Which AI chatbots do patients turn to for medical advice?

For patients, not all AI chatbots are created equal, at least not when they ask for medical advice, according to a new Pollfish survey of 1,250 U.S. adults conducted on behalf of Insuranceopedia.

Rather, patients of all ages are most likely to flock to ChatGPT when they have a question about their health insurance -- if they use AI at all, the survey showed.

These findings come as the medical industry tracks how people use AI to learn more about their health.

This practice is becoming more popular, with 2026 OpenAI data showing that nearly a quarter of ChatGPT's 800 million regular users ask a healthcare-related question at least weekly. All said, somewhere between 1.6 and 1.9 million messages each week focus on health insurance, health plan comparisons and other healthcare-related topics.

This latest survey sheds light on exactly which AI chatbots patients turn to when asking medical questions, particularly questions about their health insurance.

ChatGPT is the most popular for getting answers about one's health insurance, the survey showed, with 28% of respondents saying they prefer this tool most. Another 21.3% said they prefer Google's Gemini.

Other commercial options lagged significantly behind ChatGPT and Gemini.

For example, only 6.4% of people said they prefer to use Microsoft Copilot to learn more about their health insurance, while 4% said the same of Meta AI. Just 2.3% prefer Claude and 1.6% prefer Grok. Less than 1% of respondents said they prefer Perplexity or another AI tool.

Regardless of platform, consumer-facing AI is proving useful in one key area: helping people understand their benefits and the cost of care. According to the survey, a fifth of people use AI to better understand what their health plan covers, while another fifth said they use it to make sense of a medical bill or explanation of benefits.

But perhaps most startling was the proportion of respondents using AI to circumvent rising medical costs. A quarter of respondents said AI has been a stand-in when they need medical advice but cannot afford to see a doctor, the survey showed. This mirrors previous KFF data showing that about a fifth of AI users leverage the tool because they can't afford to go to the doctor.

But AI chatbots have benefits that extend beyond being free.

A third of respondents said AI chatbots are better sources of insurance or medical information because they are constantly available. Another 30% said AI can explain medical or insurance concepts better than payer representatives. Meanwhile, 28% said AI chatbots are easier to contact than their insurers.

Healthcare organizations and health plans alike might consider how to leverage the power of AI chatbots while still preserving the connection patients have to their payers and providers. This might include implementing conversational AI at the point of care.

Still, there's a sizeable group of respondents who are AI holdouts. More than a third (35%) said they'd never use AI to get information about their health or health insurance, suggesting that healthcare providers and payers should maintain their other channels of communication.

Ensuring the call center is staffed by human respondents and patients have the option to communicate with a human provider via the patient portal will be key for serving this notable patient cohort.

Sara Heath is an executive editor at Xtelligent Healthcare Media, where she covers patient engagement, healthcare policy and health IT.