Pharma’s digital front door is finally opening

For years, pharmaceutical companies across Europe and beyond have poured investment into their websites and social media channels, hoping to earn the attention and the trust of time-pressured healthcare professionals (HCPs). That investment is finally beginning to show measurable returns, with web and social among the very few channels to improve in the 2025 CXQ research. Yet just as the industry finds its footing, the ground is shifting again.

As AI-powered search and answer engines increasingly mediate how clinical information is discovered, the question facing pharma is no longer simply whether it publishes useful content. It is whether that content is credible, well-structured, connected and easy for both humans and machines to find and reuse. The bar is rising faster than many organisations realise and the response cannot be another cycle of periodic content refreshes. Meeting it will require a more deliberate, AI-ready operating model; one that treats content as a durable asset to be structured, connected and continuously optimised rather than produced based on a calendar.

Recent benchmarking research by DT Consulting (an Indegene company), drawing on its proprietary Global Digital Landscape Benchmark (GDLB) framework, examined 534 pharma-owned websites and social media assets. Spanning 15 leading global companies, eight countries (with the European markets covering the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain) and four therapy areas – cardiology, dermatology, respiratory and endocrinology – the study points to genuine but uneven progress.

For the first time, pharma’s web and social channels improved on every dimension the framework measures, with the overall digital experience (DX) score – a 0-100 measure of how well assets meet HCP needs across content strategy, channel experience and unification – rising from 49 to 58 year on year, enough to lift the industry from a Foundational to an Emerging level of digital maturity.

The context makes this shift significant. The majority of HCP interactions now take place in digital channels and the long-standing gap between them and traditionally strong field-based channels such as sales representative visits is narrowing. Alongside the GDLB assessment, DT Consulting’s Customer Experience Quotient (CXQ) – which measures HCP-reported experience – rose two points to 53 for web and social, one of the very few channels to improve as several traditional touchpoints stagnated or declined.

Websites drove the industry’s progress, improving across all three dimensions the research measures – content strategy, channel experience and unification – with gains visible in every region studied. Rather than functioning as static repositories, websites are increasingly designed to help HCPs find information, resources and practical support more efficiently.

Three qualities separate the strongest performers. The first is richer, more relevant content: disease information, disease management, patient stories, expert perspectives, medical news and independent education, refreshed on a faster publishing cadence and, importantly, more often co-created with HCPs, patients and external partners.

The second is a more advanced channel experience – intuitive navigation, behaviour-led personalisation, improved accessibility and a broader mix of easy-to-consume formats such as short articles, videos and infographics.

The third is unification: the connective tissue that routes HCPs smoothly between corporate and therapeutic assets rather than stranding them in disconnected silos. Crucially, excellence is defined by completeness, credibility, consistency and cadence – not by the sheer volume of content published.

Nowhere is the shift clearer than in HCP web portals, the gated destinations for registered HCPs. The research finds these evolving from opaque content libraries into open, service-oriented environments. Most notably, more than half of portals now offer substantial non-promotional, unbranded content before requiring a login – giving HCPs access to disease education, clinical-trial updates and expert perspectives without first hitting an authentication wall. This transparency reduces friction, respects HCPs’ time and helps establish trust earlier in the journey, positioning the portal as a practical partner rather than a promotional hub.

Portal experiences are also becoming markedly more user-centric. The share of portals personalising content based on user behaviour has doubled to a third and roughly 37% now capture HCP feedback through polls or surveys, embedding voice-of-the-customer measurement directly into the experience. Service functionality is expanding too, with more portals integrating call-centre access, inquiry forms and interactive tools, allowing HCPs to engage by phone, email or self-service. Accessibility, long neglected, is finally gaining overdue attention, aided in part by tightening regulatory expectations across the European Union.

Here the story splits by region. Social experience was flat in Europe year on year but fell eight points in the US – and beneath those totals, the pillars moved in opposite directions. Channel experiences improved in both regions, helped by richer visual formats. Content strategy, however, moved the other way – slipping modestly in Europe but dropping sharply in the US – and diverged markedly by platform and region, a sign that experience gains are not yet underpinned by consistently defined or scalable strategies.

The publishing landscape also became more constrained, with firms posting less frequently and co-creating less content with patients and HCPs. The fragmentation underlines how sensitive social strategies remain to external forces – regulatory, pricing and platform-level dynamics alike.

The European social media story is especially instructive. There, the decline in volume and frequency was partially offset by a rise in perceived trustworthiness, alongside more co-created content and better mechanisms for direct engagement – a deliberate shift from volume-driven strategies towards relationship-focused ones. It is a useful counterpoint to the assumption that more posts mean more impact. For European teams, the implication is strategic, not tactical: in a market defined by strict regulation, trust is built through consistency and co-creation, not cadence.

Perhaps the most consequential finding is that websites and social channels can no longer be treated as separate assets. HCPs move fluidly between them, discovering something in one place and exploring it further in another and they judge the experience as a whole rather than channel by channel. Yet this is precisely where the industry still falls short: no single company has achieved a differentiated experience across its entire portfolio and most firms’ assets diverge widely from one to the next.

Isolated pockets of excellence are no longer enough. The leaders of the next phase will not be those with the single strongest website or social channel, but those that connect them into one coherent whole – consistent in navigation, message and service and designed so that trust built in one place carries into the next.

Winning human attention is no longer the whole game. As AI-powered search and answer engines become common gateways to clinical information, a firm’s open web content; its public sites and the unbranded, pre-login layers of its web portals must remain discoverable and citable in environments where machines increasingly do the finding. The very qualities that make for a better HCP experience – scientific depth, transparent evidence, clear structure and connected content – are precisely those that make that content easier for AI systems to interpret, surface and cite.

For pharma leaders, there is a need to focus on these three key aspects:

1. Treat the website and the HCP portal in particular, as a genuine front door: audit how AI systems currently surface your brands and therapy areas and structure content; through consistent metadata, structured data and canonical pathways to be retrievable, interpretable and citable.

2. Anchor web content strategy in scientific authority and transparency, aligning medical, regulatory and communications teams around a shared approach that prizes integrity over promotional volume and make personalisation, accessibility and findability foundational capabilities rather than differentiators.

3. Recognise that social media must answer to a different logic; largely invisible to AI crawlers, its value lies in human trust, not machine discovery, therefore use it for its value in creating a dialogue, co-creation and lasting relationship rather than targeting raw reach.

These three requirements don’t demand wholesale reinvention; true impact and value can be reached through ensuring consistency across the whole portfolio, in what the best assets already do in isolation. The shift underway is subtle but decisive: on the open web, discoverability now follows credibility, not the other way round.

Authority can no longer be engineered through volume or search tactics; it has to be earned, in ways both HCPs and the machines that increasingly read for them can trust. The firms that grasp this now will not merely be found; they will be the ones HCPs – and the system answering on their behalf – have reason to believe.

Hannah Price is Senior Principal, DT Consulting – an Indegene company