Case Study
How Nushama Became Ketamine Therapy's #3 Most-Cited Brand In AI Search, And Cut Paid Ad Spend 50% With Yolando
Nushama's highest-ever month of Spravato revenue came right after they cut their paid digital ad spend in half. At the same time, they saw new patient volume and appointment bookings grow across every major AI assistant ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
Reaching new patients through paid ads wasn't scaling affordably anymore. And with the increased use of LLMs, Nushama recognized that competitor clinics that showed up first in AI-generated answers were going to own this category. Yolando provided Nushama the data and tools to implement scalable workflows to drive more affordable growth on AI.
Nushama operates clinics that facilitate safe, effective psychedelic treatments for mental wellness, delivered in person by medically trained professionals with decades of experience. Patients in this category spend months researching before they book. Nushama wanted to be in the answer when those patients were ready.
For years, "being in the answer" meant paid advertising on search and social media. Now, with Yolando, Nushama is found where their patients are actually looking.
Why paid acquisition gets more expensive every month
For years, paid and organic search, plus social media, did the heavy lifting on patient acquisition. Like most brands, Nushama leaned on those channels to scale.
But mental health is a competitive and expensive ad category. Cost per click and conversion economics that cleared comfortably a year ago no longer hold in 2026. Every dollar has to work harder at auction to deliver the same KPI growth.
While eCPC was climbing, a quiet shift was happening underneath it. High-intent research that used to happen on Google was migrating to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Patients considering a procedure as personal as ketamine therapy weren't typing keywords. They were asking questions like "What's the best Spravato clinic in Rockland for treatment-resistant depression?" on LLMs.
If Nushama didn't appear in those answers, no paid ad was going to win that patient. Patient discovery was shifting fast, and Yolando gave Nushama the AI visibility, and the tools to act on it.
Why AI visibility rewards precision, not reach
AI search rewards precision. The long-tail, procedure-by-market queries that drive high-intent patient research like "best Spravato clinic in Rockland for treatment-resistant depression," are prompts traditional paid channels struggle to reach with the same specificity.
Ad platforms work in audiences and keywords. LLMs like ChatGPT, Clade etc. work by giving answers to specific, situated questions.
When a brand is cited as the source of one of an AI answer, the patient associates the brand with the solution. The next time they search, on any platform, they’ll search for the brand by name. And here's the part Nushama won most: branded search by a wide margin is the most affordable customer Nushama can win.
AI visibility creates brand recognition
Brand recognition drives branded search
Brand search lowers the average cost to acquire a patient
For Nushama, AI visibility didn’t necessarily replace paid channels, it made these channels more cost effective, and easier to scale. Patients are more likely to click an ad when there is brand familiarity.
Your brand can scale revenue with AI visibility too
This dynamic isn't unique to Nushama, and the mental health industry. This customer discovery pattern is playing out across nearly every category where buyer research is moving to AI assistants. Nushama was smart to look for affordable ways to scale, and decided on Yolando's AI Visibility tool to create new demand and capture it through paid channels that were already in place.
By mapping the questions patients ask, layering-in local markets they serve. One prompt-and-market combination at a time, Yolando's Recommendation engine told the team which gap to close each week. In tandem with Yolando's Marketing Studio the team was ready with optimized content to efficiently take action.
Yolando's AI Visibility tool tracked Nushama's citation presence across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity simultaneously, broken down by procedure and local market. This is what separated Nushama's approach from standard SEO reporting: visibility score and citation rate were tracked as operational KPIs, not vanity metrics. The team could see, in near real time, exactly which procedure-by-market combinations had AI answers, which ones Nushama owned, and which ones a competitor held.
Without this prompt-level monitoring across all four platforms simultaneously, operating at this cadence would not have been possible.
Easy workflows, from AI search monitoring to content ready recommendations
Being able to efficiently turn all this data into a weekly action plan would normally be the hard part. But with Yolando’s Recommendations Engine and Competitor Radar, it provides highest-leverage GEO gaps to take action with ready to win content for:
Which prompts had the most patient demand
Which markets were exposed to a competitor
Which procedures had no clear AI answer from anyone yet
The cadence settled into a rhythm: data on Monday, decisions by midweek, content live by Friday.
Within one prompt cycle, the new page would start earning citations. A market like Rockland could move from invisible to dominant in a specific procedure category in only a few weeks.
Spotting the gap is only half the problem. Knowing which gap to close first, and why it matters to revenue, is where most teams stall. Yolando's Recommendations Engine and Competitor Radar surfaced the highest-leverage opportunities each week:
which prompts had the most patient demand
which local markets were exposed to a competitor
which procedures had no clear AI answer from anyone yet
Yolando’s bi-weekly strategy syncs with Nushama's prioritized action plans and aligned on what to publish that week. The cadence settled into a rhythm: data on Monday, decisions by midweek, content live by Friday.
"This kind of content velocity is impossible to operate on without the help of Yolando’s prompt-level monitoring across all four AI platforms simultaneously."
— Emily Sofin, Head of Marketing at Nushama
Shipping GEO optimized content that wins the citation
A prompt gap only closes when there's a piece of content LLMs want to cite. Yolando's Marketing Studio is where Nushama's team turned each prioritized gap into a published page—fast.
Each piece formatted with:
Clear authorship, part of E-E-A-T
Structured FAQs that map to real patient questions
Authority signals AI assistants are trained to surface
Over about 10 weeks, Nushama's AI visibility climbed from 14.9% in December 2025 to 33.5% in February 2026 resulting in a 2.2x lift.
Broken down by procedure and market, Nushama is cited in:
81% of AI answers for Rockland about ketamine therapy
62% of AI answers for Rockland about Spravato
56% of AI answers for Manhattan about ketamine therapy
47–58% of AI answers about Aventura therapy clinics
Nushama is now the third most-cited domain in the ketamine therapy category across all four AI platforms, behind only Reddit and NIH, and ahead of the nearest commercial competitor by roughly 2x in citation volume. More than 200,000 AI citations tracked in total, distributed evenly enough that Nushama's visibility doesn't rest on any single platform.
The business outcome: paid digital ad spend went down by 50%, while revenue and new patient volume increased, and Nushama has its highest-ever Spravato revenue month on record.
Branded recognition now makes Nushama's paid acquisition channels more economically effective. Making paid a supplement, not the demand engine.
"We’ve cut our digital ad spend by about 50%, and at the same time grown the business. We’re seeing plenty of people find us through LLM search, for more referral business."
— Jay Godfrey, Co-founder of Nushama
What’s next for Nushama
AI citations compound. Every new one makes the next easier to earn, and every patient who searches for Nushama by name reinforces the brand's presence in the data models AI assistants keep training on.
That's what separates AI visibility from organic and/or paid search, it builds equity rather than spending it. It's a position competitors are starting to chase, and the foundation for Nushama's next twelve months isn't an ad budget, it's building a robust citation portfolio to continue winning across LLMs.
Want to do the same for your brand? Yolando can help fix your brand’s AI visibility, not just measure it.
