Payment must not secretly improve a provider's clinical relevance or organic rank. If a placement is paid, the commercial relationship must be clear to the reader.
Current status
No live DesperateMinds provider marketplace, paid provider ranking or closed-loop referral system is currently active. This policy sets the rules that would apply before those features can launch.
Referral status
DesperateMinds may link to reviewed external referral partners through a governed registry and internal redirect layer. This is not a DesperateMinds therapist marketplace, and provider profiles are not fabricated when real supply is unavailable.
What organic matching should prioritize
- legal and professional eligibility for the requested service;
- appropriate care type and scope;
- risk or urgency exclusions that make another route safer;
- location and telehealth jurisdiction;
- verified availability and freshness;
- insurance, self-pay, price and accessibility needs;
- user-selected language, modality and fit preferences;
- profile completeness and quality;
- fair rotation among similarly suitable options.
Payment, sponsored placement and advertising
A provider may eventually pay for clearly defined advertising, sponsorship or platform tools, but that payment does not silently change the organic relevance calculation. Sponsored placements must be visually and textually identifiable as sponsored or advertising.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission emphasizes that advertising should not be formatted in a way that misleads readers about its commercial nature and that necessary disclosures should be clear and prominent. See the FTC's native advertising guidance.
Referral and affiliate relationships
Active referral CTAs use an internal DesperateMinds redirect and an opaque first-party click ID. Raw affiliate URLs are not scattered through articles or assessment results. Commission data is recorded for accounting but is not a user-facing routing input.
If DesperateMinds may receive compensation after a referral or booking, that material relationship must be disclosed near the relevant action. We do not use undisclosed lead auctions or a payout-only ranking model.
How disclosures should work
Labels should use plain language such as “Sponsored” or “Paid placement” rather than an ambiguous badge. The disclosure belongs close to the placement or action it explains and should remain understandable on mobile.
Assessment data and commercial routing
Payment does not authorize access to raw assessment answers or inferred conditions. Those data are not transferred to providers, sponsors or advertisers by default.
Local SEO requires real supply
DesperateMinds will not mass-generate city, specialty, identity and insurance combinations simply because keyword demand exists. A local/provider page becomes indexable only when it has real verified supply, accurate geography, useful practical information, freshness ownership and meaningful no-result behavior.