Free, for every provider and practice
Claim the profile that already exists for you. It costs nothing.
Correct it, say what you treat, add the consultant badge, and be the source search engines and AI assistants quote.
Guide.md was built by a physician so providers define themselves in search and AI answers instead of a directory doing it for them. The free profile is the whole product for most people; the paid plans add media, analytics and more listings.
AI assistants read Guide.md about 1.8 million times a day, on pace for 53.9 million this month. Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT most of all.
What the free profile gives you, at no cost, ever
No trial, no time limit, no card. Everything below is free. The plans further down add extras; nothing here is charged.
The badges, and which come free
Every badge is a fact you state, shown on the profile and on its own listing pages by state and city.
If you want more than the free profile
Media, analytics, more condition and procedure pages, more consulting topics, and the attorney-facing listings. Monthly and annual subscriptions renew automatically until canceled; annual plans are billed in full.
Yearly plans are billed once, up front — you pay for 10 months and get 12.
Free
$0 per month
No monthly fee. Most claim with a work email, no ID
Best for: Correcting the core facts
- Verified status: the Claimed badge and verified-first ordering, renewed yearly at no cost
- Listed on up to 10 condition and 10 procedure city pages (e.g. “Bunion surgery in Los Angeles”)
- Claim and verify profile control
- Correct core credentials, specialty, location, and contact fields
- AI profile writer — 5 drafts a month
- Conditions and procedures you treat, in your own words — unlimited
- One introduction video
- Patient FAQs of your own, above the generated ones
- "Accepting new patients", "Telehealth" and "Industry consultant" badges, with listing pages — one consulting topic
- Standard public profile
- Profile completeness up to approximately 78
Pro
$20 per month
Billed monthly, cancel anytime
Best for: Giving patients more practical context
Everything in Free, plus:
- Verified status renews with every payment (or free, by confirming yearly)
- Listed on up to 30 condition and 30 procedure city pages
- Listed under one additional specialty of your choice, on its city and state pages
- Profile view analytics — people, plus search and AI crawlers
- Office hours
- Photo gallery — up to 12 practice photos, named and captioned for image search
- Up to 5 videos
- Practice and hospital affiliations, and the providers at your location
- Neighborhood and multi-location listings
- Industry consulting: five topics (devices, pharma, digital health, trials, regulatory, reimbursement…), each with listing pages
- Expanded professional fields
- Profile completeness up to approximately 91
Premium
$49 per month
Billed monthly, cancel anytime
Best for: Publishing the most complete version of your professional identity
Everything in Pro, plus:
- Industry consulting: all twelve topics, each with listing pages
- Unlimited condition and procedure city-page listings
- Listed under three additional specialties of your choice, on their city and state pages
- AI profile writer — 100 drafts a month, with web research
- Provider-reviewed FAQ builder
- Unlimited confirmed condition and procedure pages, listed among verified providers
- Expert witness and treats-on-lien listings included ($78/month of add-ons)
- All available profile-completeness fields, up to 100
Add-ons
For providers who work with attorneys. Each is a badge on your profile, a line AI assistants and search engines read, and a place on its own listing pages by specialty, state and city. Both are included in Premium; on Free or Pro, add either one.
Expert witness listing
$29 per month
- “Expert witness” badge on your profile and in results
- Years testifying, plaintiff / defense / both, areas of testimony
- Listed on /expert-witnesses/ by state and city
- Stated in your profile’s schema.org data for AI assistants
Comparable listings cost $500–2,000 a year.
Treats-on-lien listing
$49 per month
- “Treats on lien” badge for personal-injury attorneys and their clients
- Your note to attorneys: case types, scheduling, reductions
- Listed on /doctors-on-lien/ by state and city — no territories, no exclusivity fees
- Stated in your profile’s schema.org data for AI assistants
Lien directories charge up to $1,500 a month for a territory.
The blue checkmark
$9.95 one time, optional
- A small blue checkmark beside your name and in the corner of your result card; hovering it says you confirmed your identity
- A government ID and selfie checked by Stripe Identity, about two minutes; Guide.md never sees the document
- Bought by the provider from their own account, or paid for by the agency that manages the profile and sent to the provider to complete
- Purely visual: it does not change ranking, listings or the Claimed badge, and claiming never requires it
Get onto the pages AI assistants actually quote
When someone asks an assistant for “a podiatrist in Los Angeles” or “who does bunion surgery near me,” the answer is assembled from pages that already say exactly that. Guide.md publishes them: Podiatrists in Los Angeles, Bunion correction surgery in Los Angeles, and thousands more by specialty, condition, procedure, city and neighborhood.
Your specialty page lists you automatically. Condition and procedure pages list you when you tick that condition or procedure on your profile — and mark you as confirmed by the provider, listed among the verified providers on that page, ahead of registry-only records. Free profiles can tick 10 of each, Pro 30, Premium unlimited. Anything you write in your own words stays on your profile; only ticked items create listings.
How ordering works on Guide.md
- Relevance first. Directory results and listing pages are ordered by how well a record matches what was searched: name, specialty, place, condition or procedure. The sort in use is shown on the page (Verified first, Most experience, Name A–Z).
- Verified profiles list ahead of unverified records. Among equally relevant results the order is Claimed (confirmed by the provider), then Enriched (editor-curated), then registry-only records. Confirming a condition or procedure on your profile lists you among the verified providers on that page. This preference comes from verification, never from payment.
- Completeness is a meter, not a rank. The completeness score is shown to the owner to guide editing; it does not change ordering.
- Paid plans change what a profile can hold, not where it sits. Pro and Premium add media, FAQs, badges and listing pages, and raise how many condition and procedure pages you can confirm (10, 30, unlimited). Verified status lasts twelve months and is renewed at no cost by confirming from your account that the profile is still current; any payment renews it automatically. A paid plan never moves a profile above another verified profile.
- Featured placements are labeled and separate. They are paid, marked “Featured”, shown in their own slot above the results, and never change the ordering beneath them.
Search engines and AI assistants make their own ranking decisions. Nothing on Guide.md changes those; a complete, verified profile is a better source for them, not a guarantee.
If twelve months pass without a renewal, the profile keeps everything you wrote and you keep editing rights, but it moves to the Enriched tier until you confirm it is current again (free, one click on your account page) or make any payment.
AI-generated drafts require your review. You are responsible for confirming that every published statement is accurate, current, professional, and appropriate for public display.
Why completeness is the whole point
A patient asks an AI assistant “who’s a good podiatrist near Culver City?”. Something has to answer. Whatever it says about you is assembled from whatever it can find — and an incomplete profile does not produce a cautious answer, it produces a confident one built from less.
A registry entry is not an answer
Unclaimed, your profile is a taxonomy code, an address on file, and a phone number. That is enough to list you and nowhere near enough to recommend you. Asked what you treat, a model has nothing to work from but the label “Podiatry” — so it either says something generic or reaches for a provider whose page actually says something.
FAQs answer the question as asked
People do not search in specialties. They search in problems — “heel pain that’s worse in the morning”, “do they take Blue Cross”, “can I be seen this week”. An FAQ is the only field on a profile that matches a question to an answer in the words a patient actually used. It is also the format assistants quote from most readily, because a question and its answer need no interpretation.
Specificity is what gets you cited
“Board-certified podiatrist, twelve years, focused on diabetic foot care and sports injuries, Spanish and Farsi spoken” can be matched to a real request. “Podiatry” cannot. Sub-specialty, procedures, languages and hours are the difference between being in the list and being the answer.
Verification is a tie-breaker
Directory data is famously stale, and systems that summarise it are getting more careful about which sources they trust. A profile the named provider has verified and maintained is a better source than one assembled from a federal file two years ago — and increasingly it is treated that way.
Two honest caveats. Nobody outside those companies knows exactly how any given assistant picks a provider, and anyone who tells you they can guarantee placement in one is selling something. What we can say is narrower and verifiable: a profile with a biography, services, hours, languages and FAQs contains far more that can be matched to a real question than a registry stub does. The AI Visibility Score on your profile measures that directly, and it moves as you fill fields in.
None of this requires paying us. A free claimed profile takes the completeness score from around 40 to roughly 78 — biography, specialty, contact details, credentials. The paid tiers add the fields that go beyond it: hours, gallery, affiliations, FAQs, video.
Featured placement
$49 – $149 per month, per city and specialty slot
- Limited city and specialty inventory
- Labeled “Featured” or “Sponsored” wherever displayed
- Separate from profile completeness, organic relevance, and any provider rating
- No guarantee of impressions, patient contacts, appointments, or revenue
- Two slots per city and specialty; each returns to the queue after twelve months
Does claiming cost anything?
No. Claiming is free, and most providers finish without paying anything: sign up with a practice, hospital or institutional email, confirm your name, and the profile is yours.
An address that cannot be matched to the record is reviewed by a person, usually within a few days. There is no identity check and nothing to pay. The blue checkmark above is a separate, optional purchase for a profile that is already yours; it is never part of claiming.
Compare plans
| Capability | Free | Pro | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $0 | $20 | $49 |
| Annual price | $0 | $200 | $490 |
| Verified status (Claimed badge, verified-first ordering, priority sitemap) | 12 months, renewed free by confirming | Renews with every payment | Renews with every payment |
| Condition & procedure city-page listings | 10 + 10 | 30 + 30 | Unlimited |
| Verification | A work email in a minute; otherwise a review within a few days | Same | Same |
| Blue checkmark (optional, visual only) | $9.95 one time | Same | Same |
| Correct core profile facts | |||
| Standard public profile | |||
| Profile view analytics (bots filtered) | — | ||
| Office hours | — | ||
| Gallery | — | ||
| Affiliations | — | ||
| AI writer drafts per month | 5 | 25 | 100 |
| Your own FAQs | 3 | 10 | 20 |
| Videos | 1 | 5 | 5 |
| Approximate completeness ceiling | 78 | 91 | 100 |
Profile completeness measures fields completed, not clinical quality. Plan level does not buy a better provider rating. Featured placement is a separate, clearly labeled advertising product.
Pricing questions
Can I claim a profile without a monthly subscription?
Yes. The Free plan has no recurring subscription charge, and most providers claim without paying anything at all: sign up with a practice, hospital or institutional email, confirm your name, and the profile is yours. Any other address is reviewed by hand within a few days.
Is there ever a charge to claim?
No. Claiming, the review and the Free plan cost nothing. Paid plans are optional and are the only thing ever billed.
Do subscriptions renew automatically?
Yes. Monthly plans renew each month. Annual plans renew each year and are billed in full.
How do I cancel?
Cancel online from your account settings before the next renewal date. Cancellation stops the next charge and takes effect at the end of the current paid term.
Will a paid plan improve my search ranking?
No. Paid plans add fields and media. Search engines and AI systems make their own ranking decisions.
I manage profiles for several providers. Is there an agency plan?
Yes. Create an agency account (tick "I manage profiles on behalf of providers" at sign-up). From your account page you enter a provider's NPI and email; they approve from that email and confirm their own name on one short page, and the profile joins your list. One login manages every client, you can pay for their plans from your own card, and you earn a referral payment on every account you bring. Details on the referral program page.