This year took an unexpected turn for me.
In early 2025, I stumbled into a new role I never planned on: helping uncover and expose the ghost directories that misrepresent therapists online. What started as a few posts turned into a deep dive that uncovered just how many therapists were listed without consent on a handful of ghost directories. Enough noise was made that some even changed their language. A small but important win!
From there, I decided to build some tools to track this problem at scale. Since launching the "Therapist Search Report" website in September, almost 2.5 million therapist search results have been analyzed! And all of this is to help therapists understand where their names appear online and which directories are playing fair.
This project has been one of my favorites all year. I don't make money from it. It just feels right to shine a light on directories that treat therapists' identities as SEO fodder instead of something that deserves consent and respect. (Especially when you consider that the viewers of these profiles are folks seeking mental health support! I mean, come on, this shouldn't be a place for SEO trickery.) And selfishly, I just like analyzing lots of data!
Thanks to the therapists that brought this to my attention via their LinkedIn posts, the entire LinkedIn therapist community who helped raise awareness and spread the word, and the reporters who covered this topic and helped put pressure on those that are creating these ghost directories. It's been a real team effort!
This pursuit has been a rewarding addition to 2025. And I'm curious what 2026 has in store. Working together, I'm sure we'll be pushing back even more on these ghost directories!
Jon
PS -- Today's "Advent Calendar for Therapists" game is about this very topic... Called Attack of the Ghost Directories, hopefully it provides some joy despite this very aggravating topic.
PPS -- And if you haven't done so already, I hope you check out the entire set of therapy-related games we're releasing during this holiday season. They've been so much fun to create, and there are many more on the way! 16 to be exact.
