Google is the priority and it is not the whole picture. Several other platforms carry reviews that patients read, that rank for your name, and that feed the sentiment summaries assistants produce. This lesson sorts them so you can prioritise rather than spreading thin.
Why Google comes first
Concentrate the bulk of your effort here, for concrete reasons:
- The largest audience by a wide margin.
- Reviews contribute to local prominence, which affects your map ranking.
- They appear directly in the profile patients see beside search results.
- They feed AI Overviews and Gemini, which lean on Google surfaces.
- Asking is permitted.
If your review effort produces results on one platform only, this is the one.
The platforms that follow
Provider directories such as the general healthcare directories from chapter four collect their own reviews, often via surveys. These matter because their pages rank for clinician names, so a critical review here can be prominent for years. Practices monitor Google closely and ignore these entirely, which is the mistake.
Vertical mental health directories vary in whether they host reviews, but their profiles rank and are read by patients already looking for behavioral health care.
Yelp matters as a data source and a ranking page rather than a referral source. Crucially, do not solicit here, since Yelp discourages it and solicited reviews are more likely to be filtered. Monitor and respond only.
Facebook recommendations still surface for practice names and are read, particularly by older patients and family members researching on someone behalf.
Payer directories increasingly include ratings, and these carry weight with insured patients because they trust their own plan.
Apple Maps surfaces ratings drawn partly from third-party sources, which is another reason the Apple listing from chapter four is worth claiming.
How reviews reach AI answers
Assistants do not usually quote individual reviews. They summarise sentiment across sources and use it to justify naming you, which means:
- Breadth across several platforms produces a more robust summary than depth on one.
- The themes recurring in your reviews become the themes an assistant uses to describe you. If several reviews mention that staff explained the process clearly, that becomes your characterisation.
- A contradictory picture, strong on one platform and poor on another, produces a hedged or unfavourable summary.
This is the argument for not ignoring the secondary platforms entirely, even when their direct traffic is negligible.
A workable priority
- Actively build: Google. This is where you ask.
- Monitor and respond: the provider directories, Yelp, Facebook, and any vertical directory where you have a profile.
- Check periodically: payer directory ratings and Apple.
- Ignore: platforms with no traffic in your market and no ranking presence for your name.
Test the last point empirically. Search your practice name and your clinicians names, and see which review platforms actually appear. Those are the ones that matter in your market, regardless of general advice.
Monitoring without a large effort
- Add every review-carrying platform to the listing inventory from chapter three, with who owns the login.
- Enable notifications where offered, so you are not relying on memory.
- Set a monthly slot to check the platforms without notifications.
- Apply the same response pattern everywhere. The privacy rules do not vary by platform.
- Never solicit on a platform that prohibits it.
The rules from this chapter apply identically across all of them: no confirmation of treatment, no clinical detail, no arguing. Building a habit that survives a busy clinic is next.