"We love working with Pepper because we get everything all under one roof. Not just the insights, but the execution and the strategy. That helps our very small team be much more efficient, but also drive the outcomes that we need for Talkspace on the revenue side."
AI was recommending Talkspace. It just wasn't sending anyone there.
In mid-2025 it had a strange problem. AI named Talkspace more than any competitor, then sent the reader somewhere else. Over nine months, Pepper turned mentions into citations and citations into customers, while search traffic shrank for everyone else in the category.
"We love working with Pepper because we get everything all under one roof. Not just the insights, but the execution and the strategy. That helps our very small team be much more efficient, but also drive the outcomes that we need for Talkspace on the revenue side."
- Katelyn Watson, CMO, Talkspace
AI was recommending Talkspace. It just wasn't sending anyone there.
In mid-2025 it had a strange problem. AI named Talkspace more than any competitor, then sent the reader somewhere else. Over nine months, Pepper turned mentions into citations and citations into customers, while search traffic shrank for everyone else in the category.
THE CHALLENGE
AI was talking about Talkspace and linking to everyone else
9 months back, when you asked ChatGPT about online therapy, it named Talkspace 50.3% of the time. No competitor came close. But it sent people to a Talkspace page only 23.7% of the time. The other three quarters of the clicks went to health publishers, research databases and competitors who had written the pages LLMs wanted to quote.
Being mentioned builds a brand. Being linked to is what brings in a customer. That gap was the single biggest commercial problem for us to solve.
And this is a category where you can't just create AI Content Slop at scale
Mental health is a YMYL ("Your Money or Your Life") category. Google holds the content to its highest bar for expertise and trust, and Talkspace is a regulated healthcare company with clinicians who review what goes out.
Katelyn had worked with plenty of agencies before. None of them had an answer for this.
"We have had many agencies across the years that we've worked with for SEO, for content. When AI started coming into the conversation, they were evaluating third-party tools as well, but it felt very piece-meal. There wasn't really anything that was a one-stop shop where we could get the strategy, the execution, and the insights all in one place to make us GEO-first.” Katelyn Watson, CMO, Talkspace
What Talkspace needed:
Hold the #1 positions on Google that pay the bills today, throughout algorithm volatility
Get AI tools to cite Talkspace's own pages, not third parties
Do both at a publishing pace that could match health publishers, without a single unsourced medical claim
THE INSIGHT
Most teams treat SEO and AI visibility as two projects run by two vendors. Pepper's audit showed they are one problem. The clinically sound, well-structured page that defends a YMYL ranking on Google is exactly the page an AI assistant chooses to quote.
Talkspace didn't have a visibility problem. It had a domain coverage problem. AI was already naming the brand for pricing, insurance, therapy-plus-psychiatry, multi-condition care and recovery rates. Talkspace simply had no page of its own answering those questions, so the assistants quoted whoever did.
The audit made it concrete. AI's favourite source type in this category was the "best of" comparison article. Talkspace had none.
One more finding shaped the plan. About a quarter of AI answers in the category came from sites Talkspace doesn't own at all.
THE STRATEGY: RUN SEO AND AI SEARCH AS ONE SYSTEM
Pepper built one program across both of Talkspace's audiences, consumers seeking therapy and the HR and benefits leaders who buy it for their workforce.
That measurement turned "AI search" from a worry into a channel with baselines, targets and monthly movement. It also drove the off-site half of the work: LinkedIn and digital PR for authority, YouTube for video visibility inside AI answers, and a 90-day GEO recovery sprint to build the priority pages AI needed in order to cite Talkspace's own domain.
"Today there are so many stand-alone tools to help you see a dashboard, where you're ranking or not ranking relative to the LLMs. We actually need a partner who can not only give us those answers, but also focus on the outcomes at the end of the day." Katelyn Watson, CMO, Talkspace
THE RESULTS
Over nine months, Talkspace's presence moved on both surfaces at once: the blue link on Google and the recommended name inside the AI answer.
AI sends fewer visitors than Google. Nine times more of them become customers.
This is the result that matters most, and it runs against the whole category's story. Between January and July 2026, visits from Google fell 60%, in line with the contraction every therapy brand saw. New customers held flat. Traffic from AI search filled the gap, and it converted at nine times the rate of a Google visitor.
"Talkspace is really proud to be a leader in not only visibility, but significantly above our most direct competitors for citations as well. We've seen 60% growth across conversions from organic search, and LLM-driven traffic has surged and it's converting better." Kaytelyn Watson, CMO, Talkspace
#1 in enterprise AI visibility, at roughly twice the nearest competitor
In the enterprise segment, where employers and health plans research mental health benefits, Talkspace now leads outright.
The insurance pocket
Insurance pages turned out to be the programme's highest-ROI corner: a 9.4% conversion rate on 840K impressions, at just 0.54% click-through. High conversion on a low click rate means the titles and snippets are the next lever, and they are already on the roadmap.
What AI actually says about Talkspace now
THE IMPACT BEYOND TRAFFIC
1. Talkspace described in its own words
When a patient or a benefits buyer asks an AI which platform to trust, the answer now draws on Talkspace's own pages: therapy plus psychiatry, insurance coverage, medication management. Not a publisher's summary of it.
2. A revenue base that survived the category's worst year
Holding #1 on "online therapy" through YMYL volatility protected the organic revenue that funded everything else, while Google clicks fell 60% around it. Defence turned out to be the growth strategy.
3. A small team that moves like a big one
Talkspace's marketing team is small for a public company. Strategy, production, clinical-grade QA, technical fixes and AI measurement all sit with Pepper, so the internal team spends its time on decisions rather than production.
"The Pepper team is definitely AI-first. They're bringing in tools, they're bringing in insights, they're doing it all under one roof with our team." Caitlin Watson, CMO, Talkspace
WHY IT WORKED: THE PEPPER DIFFERENCE
Talkspace chose Pepper for three reasons.
1. One roof, not a stack of vendors. Strategy, execution and insight in one team, so nothing falls between an SEO agency, a content shop and a GEO dashboard.
2. Outcomes, not dashboards. Every AI visitor tracked through to a purchase. The programme was judged on customers, not on a visibility score.
3. Built for a regulated category. Clinician bylines, NIH and PubMed sourcing on every number, and a production process Talkspace's medical reviewers could sign off at 70 articles a month.
"Every time we have a call with the Pepper team, we walk away super impressed. My team is like, I can't believe what they've built.What's important to me is having a partner and a thought leader who can educate the team along this journey from the beginning, as well as execute. Katelyn Watson, CMO, Talkspace