Asha Plans More Growth For Referral Site Where You Live Matters In 2026

The American Seniors Housing Association’s senior living education and referral platform, Where You Live Matters, has added thousands of communities to its database. Now, the site and ASHA are taking that growth and momentum into 2026.

ASHA relaunched and rebuilt the Where You Live Matters site in 2024 to better connect consumers with operators and provide more in-depth information through videos and blog posts, according to ASHA President and CEO David Schless. Though the referral platform has the same goal as operators do – getting residents to move into the right senior living communities – it also includes an educational component, an important element to inform and attract the next generation of older adults.

“There’s an element of Where You Live Matters that is going to be fundamentally different than what any of our members are going to do with their websites,” Schless told Senior Housing News.

The site’s organizers have worked to build a community locator tool for consumers in an effort to help the “do-it-yourselfers” connect directly to communities. That has led to a steady push of working with operators and communities to validate their offerings on the site. At latest count, Where You Live Matters has over 5,200 communities verified on the platform.

The platform is continuing to evolve in its approach this year, and its backers are experimenting with a series of tests and pilots in Dallas and Cleveland, Ohio to test the effectiveness of digital advertising. The site also is conducting a year-long campaign in partnership with the Wisconsin Assisted Living Association to incorporate offline media, according to Robert Grammatica, founder of Longevity Point Advisors, LLC, and who helps lead marketing strategies for Where You Live Matters.

“We’re going to pick a couple of other big areas that prove that when we run paid media, consumers respond,” Grammatica said. “Our conversion rates off the site are probably five times what any community would get alone. It’s over 10% … We don’t gate it, so we’re passing through traffic to the communities themselves.”

Growing the platform

Where You Live Matters’ pilots this year have included testing digital advertising and advertising on Meta in two markets. Stephanie Harris, CEO of St. Louis-based Arrow Senior Living and executive board member of ASHA, said the tests combined paid search with generalized information about the senior living industry and see if it could outpace the performance of paid locators.

In Dallas, where community leadership verified the information on the platform, the pilot achieved a 47% community validation rate – the amount of communities that have verified their listing out of the total communities in a market – among the roughly 400 listed properties in the market. A similar pilot in the Cleveland-Akron market increased community validation for communities there to 72%. Following the more concentrated verification effort, conversion rates increased at a rate of two and a half times.

“As long as everyone is validated in that market, we will see it drive an increase in results,” Harris said.

Operators with verified communities on Where You Live Matters, including Arrow Senior Living, saw a 24% conversion rate of leads to move-ins that were directly attributable to the website over a 90 day period. Most of those leads were independent living prospects where the seniors were looking for themselves, rather than coming from an adult child.

“I think anytime the industry can improve our messaging directly to seniors and shift away this reliance on purely us as a need driven solution, we’re going to see a larger result. We will start to turn the tide of winning this PR campaign that senior living can be an aspirational decision, not just that a choice of need,” Harris said. 

ASHA has made improving and growing the website a formal part of its five-year plan, according to Grammatica.

Now, ASHA is implementing its test in Wisconsin, which aims to track data from across the entire state rather than any given market, and will tie in traditional printed ad campaigns as part of its efforts. Alongside the campaign, ASHA is working to add more communities to the site through a validation process, which Schless said is being done company by company, and there is no cost to operators to have their information on the site and is meant for the industry at large, not just ASHA members.

“If you’re an operator and you get 10 move-ins where you’re not paying a month’s rent … that’s going right to your bottom line,” Schless said.

A platform in the time of AI

ASHA is keeping AI overviews well in mind when it comes to Where You Live Matters due to their rising prevalence in online searches. According to Harris, the organization is tracking search metrics through traditional methods including Google results and ChatGPT, but targeting metrics will shift as search behavior does.

One of the hopes, at least in regard to ChatGPT, is that the more relevance to the site, it will cite it more frequently as a reference in search inquiries.

“That’s going to only reinforce our initiative,” Harris said. “I think winning at searches is the first game, because that’s where our consumers are going … the relevance of us in a traditional search will help reinforce our relevance and ChatGPT search, as we see more of our consumers using that as a source.”

Grammatica added ASHA is performing regular audits focused on zero-click AI overviews. So far, Where You Live Matters gets mentions in Google overviews due to the historical nature of the site being used as an educational tool for the better part of a decade, particularly in searches where prospects and consumers are looking to learn about differing levels of care.

As such, ASHA is exploring ways on how these overviews can be better utilized and leveraged for the platform’s benefit.

Looking ahead, ASHA is striving to get more communities registered and verified on the site to benefit not just themselves, but the industry as a whole.

“The more the industry participates, the more it benefits and that local communities benefit,” Grammatica said. “There isn’t one single owner-operator or investor that we’ve talked to that doesn’t think we should do this … this is one of those things where the urging crowds out the important. It often gets dropped to lower in priority.”

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