We are on calls with therapists every week, and at this point we can set a timer. Somewhere around minute six, someone says it:

“I’m paying for Psychology Today and I’m getting nothing out of it.”

We hear it constantly. Practices that used to get eight or ten inquiries a month from that profile are now getting one. Maybe two. And they’re still paying every month for the privilege.

So here’s the advice nobody expects from us: keep paying for it.

Not because it’s going to start sending you clients again. It probably isn’t. Keep it for a completely different reason, and it’s one almost nobody has explained to therapists yet.

The reason is ChatGPT

Picture someone at 11pm, sitting on the edge of their bed. Instead of Googling, they open ChatGPT and type find me a trauma therapist in Nashville.

It answers. With actual names.

Where does it get those names? Not from wandering the internet at random. It pulls from a handful of sources it already considers reliable, and directories are near the top of that list. Psychology Today is a big, well-organized, long-established site full of clean, structured information about therapists.

AI tools love that. It’s exactly the kind of source they reach for.

So your Psychology Today profile has quietly changed jobs. It used to be a place clients found you. Now it’s a place machines learn about you before recommending you to clients.

Same subscription. Completely different function. And that’s why cancelling it right now would be a mistake.

Here’s the part that should bother you

We audit practices for this, and we keep finding the same pattern.

One practice we looked at recently: four clinicians, full caseloads, genuinely good writing on their website. We checked what AI tools were saying about them.

ChatGPT brought them up three separate times. Google’s AI mentioned them once.

Not one of those mentions came from their website. Every single one came from Psychology Today.

Their PT profile listed the license number, the degree, the years in practice, the EMDR certification. Their own bio page listed none of it.

They paid someone to build that website. They pay Psychology Today monthly. Guess which one ChatGPT is listening to?

Cool. Cool cool cool.

The four that matter most

Here’s where we’ve landed after doing this over and over. For therapists, there are four places worth keeping current. Get these four right and you have a genuinely strong foundation for showing up in AI answers.

1. Psychology Today. The one you’re already paying for. AI tools trust it and read it.

2. Google Business Profile. Your Maps listing. This one does double duty, since it’s also what decides whether you appear in local searches at all. We wrote a whole piece on that here.

3. Yelp. We know. Nobody wants to think about Yelp. But it’s old, enormous, and AI tools treat it as a reliable source for local businesses. Yours probably already exists whether you made it or not, which is worth knowing.

4. Bing Places. The one nobody has done. Bing is the search engine sitting behind ChatGPT, so a complete Bing listing is about as direct a line to AI as you can get. It’s free, and if your Google profile is in decent shape you can copy it straight over in under half an hour.

Plus one, your specialty’s professional directory. EMDRIA if you’re EMDR certified. Or the equivalent body for whatever you’re credentialed in. These are smaller, but they’re authoritative and specific, which is exactly what gets picked up.

The boring thing that makes or breaks all of it

Now the part that sounds too simple to matter, and matters more than anything else on this page.

Your name, address, and phone number have to be identical everywhere.

Not similar. Identical.

This is the single most common problem we find. A practice will have:

• “Jane Smith, LCSW” on Psychology Today and “Smith Counseling Services” on Google
• One phone number on the website, a different one in the footer, and a third on an old directory listing
• An address written as “Suite 200” one place and “Ste. 200” another
• An old office address still live somewhere from a move in 2021

Every one of those inconsistencies is a small reason for a machine to get confused about whether you’re one business or several. And when these systems get confused, they don’t guess. They go find someone whose information is clean and recommend that person instead.

What to check on each of the four:

• Practice name spelled exactly the same way. Pick one version and use it everywhere.
• Phone number the same on all of them, and matching what’s on your website.
• Address formatted the same way, including the suite abbreviation. If you’re virtual or keep your address private, that’s fine, just be consistent about how you handle it.
• Your credentials. License, degree, certifications, years in practice. These belong on every profile and on your own website.
• A real description of what you actually treat. Not “warm, supportive environment.” Say the actual specialties in plain words.

Set aside an hour with all four open in tabs and fix it in one pass. It is tedious and it is the highest-value tedious hour you’ll spend on this.

What we’re not going to tell you

We’re not going to hand you a statistic, because there isn’t a good one yet. No study has measured how often an AI recommendation turns into a booked session. Anyone quoting you a hard number on that is making it up.

What we do have: clients telling us, unprompted, that someone found them through ChatGPT. Not a lot of them. But it’s happening, and a year ago it wasn’t. 

So we think this matters and we think it’s growing. We don’t think it’s the whole game, and anyone telling you to panic about AI is selling something.

The good news is that everything above also helps you in regular Google search. Consistent information, real credentials, clear descriptions of what you treat. None of it is speculative. It’s just being findable, which was always the job.

One thing for whoever built your site

If your website was built on a template platform, ask whoever manages it to confirm that AI tools aren’t being blocked from reading your site. Some older therapy website templates came with that setting turned on by default and nobody ever changed it back. If it’s on, none of the rest matters, because the door is locked.

That’s a one-line question to send. Worth sending.

(And if “ask whoever manages my site” made you sigh, we have opinions about that situation too.)

Where to start

• Don’t cancel Psychology Today. Update it instead.
• Pick one version of your practice name and make all four match it.
• Put your credentials on your own website, not just your directory profiles.
• Claim your Bing listing at bingplaces.com. Thirty minutes, and almost nobody else has done it.

If you want to know where your site stands before you touch any of it, we built a free scanner that checks it and tells you what’s working. No email required, no call, no personal data. If your site is fine, it says so, which is more than most free audits are willing to admit.

Run your site through it here.

Curious how we handle this for practices? That’s over here.