For two decades, the branded pharma website has been treated as the centerpiece of digital engagement. It has been the polished ‘front door’, where brands prepared to tell their story and hoped clinicians and patients would arrive to listen. Websites still get foot traffic, but they’ve become houses people notice as they pass by, not doors where they open, enter, and spend their precious time.
Traffic still flows, but engagement is collapsing. Not because content teams aren’t working hard enough, and not because brand managers aren’t investing. The truth is more fundamental: the world no longer interacts with information in the way that pharma websites expect them to.
A System Built for Reading in a World That Asks Questions
Healthcare’s literacy problem is well documented. Only 12% of U.S. adults possess proficient health literacy, while nine in ten struggle to understand the health information they encounter, a statistic that has remained stubbornly unchanged across CDC and HHS assessments for many years. Physicians are far from immune: many report that branded HCP portals and even dedicated pharma apps are difficult to navigate and fail to surface clinically relevant information.
The content isn’t the issue; the medium is. The pharma website is still built around linear navigation, dense text, and a user journey that presumes time, attention, and a willingness to hunt for answers. Real-world behavior shows the opposite.
Behavior Has Changed But Technology Has Not Kept Pace
Two major behavioral shifts define the current moment.
According to Frank Defesche, senior vice president & general manager of life sciences for Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), “pharma has spent decades pushing compliant, comprehensive content across brand sites and channels, but consumption habits have shifted. LLMs are now major consumers of that content, reshaping relevance and accessibility. Patients and providers no longer tolerate ‘scroll and read’ experience. Instead, they expect direct answers. With the right guardrails, AI can deliver contextual, on-demand information that aligns compliance with how people actually seek knowledge today. Without that shift, the right facts and the right voices will get lost in the noise.”
For consumers, AI-assisted health queries have moved mainstream. Among U.S. adults who search online for health-questions, roughly 30% say they often or always receive the answer they need from AI-generated responses.
For clinicians, nearly two-thirds of physicians report using some form of AI in clinical practice, an 80% year-over-year jump, according to recent AMA data.
Both groups have adopted a new expectation: ask and receive, not hunt and click.
AI is no longer a novelty layered onto the healthcare system; it is becoming the operating mechanism underpinning it. Clinical AI pathways at Cedars-Sinai have handled tens of thousands of encounters. United Kingdom’s NHS deployed AI tools that dramatically accelerate stroke decision-making for tens of thousands of patients each year.
Information seeking has become universally and rapidly conversational and consumerized. Clinicians and patients are consumers, too, and they are passing static websites by as they navigate to more consumer-friendly locations.
The Industry Keeps Maintaining Websites While Users Pass Them By
Pharma maintains hundreds of sites across brands and markets, often investing millions annually to keep them compliant and current. Yet engagement metrics continue to decline.
Despite this shift, pharma continues to justify brand.com investments in part because the sites provide key first-party data, offering brands a window into how clinicians and patients alike engage with their brand content. However, even when a website wanes, the data and insights it once produced need not vanish. Emerging, pharma-built AI engagement layers allow brands to collect compliant, high-fidelity interaction data from within the exact channels where clinicians and patients already spend their time, including email, SMS, social and, yes, even websites. Rather than “driving” users to a single channel in an attempt to understand their behavior, brands can offer higher quality engagement – that in turn yields higher quality data – by meeting the patients and providers that they serve where they already are.
The reason is structural. Websites require users to come to them. Even traffic that is ‘driven’ to a website frequently requires a user to leave the channel they started in, be it television, social media, email, and enter an entirely new engagement channel.
Personalized, in-flow content repeatedly outperforms generic site content, driving improvements in engagement. But most pharma sites cannot personalize meaningfully without breaking existing infrastructure constraints. That’s why companies like Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY) are taking a different path.
“Healthcare is personal. Lilly is focused on moving away from static, generic websites to transforming consumer insights into personalized content embedded in their daily ‘life flow.’
In collaboration with our tech and data partners, AI is enabling us to upend the old approach and to help meet users where they already are, driving increased engagement and improved patient outcomes,” says Jennifer Oleksiw, global chief customer officer at Eli Lilly.
Increasingly, AI is enabling pharma to upend the old approach, and to meet users where they already are.
AI Is Rapidly Enabling a New Interface Layer
The future of digital engagement will not take place on static websites. It will occur in the realization of a long-imagined omnichannel interface layer, powered by AI, that seamlessly marries scientific accuracy, regulatory compliance, personalization, channel orchestration, and user intent
AI is collapsing what once required multiple, separate, complex, and expensive technology stacks such as CRM, content engines, analytics, and UX. What has emerged in its place is a single, integrated system capable of delivering compliant, context-specific answers instantly, and helping brands quickly and compliantly adapt to the changing needs and engagement preferences of their users.
Global investment reflects this shift: the AI-in-healthcare market is estimated at $26.6 billion today, and is projected to surpass $180 billion by 2030. This is not innovation theater. It is not small-scale pilots. It is enterprise-wide infrastructure investment in an entirely new modality of engagement between brands and the clinicians and patients they serve.
However, general purpose and consumer-favored generative AI tools cannot simply be slapped on top of existing pharma brand sites and be expected to deliver on this promise. Regulatory constraints, including strict regulatory review and submission requirements, demand a new architecture that combines the AI-powered experience users demand with the regulatory-led precision pharma requires. In other words, AI must be able to deliver exactly what consumers want, when they want it, while simultaneously only delivering exactly what pharma regulatory teams have approved, in the form it was approved.
This constraint is not an obstacle. It is an opportunity. It is the reason the interface layer must be intentionally and thoughtfully built, and done so through the collaboration of technology and industry leaders.
The Opportunity for Pharma
Let’s make no mistake: whomever owns the interface layer will own the relationship that clinicians and patients have with the life-saving treatments and products they use. And this is a clear and present danger for today’s pharma companies.
Consumer tech companies are already deploying medical-grade agents capable of triaging questions, surfacing recommendations, and shaping clinical decisions. And patients and providers alike are using them at increasing rates, asking and answering questions without ever reaching a pharma website. Health systems are likewise building their own AI-powered engagement layers, bring conversational support directly to patients and enabling more and deeper provider interactions. Pharma’s own digital front doors, the pricey brand.com websites, are at increasing risk of becoming an afterthought.
The next phase of digital health will belong to organizations that recognize and embrace this shift. For pharma to keep pace, and to take its rightful and important place in the conversations patients and providers are having about its treatments, this means recognizing two fundamental truths:
- Pharma must own the science. When it comes to what these drugs and devices can do, how they work, when and how they are safe to use, and more, pharma must be the visible and trusted voice for patients and providers.
- Technology companies, including AI-native startups, will own (indeed have already claimed) the infrastructure needed to operationalize personalized, compliant engagement at scale.
With pharma supplying the trusted content, and technology partners providing a compliant integration layer, the result is not just a new coat of paint on the front door that patients and providers have stopped looking for. It is an opportunity to insert pharma directly into the spaces where those same patients and providers are conversing, and to ensure that those conversations are backed by top tier science and regulatory compliance.
The future of digital engagement will not be defined by assets, pages, or campaigns. It will be defined by who controls the intelligent layer that connects the right information to the right user at the right moment, regardless of channel.
That requires deep, bidirectional collaboration between pharma organizations, AI-native health technology companies, and large infrastructure providers.
No single party can deliver this alone. The ecosystem is too fractured, the data requirements too complex, and the compliance demands too unforgiving.
A New Metric: Relevance, Not Traffic
For years, digital success was measured by visits, clicks, dwell time, and bounce rates. Those metrics belong to the era of static websites.
In an AI-first environment, the defining question becomes:
Did the user receive the right, compliant answer at the exact moment they needed it?
If a cardiologist can ask a complex, label-bound question through an embedded, approved agent, and receive a precise, context-aware response instantly, and is able to quickly proceed with the care of her patient, then why should any of us care about the channel through which that cardiologist received her answer?
Driving traffic to a static website is not the purpose; it never was. The brand.com website is simply one channel among many that exist for a purpose that has never been more important: to provide clear, accessible, and accurate information to patients and providers so that they can move forward confidently in their healthcare journey and receive the care into which pharma companies invest so much to bring to life.
Engagement, not activity, is the point.
Leading commercial organizations are already reframing their approach, including Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN), which has been pushing its teams to think less about clicks and more about whether their science shows up when and where it’s needed most. As Murdo Gordon, executive vice president, global commercial operations at Amgen, puts it: “AI is collapsing the distance between a question and its answer. For commercial teams, that means our focus must shift from driving people to assets to ensuring our science shows up, accurately and instantly, wherever the question is asked. That’s the future of engagement and it will reshape how we measure success.”
The Website Isn’t Dying, It’s Being Superseded
The decline of the static pharma website is not a failure. It is the natural progression of an industry shifting from narrower, specific channels designed for one-way communication to a broader, context-aware, and conversational form of engagement.
The brands that lead the next decade will not be the ones with the best websites or the largest search budgets. They will be the ones that break free from the cycle of repainting their brand.com front doors and venture out boldly into the new AI-powered world in which their patients and providers are already immersed. They will be the ones that partner with pharma-first technology companies to enable the intelligent, compliant, omnichannel layer that replaces the website entirely, the layer that meets clinicians and patients where they already are.