TL;DR: More people are asking ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers to recommend a local therapist, then arriving already half-decided. You get picked the same way you get picked by Google: a site that plainly says who you help, what with, and where, written in the words clients use. Nobody knows the exact numbers yet, and anyone who quotes you one is guessing.
A client told her counsellor recently, “I found you on ChatGPT.” That is a real sentence therapists are starting to hear, and it is a slightly strange one. You did not put yourself on ChatGPT. Nobody lists themselves there. Yet somehow a worried person typed a question into a chatbot, and your name came back.
I keep hearing versions of this, and I understand why it unsettles people. For years the job was “get found on Google”. Now there is a second front, and it feels like one more thing to worry about at exactly the moment private-practice diaries go quiet over the summer. So let me take the pressure out of it. This is far less new, and far less technical, than it sounds.
What is actually happening when someone finds you through AI?
When a person asks ChatGPT, Google’s AI answers, or a tool like Perplexity for “a counsellor near me who works with anxiety”, the tool does not know anything about therapy. It reads what is already published on the open web, picks the pages it can understand clearly, and stitches together an answer. Sometimes it names practices. Sometimes it links to a website. It is not making a professional judgement about who the best counsellor is. It is choosing the pages it can read and quote most confidently.
That last point is the whole thing, so let me say it plainly. These tools reward clarity. A page that states, in ordinary language, “I am a counsellor in Wells and I help people with anxiety and panic” is easy for a machine to read and repeat. A page that opens with a paragraph about the journey of self-discovery, and never quite says what you do or where, gives the machine nothing to hold on to. The same page that helps a real person decide is the page an AI tool can quote. There is no separate trick for the robots.
Is AI replacing directories like the Counselling Directory?
Not yet, and probably not soon. The counsellor and marketing writer Josephine Hughes looked at exactly this question and her verdict was measured: AI “isn’t replacing directories … but it is changing the way people search” (Is AI Replacing Therapy Directories?). That matches what I see. Directories still send enquiries. Google still sends more. AI is a third route opening up alongside them, not a wrecking ball swinging through the other two.
What has changed is how people phrase things. Instead of typing two or three keywords into a search box, they ask a full question, in full sentences, the way they would ask a knowledgeable friend. “Is it normal to feel anxious for no reason?” “What actually happens in a first counselling session?” The practices that answer those real questions somewhere on their site are the ones the tools find easiest to recommend. Hughes’ own advice to therapists is almost word for word what I would say: answer the questions clients actually ask, keep the site loading reasonably fast, use “headings, short paragraphs, bullet points” because “AI likes clarity”, and add something new now and again so the site looks active.
How many people really find a therapist this way? Nobody knows, and that matters
Here is the part where most articles quote you a frightening statistic. I am not going to, because there isn’t an honest one to give.
Nobody has measured how many people find a therapist specifically through ChatGPT or an AI answer. No such study exists that I have found. Anyone who tells you “AI now drives X per cent of therapy enquiries” has made the number up, and this audience is trained to spot that sort of thing.
What we do have is the wider picture, and it is genuinely striking. BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 45% of consumers had used ChatGPT and other AI tools for local recommendations, up from 6% the year before. That is a large jump in a single year, across all local businesses, not therapy specifically. So the direction is clear even if the therapy-sized number is not: more people are asking machines for local recommendations, and the trend is upward. Treat it as a reason to get your house in order calmly, not a reason to panic.
The two boring things that make it possible
When I look at why one site gets picked up by these tools and another doesn’t, it almost always comes down to two unglamorous things. Neither requires you to understand a word of code.
- Clear, human pages that answer real questions. One page that names your town and the problems you help with, written in the words a worried person would actually use at 11pm, not the words you would use to impress another therapist. This is the same page that helps you rank on Google, and I have written before about the one page most therapy websites are missing. If you have ever written a warm, plain answer to “what happens in the first session”, that page is doing double duty: it reassures a real person and it feeds an AI tool something clean to quote.
- The plumbing underneath, so a machine can read what you wrote. This is the invisible half. A site can be well written and still be hard for a machine to parse, because the technical signals that tell a crawler “this is a therapist, here is the location, here is the service” are missing. That is a settings job, not a reflection of your work.
I saw this plainly with a client of mine who has written a shelf-full of books in his specialist field. Genuinely good work, described well on his own site. Yet ask an AI tool for the well-known names in his field and his never came up, only his better-known peers. The words were all there. The machines simply could not read them properly, because the underlying structure was missing. We did not rewrite his content. We fixed the plumbing so what he had already written could be read and quoted. In most AI-visibility work the writing is already fine, and it is the wiring that needs sorting.
Be careful who you believe about your own website
One more thing, because it is about to matter more. As AI visibility becomes the thing everyone talks about, you will get pitches telling you your site is invisible, broken, or failing. Some will be right. Plenty will overstate it to make the sale.
I will hold my hands up: I once sent a client an audit that said his book pages had “no descriptions”. He emailed back, baffled, because they plainly did. He was right and I was wrong. I had leaned on a tool’s summary instead of checking his live pages myself. I corrected it, apologised, and reframed the real gap honestly: the writing was there, the machine-readable structure was not. The lesson stuck with me. Before you spend money on anyone promising to fix your AI visibility, ask them to show you, on your actual live pages, what is missing. A good answer points at specifics. A vague “your whole site needs redoing” is usually a sales script.
A short, calm checklist
If you want to do something about this without it eating your week, this is the order I would go in:
- Make sure your site has at least one clear page naming your town and the problems you help with, in plain language.
- Somewhere on the site, answer two or three real questions clients ask before they book. “What happens in the first session” is the best one to start with.
- Check the site loads reasonably quickly on a phone. Slow sites lose both people and machines.
- Leave the technical plumbing (structured data, the machine-readable settings) until the words are right. It matters, but it is the last 20%, not the first.
- Ignore anyone quoting you a precise figure for AI-driven enquiries. It does not exist.
None of this is a scramble. It is the same steady, honest work that has always made a small practice findable, pointed at one more place people now look. If you want the ground-level version of that work, I have written a plain-English SEO guide for therapists that covers where to start, including getting your Google Business Profile set up properly.
This is roughly what I do for clients too. If the writing on your site is already good and you just want the technical plumbing checked and fixed so the AI tools can read it, that is a small, defined job rather than a rebuild. It is the AI Search Visibility Setup I offer through GrowPath, and it sits alongside the ordinary website work I do at RTWD. If you would rather just talk it through first, you are welcome to book a free 30-minute chat. No pressure, no pitch, and I will tell you honestly if I think you do not need it. For what it is worth, RTWD was named Best Web Design Service in Somerset at the Southern Enterprise Awards 2021, though the more useful proof is that my own local pages are the ones the search tools already find.
Frequently asked questions
How do clients find a therapist through ChatGPT?
They ask the tool a full question, such as “a counsellor near me who works with anxiety”, and it reads the open web to build an answer. It does not have a private list of therapists. It picks the pages it can read and understand most clearly, and sometimes names or links to a practice. So you are found through AI the same way you are found through Google: by having clear, plainly written pages that state who you help, what with, and where. There is no separate listing to join and nothing to sign up for. A site written for a real, worried person is exactly the site an AI tool can quote confidently.
Do I need to do anything special to be recommended by AI tools?
Not really, and that is the reassuring part. The work that makes a page easy for a person to understand is the same work that makes it easy for a machine to read. Name your town and your specialisms in plain words, answer the real questions clients ask before booking, and keep the site reasonably fast and up to date. There is no trick, no secret setting, and no monthly product you must buy. The only genuinely technical part is the machine-readable “plumbing” underneath the site, and that is a settings job for later, once the writing itself is clear.
Is AI going to replace directories like the Counselling Directory?
Not for the foreseeable future. The counsellor and marketing writer Josephine Hughes examined this and concluded AI “isn’t replacing directories … but it is changing the way people search”. Directories still generate enquiries, Google still generates more, and AI is a third route opening up alongside them rather than a replacement. What has actually changed is how people phrase their search: full questions in plain sentences instead of two or three keywords. The practical response is not to abandon your directory profile, but to make sure your own website answers real client questions clearly, so it works well across all three routes at once.
How many people find a therapist using AI?
Nobody knows, and it is worth being honest about that. No study has measured how many people find a therapist specifically through ChatGPT or an AI answer. Anyone quoting you a precise figure for therapy is guessing. What we do know is the wider trend: BrightLocal’s 2026 survey found 45% of consumers had used AI tools for local recommendations, up from 6% the year before, across all local businesses. So the direction is clearly upward, even though the therapy-sized number does not exist. Treat that as a calm reason to get your website clear, not a reason to panic about a statistic nobody can actually cite.
Someone said my website is invisible to AI. Should I believe them?
Be cautious. As AI visibility becomes a talking point, some pitches will overstate problems to close a sale. Before spending any money, ask them to show you, on your actual live pages, exactly what is missing and why. A trustworthy answer points at specifics: a missing type of page, absent structured data, unclear headings. A vague “your whole site needs redoing” is usually a sales script rather than a diagnosis. Often the writing on a site is perfectly good and only the technical structure needs attention, which is a much smaller and cheaper job than a full rebuild. Get a second opinion if anything feels like pressure.