Patients ask ChatGPT for a psychiatrist who is accepting new patients. The answer is rarely the office with the shortest wait.
A patient's PCP has been refilling her sertraline for two years and finally says she needs a psychiatrist. She calls four offices from her insurer's list. Two have closed panels, one quotes a five-month wait, one number is disconnected. Then she asks Gemini "psychiatrist accepting new patients in Grand Rapids" and gets three names. Whichever practice she reaches first gets a patient who will stay for years of follow-ups.
TrustPractice runs 25 of those searches for your practice across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and reports whether you were named, which practices and telepsychiatry companies were named instead, and what the platforms are saying about each.
No signup. No credit card. Results in 3–4 minutes. The form is at the bottom of this page.
What patients actually ask AI about psychiatrists
Psychiatry searches are about access and medication before anything else. Patients ask who is accepting new patients, who does medication management, who prescribes for ADHD, and who takes their plan. They name the diagnosis when they have one: bipolar, OCD, PTSD, treatment-resistant depression. Many do not know the difference between a psychiatrist and a therapist and ask for a psychiatrist when they mean meds. TMS and ketamine queries come from patients who have failed several trials. These are drawn from the query set we run for psychiatry practices:
- psychiatrist accepting new patients in Grand Rapids, MI
- psychiatrist for medication management in Grand Rapids, MI
- ADHD psychiatrist in Grand Rapids, MI
- psychiatrist that takes Blue Cross Blue Shield in Grand Rapids, MI
- I need my psych meds managed in Grand Rapids, MI. Who should I see?
- psychiatrist for TMS therapy in Grand Rapids, MI
Six of the 25 queries we run for psychiatry practices, shown here for Grand Rapids, MI. Your scan uses your city.
Why psychiatry practices get left out of the answer
Psychiatry practices get skipped for reasons that track the field's access problem more than its clinical reputation.
New-patient status is not on anyone's website
"Accepting new patients" is the single most common query in this field and almost no practice states the answer in text. Panels open and close monthly and the site never changes. The platforms then fall back to the accepting-new-patients flag on Healthgrades and Zocdoc, which is often years old, or default to the health system's behavioral health intake line because at least that number is published.
Med management and therapy are never spelled out
Most practices describe themselves as "comprehensive psychiatric care." A patient asking for medication management, an ADHD evaluation, or a psychiatrist who also does therapy gets matched to whichever practice uses those exact words on a page. NP-led practices with a collaborating psychiatrist rarely explain the model, and controlled-substance policies (no stimulants at the first visit, no benzodiazepine refills) sit in the intake PDF where nothing can read them.
The national telepsychiatry companies own the online queries
For "online psychiatrist" and "telepsychiatry in Michigan" the platforms name Talkiatry, Brightside, and LifeStance, because each has a crawlable state-by-state page that says exactly that. A local practice that does most of its follow-ups by video but never writes "telepsychiatry" on its site is absent from those answers.
What your score measures
Your grade comes from four factors, each measured against what the three platforms actually said about psychiatrists in your city.
Discoverability
How many of the 25 psychiatry queries returned your practice. Practices usually surface on "best psychiatrist" and miss the access, medication, insurance, and telepsychiatry queries, which is where nearly all the new-patient intent sits.
Prominence
Whether you were the first name or listed after the health system and a national telehealth company. In markets with a dominant system, its outpatient psychiatry clinic is often the default first answer and independent practices compete for the second slot.
Accuracy
Whether the platforms have your prescribers, panels, and services right. We see "not accepting new patients" for practices that opened their panel months ago, a psychiatrist who left still listed as the lead, and "does not treat ADHD" for practices that do stimulant management every day.
Sentiment
How the AI characterizes you. Psychiatry descriptions echo review language about whether the prescriber listened, how long appointments run, and refill responsiveness. We show the exact phrasing the platforms are repeating so you can see which reviews are shaping it.
What the action plan looks like for a psychiatry practice
Every full report ends with a prioritized action plan. For a psychiatry practice it tends to include items like these:
Publish a new-patients page that answers the access question directly
Create /new-patients that says plainly if the practice is accepting new patients, for which prescribers, the typical wait to a first appointment, and whether the intake can be done by video. Add your controlled-substance policy in plain text. Date the page and update it whenever the panel changes. This is the fastest fix on the list and it moves the highest-volume query in the field.
Build service pages for medication management, ADHD, and any interventional treatment
Add /services/medication-management, /services/adhd-evaluation, /services/telepsychiatry, and, if you offer them, /services/tms and /services/spravato. Each should say who provides the service (psychiatrist, PMHNP, PA), what a first visit involves, and which diagnoses you treat. Put Grand Rapids and "telepsychiatry in Michigan" in text on the site, not in an image.
Reconcile every prescriber across Healthgrades, Zocdoc, and Psychology Today
List every prescriber including nurse practitioners and physician assistants, remove anyone who left, and set the new-patient and telehealth flags correctly on all three. Confirm the insurance list matches your site (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Priority Health, Medicare, Meridian and Molina for Medicaid). These directories are what the platforms read for access queries.
Illustrative. Your report's items are generated from the specific queries you missed and the specific errors the platforms made about your practice.
Questions psychiatrists ask us
Yes. Patients ask for a psychiatrist because that is the word they know, and the platforms name PMHNP-led practices for those queries when the practice describes medication management clearly. The report shows whether you are being named at all and whether the AI describes your model accurately, which is a frequent accuracy finding for NP-led groups.
It depends on how long the panel will stay closed. If you reopen in a few months, the scan tells you what the platforms will say the day you do, and the 60-day re-scan lands around the time you need it. If you are closed indefinitely, the accuracy section still matters, since being recommended to patients you cannot see creates calls your front desk has to turn away.
Because the insurance directory gives them twenty names and no way to choose. The next step for many patients is asking an AI which of those twenty is good and who is actually taking new patients. If the answer names two practices and yours is not one, the insurance directory listing did not help. The scan shows how often that is happening in your market.
The psychiatry query set includes TMS, ketamine, and treatment-resistant depression searches alongside medication management, diagnosis-specific, insurance, and telepsychiatry queries. The competitor section shows which practices the platforms name for the interventional queries specifically, which in many markets is a standalone TMS clinic rather than a psychiatry practice.
Find out what AI says about your psychiatry practice
Free letter grade, your mention rate, and the name of the competitor AI recommends most in your market. The practice type is already set to Psychiatry. Add your practice name and city.
1 PwC, "2025 US Healthcare Consumer Insights Survey: The Consumer-First Era of Health," October 2025. Figure represents Millennial and Gen X respondents.