Before someone calls your practice now, there’s a good chance they’ve already had a conversation about you. You just weren’t in it.

More people are using AI search to get recommendations for local businesses, including you, their local therapy practice. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode to help them find a therapist nearby, the answer they get becomes their first impression of your practice. You can’t control what the tool says. You can make sure what it draws from is accurate and complete, and you can be ready for the person who shows up knowing only what the tool told them.

The shift happened fast. In BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 45 percent of U.S. consumers said they’d used an AI tool to get local business recommendations in the past year. The year before, it was 6 percent. AI is now the third most-used tool for finding a local business, behind only Google and Facebook.

That research covers local businesses in general, and nobody has published a good number yet on how many people use AI to find a therapist specifically. But most people want a therapist close to home, so how people search locally is exactly the behavior that matters to us.

How is an AI tool different from every other middleman between you and a new client?

Practices have always had middlemen. Insurance panels decide who’s in network. Directories decide how your profile looks and where it lands. Referral sources decide who gets mentioned. Owners have learned to work with all of them.

Every one of those middlemen hands over information and steps back. A directory listing sits there and waits to be read. The person scrolls, compares, and decides for themselves.

AI talks back. It answers follow-up questions. It responds to how the person phrases things, and it shapes what they think while they’re still deciding whether to reach out at all. It also tends to tell people what it thinks they want to hear. No middleman in this industry has ever done that before.

“AI is interactive. It shapes what a person thinks while they’re still deciding whether to reach out. No middleman has ever done that before.”

Now think about who’s on the other end of that conversation. Often it’s someone who is struggling, who has been working up to this for a while, and who is typing their worry into a chat box at eleven at night. The tool will give them facts, filtered through whatever they asked. What it can’t give them is the feeling that someone understood them. That’s the part of your practice that actually earns the call, and right now it has to survive a middleman that doesn’t carry it.

What does AI search draw from when it describes a therapy practice?

An AI answer about your practice is built from what already exists about you online. Google’s own documentation on AI features and your website says AI Overviews and AI Mode may run what it calls a “query fan-out,” issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources to assemble a response. Google also says there are no special requirements to appear in those answers beyond being indexed and eligible in Search.

In plain terms, the tool is pulling from three places:

• Your own pages, including whatever they say, and whatever they leave out.
• What other sites say about you, including reviews, directory profiles, and mentions.
• Whether your content answers the questions people actually ask, in the words they actually use.

None of that is new. Good search work has always depended on it. What’s new is that the tool now reads all of it and summarizes it for a person who may never look at the original. That’s the work we now call GEO, or AI search optimization, and the summary is only as good as the material it has to work with.

What happened when people found Beacon through AI?

Something started happening on our own sales calls that we couldn’t explain at first.

Ken, my business partner, runs most of Beacon’s discovery calls. Over the past several months, he kept coming back with the same comment. A surprising number of people would get on the call and ask, “Do you even do mental health marketing?”

Honestly, we were surprised! Mental and behavioral health marketing is pretty much all our website talks about. It’s on the homepage. It’s on nearly every page. How did you not know that’s what we specialize in?

So Ken and I went back to see how the people asking that question had found us. Most of them had come in through an AI tool.

Here’s our theory, and I want to be clear it’s a theory we’re still testing. We are surmising that many of those prospects talked to the tool instead of reading our website. The tool recommended us because we specialize in what they were looking for. But what it handed them was a narrow slice of who we are. If they visited the site at all, it was probably just long enough to grab a phone number or fill out a form. So they arrived with a recommendation and almost none of the context behind it.

“They were almost blinded to the results, because AI was the intermediary instead of them doing the research themselves.”

The research on this is early, but it points the same way. In Yext’s 2026 Consumer Search Behaviors Report, a March 2026 survey of 1,120 U.S. adults, 62 percent of people who got a local recommendation from AI said they searched Google right afterward. Only 58 percent said they visited the business’s website directly. BrightLocal found that 88 percent of AI users say they fact-check what the tool tells them, and most double-check against reviews.

So people are verifying. They’re just not necessarily verifying on your pages. And I think there’s something underneath that. When you do your own research, you trust it more because you did it. When a tool does it for you, you get the answer without the confidence, and you end up asking the question again.

Now picture that in your practice. Someone calls and asks whether you offer evening appointments, or whether you work with couples, or what a first session looks like. Your team has heard it a hundred times, and it’s on the website. The person asking may never have seen the website.

Where did Beacon get this wrong?

I’ll be the first to admit we’ve had our own blind spot here.

When we looked at which questions AI tools answer with Beacon in the response, we showed up when someone asked which agency to hire. We were mostly missing when practice owners asked how to do the work, the practical, day-to-day questions like how a therapy clinic attracts more new clients online.

We had been answering the questions we thought mattered. Owners were typing different ones.

“Everyone can miss the forest for the trees sometimes. We all need to listen to what our clients are actually asking, and not just what we in the industry think is important.”

That’s a common risk for any business owner, and it’s exactly where an agency should be helping its clients. It was a good reminder for me that we aren’t immune to it. If it can happen to a team that thinks about search all day, it can happen to a practice whose owner is also seeing clients all day.

How much of what AI search says about a therapy practice does the owner actually own?

You can’t control AI. I want to be straight about that, because a lot of people are selling the idea that you can. Nobody gets to decide how a tool phrases its answer or what it chooses to emphasize for a particular person on a particular night.

What you can do is make sure, to the best of your ability, that the information about your practice on the web is as accurate and comprehensive as possible. That’s the owner’s job, and it’s a different job from the vendor’s. Your marketing partner can build the pages and manage the listings. You’re the one who knows whether what’s out there actually describes your practice.

A few places to start:

• Ask the tools yourself. Type the questions a prospective client would ask about practices like yours in your area. See whether you show up and how you’re described. Do it again in a few months.
• Check what other sites say about you. Your Google Business Profile, your directory listings, and your reviews should all tell the same accurate story.
• Listen to your front desk. The questions your team answers every week are the questions people are typing. If your website doesn’t answer them clearly, the tool can’t either.

If you want to see how we approach this for practices, our mental health marketing work starts in the same place.

What should happen when someone arrives knowing only what the tool told them?

When someone asks Ken whether we do mental health marketing, he answers the way he always has. Yes, absolutely, we do, and here’s a little of our history. The answer hasn’t changed. We just give it more often now.

What made that easy is how our discovery calls already worked. They’re mostly about the person on the other end: their story, their history, their why, what they’re trying to accomplish. We spend very little time talking about ourselves unless we’re answering their questions. So when someone shows up knowing only what a tool said, nothing breaks. We were going to start with them anyway.

That’s the part I’d want every practice owner to take from this. The tool can make the introduction. It can’t make the person feel understood. That job still belongs to whoever answers the phone or replies to the form, and now that first conversation has to do some of the work the person’s own research used to do.

“Marketing is human-to-human connection, not conversion. The conversions follow when you get the connection right.”

So if someone asks a question your website already answers, answer it warmly. They may not have seen your website. And being found only matters if someone catches the inquiry when it comes in. We wrote about that side of it in The Lead You Never Called Back and in our piece on what’s actually behind your practice’s contact form.

We’re still learning what this shift means, for Beacon and for the practices we work with. Anybody who tells you they’ve got it all figured out is probably trying to sell you something. What I do know is that AI search is now writing the first impression of your therapy practice. The best response is making sure it has the right material, and then showing up as a real person when someone reaches out.

What’s the question people keep asking your practice that your website already answers?