How to get your private practice recommended by ChatGPT

Readable, verified and trusted

Every AI answer about local businesses rests on three things. Miss one and you drop out even when the other two are strong.

• Readable

  One page per specialty and one per modality, in the words people use. A fees page with the session rate in dollars. An insurance page naming the panels. A telehealth page naming the states. MedicalBusiness and FAQPage structured data.

• Verified

  The same name, address, phone, hours and specialty list on Psychology Today, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, your insurance panel directories and, if you use them, Zocdoc and Healthgrades. ChatGPT search runs on Bing, and Bing Places is the listing almost nobody has claimed.

• Trusted

  A full Psychology Today profile, a bio with your degree, licence and years in practice, referral relationships with local physicians, and a site touched this year.

Fix them in that order. A perfect directory profile pointing at a website an assistant cannot read still leaves you out.

The pages that get a practice named

AI answers questions, so your website has to hold the answers, on pages, in text a person could read out loud.

• One page per specialty

  Anxiety, depression, trauma, couples, teens, grief, ADHD. Say who you work with and how you work. Do not say what therapy will do for them.

• One page per modality

  CBT, EMDR, DBT, IFS. Who does EMDR near me is asked by name, and only a modality page answers it.

• A fees page

  The session rate, the session length, and the sliding scale policy if you have one. It is the page an assistant quotes.

• An insurance page

  The panels by name, whether you bill directly, what out of network reimbursement means, and whether you provide a superbill.

• Availability and first session pages

  Whether you are taking new clients and the usual wait, then a page on what happens in a first session: the paperwork, the length, the questions you ask.

Put the answer at the top of each page. Two or three sentences a reader, or a model, can lift whole and be right.

The directories AI reads for therapists

Start with Psychology Today. It is the single most cited directory in this category, and an incomplete profile there undoes a lot of good work elsewhere.

• Psychology Today

  Every field filled: concerns, modalities, licence type, fee, panels, states licensed, telehealth and new client status. Review it every quarter, because an out of date fee gets repeated word for word.

• Google Business Profile

  Categories, hours, the service list, and the questions section, which you can seed with what people ask when they call.

• Bing Places

  Twenty minutes of work, and ChatGPT search runs on Bing. The single most skipped item on the list.

• Insurance panel directories

  The provider directory of each carrier you are in network with. Does any therapist near me take my insurance gets answered from these records.

• Zocdoc and Healthgrades

  Identity and availability together. Keep the licence, fee and insurance details identical to your own site.

The job is not being everywhere. It is being identical everywhere. One old phone number is enough for an assistant to name a practice it is more sure about.

Telehealth, licences and the state question

Online therapist in my state is one of the most common questions in this category and one of the easiest to answer badly. A model will not guess where you are licensed. If your site does not say, you are not in that answer.

So name the states, on a page of their own, and repeat the list on Psychology Today. Say which platform you use and whether a first session can be online.

Reviews, ethics and claims to avoid

In most local industries the advice here is to ask for reviews. In this one it is the opposite. Most licensure boards and professional codes restrict soliciting testimonials from current clients, so a review request to somebody you are seeing is an ethics problem, not a marketing tactic. Do this instead: keep the Psychology Today profile detailed and current, ask local physicians, schools and other practices for referral relationships, and let the profiles and clear pages carry the weight reviews carry elsewhere.

If a review appears on its own, never confirm in public that somebody is a client and never mention their care in a reply. Confidentiality outranks the reply box.

Keep outcome language off the site entirely. No cure, no fix, no heal, no guaranteed relief, no success rate, no number of sessions to recovery. Write about the modalities you offer, who you work with, your credentials, your fees, the panels you take, your availability and what a first session involves.