A Place for Mom is bringing its online referral system into the AI age as the habits of people seeking home care and other supports for older adults evolve.

On Nov. 12, the company announced it is pivoting from a marketing strategy centered on online search results to one that is more focused on prioritizing the referral company and its partners in responses from AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.

That trend represents a seismic shift for New York City-based APFM, which has over the years built a national marketing and tech machine using SEO and keywords to stand out in web searches and connect prospects with home care, senior living communities and other care options.

“It’s no longer about these keyword strategies,” APFM CEO Tatyana Zlotsky told Home Health Care News’ sister publication, Senior Housing News. “It’s about providing the best information for the models to prioritize my answer as most salient and trustworthy, and providing that to the families when they’re searching.”

APFM has increasingly expanded its offerings for home-based care services over the years. Its home care-related revenue has increased by more than 100% over the past three years.

“Sixty-seven percent of family caregivers prefer home care based on our proprietary research,” Zlotsky told HHCN in an email. “We are ensuring we are able to provide the full range of options across the aging journey – from home care to senior living.”

APFM is pairing its shift to AI with a rebranding effort aimed at honoring family caregivers and marking its 25th year in business. The company is launching a new campaign that features caregiver stories from parents and adult children navigating care for older adults.

“Caregivers … stopped looking for things in the way that they used to traditionally, and so it’s finding them in the right moments with the right message,” Zlotsky added.

From SEO to AIO

At its heart, APFM’s effort to pivot to AI is meant to help ferry home care and senior living prospects to the places where they want to go.

Previously, SEO and keywords helped companies rank higher in online searches; the higher on that search, the more likely they were to attract clicks from prospects.

According to Search Engine Land, a publication that tracks online web search functions, click-through rates are “at their lowest levels in 15 months.” That correlates with a general rise in people using large language models such as ChatGPT or AI overviews from Google’s Gemini in lieu of more traditional web searches. Instead of typing a question into Google and hunting through the results, users are asking AI platforms for guidance. 

Instead of optimizing their websites for search engines by including specific keywords, a practice known as SEO; many companies – APFM included – are now building marketing strategies to stand out among AI-powered “answer engines” like Gemini; a practice known as AIO.

AI and other search engine trends could hinder companies’ efforts to attract prospects to their websites.

“It’s great to have a website, but who’s going to this website now and how are they going to be learning about what’s on your website?” Zlotsky said. “It’s all about figuring out how to get into the ‘answers’ of the LLMs that people are already using for their research instead of Google.”

A Place for Mom is evolving its digital marketing strategy beyond keywords and focusing on giving LLMs and AI search tools what they’re looking for: structured data and informative, truthful content.

“They’re looking for at scale structured data about a problem that the user is trying to resolve,” Zlotsky said. “We have structured data across the millions of families that we serve, and so we can offer better advice.”

On the content side of things, APFM is embracing AI tools for caregivers, social media, content with online influencers and other methods to plant operators’ flags and reach families sooner in their journey and at different points. Since 2024, the company has collected about 75,000 family reviews – another valuable resource when trying to stand out in an AI world, Zlotsky said.

“That is a great, substantive example that an LLM would value, that a keyword traditional SEO strategy just wouldn’t even have the sophistication to pick up,” she added.

At the end of the day, Zlotsky believes that companies that understand their customer and what they value already have a leg up in the age of AI. Over the years, APFM has reinvented itself multiple times, from a company focused on phone calls to one embracing web searches, and now AI.

“To be a consumer company, you have to embody the customer,” she said. “So, for us, it’s just following and leading the customer to where they are with regard to operators.”

Deeper focus on caregivers

With its new focus on caregivers, APFM is seeking to create a “modern brand rooted in empathy.”

The company’s new marketing efforts center on “how families find, fund, and feel through the caregiving process, capturing the emotional core of A Place for Mom’s mission: helping families make one of life’s hardest choices with confidence and compassion.”

APFM is, as part of its rebranding effort, depicting families in the midst of their search for senior support. The company’s new ads and TV spots show adult children and their older parents casually discussing home care and other options, much as they might do at home.

In one social media post, an adult child named Kimberly describes how their mother used to “do everything,” but that she “couldn’t do that anymore” in her later years. The video ends with a message that A Place for Mom can “help caregivers like Kimberly find the best care for their parents.”

All of this is aimed at addressing what adult children and their families are thinking about as they search for home care, senior living or other kinds of support. More than that, the company’s rebranding and digital marketing efforts are meant to help take a burden off of its partners, especially smaller operators with fewer resources to devote to marketing.

“A lot of times we can get stuck in the zero-sum game mentality in the industry,” Zlotsky said. “The REITs have a role to play as capital allocators; the operators, as caregivers; and A Place for Mom is the family caregiver platform and the brand ambassador for the industry at large. And so I think there is a big collaboration opportunity.”