The Mental Health Sites Winning the Most AI Referrals

When ChatGPT and its competitors get questions about depression or where to find a therapist, Psychology Today, Verywell Mind, and 7Cups are among the sites where they funnel traffic.

While the use of general-purpose AI chatbots such as ChatGPT for mental health support remains a subject of debate, it is nonetheless an emerging trend. While other AI tools have been more specifically optimized for therapeutic conversations, ChatGPT is the chatbot people are most likely to turn to with their mental health related questions and concerns simply because it is so well known.

As individuals increasingly turn to ChatGPT for guidance on personal decision-making, the platform has faced criticism for inadequately addressing unhealthy or potentially harmful conversations. In response to this, OpenAI recently announced new mental health guardrails for ChatGPT to mitigate these risks.

AI platforms can also provide useful answers to questions like “where can I find a therapist?” or “what is a good online counseling service?” That is when these services are most likely to provide links to external resources.

We analyzed traffic to the top 100 mental health websites using Similarweb’s GenAI Intelligence Toolkit to understand which sites are receiving that traffic and the questions people are asking that lead them to click on an external link for more information.

Among the top recipients of that traffic are the publications Psychology Today and Verywell Mind and the online counseling services BetterHelp and 7Cups, according to Similarweb estimates.

Referrals from AI platforms have been rising over the past year, and that’s a trend mirrored in the mental health category.

Key takeaways

• Collectively, the top 100 websites in the mental health category received just over 1 million AI referral visits in July 2025, compared with about 230,700 in July 2024. That’s an increase of nearly 350%.
• For publishers that focus on providing informational content about mental health—rather than offering clinical services—the growing shift toward AI-generated answers over traditional search may result in reduced visibility and traffic. Psychology Today is the biggest recipient of AI referrals, but its overall web traffic is down -8.3% over the past year.
• Services that provide either online counseling or directories of therapists may benefit more from being recommended on  AI platforms. The underlying assumption is that individuals who have already received answers to their basic questions through an AI chatbot may be more inclined or better prepared to make a purchase upon clicking through to a website. The online counseling service 7Cups received over 36,000 AI referral visits in July and even more in some past months – about 95,600 in May. Over the past 12 months, traffic to 7cups.com is up 5.8%, and AI referrals could be one reason.

The prompts that produce traffic

Which prompts produce traffic, as opposed to continuing a conversation with the chatbot? The exact answer depends on the type of website, but essentially, they are answers that prompt the chatbot user to want to learn more or take action.

Psychology Today is a 57-year-old magazine and now an online digital platform that features articles and resources from psychologists and academics.  Referrals to the website are distributed across a broad range of articles on specific topics, but its most popular pages include ones for a directory of therapists and for attention testing tools related to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Psychology Today, Verywell Mind, and other publications in this category also attract links to articles where readers can get more in-depth information on psychological principles or theories, including social comparison theory, Piaget’s theory of the stages of growth, the benefits of “brain dump” journaling,

While AI prompts are longer and more complex than search keywords, Similarweb’s AI Traffic tool can show examples of the types of prompts driving traffic to a given landing page. For Psychology Today, we can drill down to see the types of questions leading people to the directory of therapists.

In many cases, the referrals we’re able to track come entirely or almost entirely from ChatGPT, but here’s an example of a Verywell Mind article on personality types that also gets the attention of Perplexity and Grok.

If we look at what drives traffic to the Verywell Mind home page, we see a variety of prompts on topics where the website has what the chatbots consider to be authoritative articles, like:

• What are the mental health benefits of learning a new language?
• Can you explain the different types of language disorders?
• What is primary progressive aphasia, and how does it affect individuals?
• How do the five love languages impact relationships?
• What are the stages of language development in children?

Seeking advice from AI

In some cases, traffic to a page reflects the fact that people are telling ChatGPT and other chatbots their personal problems. For example, traffic to a 7Cups forum thread on worries about infidelity is associated with prompts like:

• How can I cope with the anxiety that my partner might be cheating on me?
• What are effective strategies to manage trust issues in a relationship?
• How do I address my fears of infidelity without harming my relationship?
• Can anxiety cause irrational thoughts about my partner’s fidelity?
• What steps can I take to build trust and reduce relationship anxiety?

The 7Cups service promises to connect its users to human counselors who will talk with them about their problems, so traffic to the website suggests many AI users are looking for more than counseling delivered by AI alone.

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Methodology

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by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".