Therapist Search Report

This week’s report is arriving a day late because we were busy launching something fun -- our Advent Calendar for Therapists! If you haven’t seen it yet, we’ll be publishing a new activity or game every day through December 24th, just for therapists. It was a blast to make, and we hope it brings some joy (and maybe a little stress relief) as the year winds down:

Now, onto the data -- and onto one of the more concerning newcomers we’ve had to evaluate: Vitadox. It has technically appeared around the edges of our dataset before, but this week it jumped over 2 points and is now visible enough to warrant serious attention.

Based on what we can tell, Vitadox may have hundreds of thousands of therapist profiles. That number is difficult to verify because of how the site is structured, but even a conservative estimate puts its scale far above most other directories. Each profile contains multiple ads -- sometimes stacked and overlayed in ways that make it clear the primary goal is ad revenue, not helping clients find accurate information about a therapist.

What stands out most (in a not-great way) is what happens when you try to “claim” your free profile. The button immediately prompts you to download a browser extension. That's a huge red flag. We strongly recommend therapists avoid installing anything until more is understood. (Honestly, from a security standpoint, any website that abruptly prompts you to install an extension should be avoided.)

(Note that after dismissing the extension download page, it appears to then let you maybe submit a form to claim your profile, so the extension download might not be a requirement.)

Some directories are simply messy or out of date. This one may require deeper investigation to fully understand how it operates, how it gathers its data, and what that browser extension is actually doing. We’ll keep digging.

Among the top domains, the leaderboard remains steady: LinkedIn, Psychology Today, and Facebook are still the core three. But there were a few interesting shifts underneath the surface. Instagram saw a noticeable jump, while Sharecare and npidb.org also climbed modestly. Meanwhile, therapyfinder.com continued its strong momentum over the past month.

Vitadox hasn’t cracked the top 30 yet, but this week’s movement shows it’s inching closer.

The biggest movers this week were instagram.com and vitadox.com. On the downside, therapysolutionsforkids.com fell after its surprise debut last month.

These smaller moves don’t change the overall landscape much, but they do show how quickly mid-tier sites can shuffle as new directories surface -- especially large-scale ones like Vitadox.

The top positions chart remains almost identical to previous weeks: Psychology Today still dominates the #1 ranking at 48.1% of all first-position results, with Mind Diagnostics and LinkedIn following in predictable patterns.

This week’s standout theme is simple: directories like this will keep appearing.

When public data exists, and when SEO rewards massive volumes of pages, it’s almost inevitable. Vitadox is just the latest example -- a site that may contain hundreds of thousands of therapist profiles that's monetized heavily with ads.

You can’t control whether these sites exist. But you can control how your professional identity shows up online. Two steps:

1. Track your search results regularly. When a site lists your information without permission, you should know. If you want help, we offer a free automated report that handles this for you: https://therapistsearchreport.com/personal-report/.

2. Build and maintain the profiles you control. Your website, your LinkedIn page, your chosen directories -- that’s your offense. Lock in your top result positions and a site like Vitadox living on page 4 or 5 won't matter too much.

That's it for this week. We hope you'll check out our recently-launched Advent Calendar for Therapists and we'll see you next week!

And stay warm if you're somewhere (like here) that just got bombarded with snow.

Jon