap Cankusic says his manual checks and refund terms are designed to close.

Animal House Marketing is based at 610 E Zack St, Ste 110-3016, Tampa, FL 33602, and can be reached at (727) 610-8357.