Something has quietly shifted for mental health provider websites over the past year. New sites that once reliably grew organic traffic by 40% are now averaging closer to 20%. Impressions are softer. Clicks are harder to earn. And the strategies that worked eighteen months ago are producing diminishing returns. This isn't a reflection of your practice — it's a reflection of how AI has fundamentally changed the way people search for mental health care.
Across mental health provider websites, organic traffic growth has measurably slowed. Sites that previously saw 40% increases in search traffic following a new launch or SEO investment are now tracking closer to 20% growth — and that trend is consistent across both impressions and clicks. It's not a one-site anomaly. It's a pattern.
The culprit is largely AI-powered search. Tools like Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity now intercept the kinds of searches mental health patients use most in the early stages of their journey — "what is CBT," "signs of burnout," "difference between a therapist and psychiatrist" — and deliver summarized answers directly on the search results page. Users get what they need without ever clicking through to your site.
This is called zero-click search, and mental health content is among the most vulnerable content categories on the internet. Google classifies health content as YMYL — Your Money or Your Life — meaning it's held to the highest accuracy standards. That same classification makes it prime material for AI summaries. The very credibility that makes your content worth reading is what makes AI confident enough to summarize it.
The result: impressions may hold steady or even rise, but clicks are increasingly staying on the results page. Your content is being seen. It's just not being visited.
Not all content is equally affected — and the pattern of what's holding up is instructive. Based on consistent observation across mental health provider sites, two categories are outperforming everything else right now: provider bio pages and hyper-specific blog content.
Provider pages — dedicated pages for individual clinicians with their credentials, specialties, modalities, and clinical approach — continue to perform well because they answer questions AI simply cannot. When someone searches "EMDR therapist accepting new patients in Chicago" or "IFS therapist for attachment trauma near me," there is no AI summary that can answer that. It's a transactional, local, specific query that requires a real human in a real location. Clinician pages that are optimized for local SEO and that surface high-traffic credentials like EMDR, IFS, DBT, and SFBT consistently rank and convert.
Hyper-specific blog content follows a similar logic. A post titled "What to Expect in Your First IFS Session in a Trauma-Informed Practice" will outperform "What is IFS Therapy" every time — because the former is specific enough that AI won't summarize it, and a real patient searching that phrase is much closer to booking an appointment.
Service pages, while still important for site architecture and local SEO, are highly competitive and generate less search traffic than provider-specific or niche blog content. They remain essential as conversion pages, but they're not where new organic traffic is being won right now.
Here's something worth understanding about how AI Overviews are currently working in the mental health space: for organic searches about specific providers, Psychology Today is consistently being cited as a primary source. When someone searches for a therapist by name or specialty, Google's AI is largely pulling that information from Psychology Today's directory rather than from the practice's own website.
This creates a real tension. On one hand, Psychology Today remains a meaningful tool for boosting your web presence — being listed there still carries authority signals that benefit your overall SEO. On the other hand, if a prospective patient runs a generalized search for a specific specialty — say, "somatic therapist for chronic pain" — your Psychology Today listing is far more likely to surface in an AI Overview than your own website. Your site isn't being served up. Their platform is.
The implication is clear: owning your own credentialed, well-optimized web presence is more important than ever, even as directories like Psychology Today siphon some of that visibility. The goal is to make your site specific enough, local enough, and credential-rich enough that it captures the searches Psychology Today can't — the hyper-specific, long-tail, location-bound queries where your unique clinical identity is the differentiator.
Google evaluates health content through a framework called EEAT — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. For mental health providers operating in a post-AI search landscape, this framework is the single most important SEO concept to understand.
Experience means demonstrating direct, real-world clinical involvement. A licensed therapist writing about the therapeutic relationship brings something no AI-generated summary can replicate: hundreds of hours in the room with real clients. That firsthand experience should be visible in every piece of content — not just asserted, but evident in the specificity and texture of the writing.
Expertise means credentials must be visible, accurate, and specific. LPC, LCSW, PsyD, MD, PMHNP — these designations matter both to patients and to Google's quality raters. Every piece of content on your site should have a named, credentialed author. If your blog posts are published under "Admin" or list no author at all, that is a direct drag on your ability to rank in a YMYL content category. High-traffic credentials like EMDR certification and IFS training should be prominently featured on both bio pages and relevant blog content — they're what patients are actually searching for.
Authoritativeness is built through external recognition: Psychology Today listings, directory profiles, local press mentions, inclusion in therapist roundups, and citations from peer organizations. For group practices, this means actively building that external footprint for each clinician, not just the practice as a whole.
Trustworthiness encompasses your technical foundation — HTTPS, clear privacy policies, HIPAA-compliant contact forms — as well as content accuracy. For psychiatrists and prescribers, outdated clinical content isn't just an SEO liability. It's a patient safety issue. Content must be reviewed and updated regularly.
Private practice therapists have a natural EEAT advantage that most don't fully use. You are a specific, credentialed, real human — which is exactly what AI cannot be. Your most important SEO investment is a robust bio page that clearly names your modalities (EMDR, IFS, CBT, somatic work), the populations you serve, your licensure, and your location. Pair that with blog content that reflects your actual clinical perspective — not generic explainers, but posts that only you could write. That combination is genuinely hard to outrank.
Group practices and DSOs face a scale challenge: multiple clinicians, potentially multiple locations, and a content operation that can default to generic if not carefully managed. The fix is distributed authorship. Let individual clinicians own content in their specialty areas. Your trauma therapist's name should be on your EMDR content. Your child psychiatrist's credentials should lead your ADHD resources. Each clinician page should be optimized for local SEO with their specific credentials surfaced prominently. This creates an EEAT signal network that is genuinely difficult for competitors — or AI directories — to replicate.
Psychiatrists and prescribers occupy a uniquely authoritative position in the mental health ecosystem. Content about medication decisions, the biological basis of mental health conditions, or the integration of pharmacological and therapeutic approaches is something very few people are qualified to write credibly. That scarcity is a direct SEO advantage. Publish content that only an MD or PMHNP can write with authority — and make sure your credentials are impossible to miss.
One technical step worth taking immediately regardless of practice type: implement FAQ schema markup on your key pages. This structured data tag signals to Google's AI exactly where your questions and answers live, increasing the likelihood your content gets cited in AI Overviews rather than silently summarized from a competitor who did the work.
The era of easy, passive blog traffic for mental health providers is slowing. The era of intentional, credentialed, hyper-specific visibility is here. The practices that adapt — building content only they can write, optimizing for searches only they can answer — are the ones that will grow in this environment. Reach out if you'd like to talk through what that looks like for your practice specifically.
