Know Your

AUDIENCE

Survey reveals 4 key truths about marketing to family caregivers

By Eric Hultgren

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Moonlight casts a glow across a quiet living room as Sarah scrolls on her phone. Her 7-year-old went to bed a long time ago and she has maybe an hour before the exhaustion of the day takes her. She is spending that hour the way she spends most of her free time these days: trying to figure out what her aging father needs for care. He took a fall about a month ago and now Sarah is tasked with researching next steps. On her third click, she finds your agency, clicks on the pricing page, and finds nothing. And just like that, she is gone.

In October of 2025, 500 caregivers across the continental United States and four different generations of caregivers were surveyed about what drives their decisions in senior care. The survey surfaced four findings that every marketing team should sit with.

Swipe to the left to see each slide

1. It might be AI.

About 18% percent of family caregivers are using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to research providers right now. Even more surprising is that 89% of those surveyed said they were open to trusting AI-generated healthcare information—including 80% of the baby boom generation. That means age is not a barrier, but experience is. These adoption rates are the lowest they will ever be and most providers are not optimized for any of this.

These AI platforms work by interpreting the intent of the user from the moment they enter a prompt, then evaluating trust signals the AI will synthesize your presence across every place you exist online, to produce the answer. If your site either doesn’t answer their question or is mired down in industry jargon instead of natural language AI moves on and so does the caregiver.

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2. It’s all in the family.

The caregiver you are picturing might not be the one doing the research, because 35% of Generation Z respondents say they are the caregiver for their grandparent or grandparents. While this generation might not make the final decision about the location and care their grandparents select, as digital natives they play a major role in research and evaluation.

They screenshot options, share links in family group chats and build the short list that older family members ultimately choose from. Ignore them and you may never make this list.

This means providers running a one-size-fits-all digital campaign are missing out on nuance across generations; worse, many of these providers are targeting patients rather than their family caregivers. Sarah’s story demonstrates how senior care is discovered in 2026; the providers who understand that will make an impact on their business and those they care for.

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3. They want you to show them the money.

The biggest finding in this survey is also the one most providers can fix quickly: the question of cost transparency. One in five family caregivers said the inability to find cost or insurance information is their biggest frustration and that friction leads them to look elsewhere. For baby boomers, that number balloons to 30%, and they are not calling to ask about it—they are just moving along.

This doesn’t mean your website must have a fast-food menu style pricing guide on your site, but you do have to have something aimed at answering their questions and removing that friction.

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4. Social media matters, but not the way you think.

The final finding worth noting highlights social media. Seventy-three percent of caregivers say that social channels such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X and TikTok influence their provider choice, but that those channels rarely top their discovery channel. There’s a difference between a family finding you and a family picking you.

Most providers treat social media as a top-of-the-funnel awareness play. The data indicate that, in fact, social platforms are where caregivers validate what they have already found. That is, it’s not where they discover you, it’s why they choose you. Things like team spotlights, day-in-the-life examples and real family stories are the types of content that make the difference between a passing swipe and “I am calling them in the morning.”

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Sarah is out there right now. The question is whether your agency is the one she calls.

Eric Hultgren is national director of content marketing at Advance Local, leading strategy across healthcare, travel, education and recruitment. He focuses on how organizations stay visible and credible as search shifts to AI-driven answers, helping healthcare and senior care teams structure content to be found, trusted and acted on