I Googled myself, so you don't have to.

Every so often I type "therapistweb.design" into Google, half out of vanity, half as a diagnostic. If I'm going to tell clients to check what shows up when someone searches their practice, I should probably be willing to do it to myself first. So here's what actually came back, and why I think every therapist reading this should run the same experiment on their own name this week.

What used to show up

For a stretch, Google's cached title for this exact page read "WordPress Sites for Private Practice," a title I have never used, for a platform I don't build on, that just would not let go. Stale metadata, old snippet fragments, nothing sinister, just the kind of small technical rot that sits on a site quietly costing it credibility. That's fixed now. But it's exactly the kind of thing you don't catch unless you go look.

What shows up now

I ran two searches: my domain, and a more pointed "why should I work with Chad?" Both landed in Google's AI Mode, the conversational answer layer sitting above the traditional blue links. Here's roughly what came back.

That's not spin I wrote for Google to repeat back. That's Google's AI reading the site and describing it accurately, correct city, correct specialty, correct differentiation from Squarespace and Wix. The second search went further:

It even surfaced a testimonial, word for word, from a review sitting in this site's own structured data: "Chad built our whole group-practice site and I still get compliments on it, from clients and from other therapists asking who made it." That's Becca's review of Full Bloom Counseling Group's site, correctly attributed, correctly quoted, pulled straight out of the page's schema markup and handed to whoever asked.

Why this isn't luck

None of that happened by accident, and it isn't magic. It's the boring technical stuff: schema.org markup on every page (the site literally labels itself as a LocalBusiness, lists its services, tags its FAQ as an FAQPage), an llms.txt file that gives AI crawlers a plain-English summary instead of making them guess, real meta descriptions instead of Google scraping random footer text, and a sitemap that actually gets updated. Read the SEO service page for the full list. None of it is exotic. Almost nobody does all of it.

Now go do it to yourself

Open an incognito window and search your own practice name. Then try a more pointed version, "is [your name] a good therapist in [your city]," or whatever a nervous prospective client might actually type. Look at three things:

• Does the AI summary get your specialties right, or is it vague, outdated, or quietly wrong?
• Does your Google Business Profile show up with real hours and more than zero reviews, or does it look abandoned?
• Is there anything from three platforms ago (an old Psychology Today bio, a defunct Wix site) still outranking the site you're actually paying for?

If the answer to any of those is "I have no idea" or "oh no," that's not a personal failing, it's just a site that was never structured to be read by anything other than a human scrolling slowly. That part's fixable, and it's not a redesign, it's plumbing.

The blue links still matter. They're just not the only thing reading your site anymore.

If you want to know what an AI answer engine currently says about your practice, and whether that's something worth fixing, tell me about it and I'll actually go look, same as I did here.