Practo, Justdial and Google: where patients actually search
Google, Practo and Justdial are different kinds of products, and none of the doctor discovery platforms India’s patients use publishes a neutral view of search share. Build accurate, consistent listings on each, keep the booking path on pages you own where possible, and let your own tracked data decide where to invest.
Every clinic owner I meet eventually asks me the same thing in a different form: should we be on Practo, does Justdial still matter, or is it all Google now? The honest answer is that nobody outside those companies has a clean, neutral view of how patients split their searches, and each platform describes its own reach in its own terms.
So this piece does two things. It describes the main doctor discovery platforms India’s patients use, factually and from each platform’s own public pages. Then it shows how to find out where your patients actually come from, because that answer lives in your own data, not in anyone’s pitch deck.
This sits in the authority and listings part of my complete playbook on local SEO for hospitals. If you run a group with many units, read it alongside the piece on winning near-me searches across every unit.
Why “where do patients search” has no public answer
There is no independent, published dataset that splits Indian doctor searches across Google, aggregators and local directories. What exists are self-reported figures from platforms, agency surveys with unclear samples, and anecdotes. I do not plan budgets on any of them.
The behaviour also varies more than people admit. A parent looking for a paediatrician at 11 pm, a family in a tier-2 city comparing orthopaedic surgeons, and a corporate employee booking a routine consult will start in different places. Specialty, city size, language and urgency all change the path.
The useful question is narrower: for my practice, in my city, for my specialties, which surfaces produce enquiries that turn into consultations? That can be measured, and the rest of this article is built around it.
How doctor discovery platforms in India differ
The three names in the title are not the same kind of product. Google is a general search engine and maps product where your listing is one of many results. Practo is a healthcare-specific directory with booking and practice software. Justdial is a general local search engine where doctors sit in one category among thousands.
| Platform | What it is, per its own pages | What you control | Where the relationship sits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search and Maps | General search and maps, with a free Business Profile per location or practitioner | Name, category, hours, phone, links (including appointment links), photos, posts, review replies | With you, if the profile is verified and owned by your organisation |
| Practo | Healthcare directory, appointment booking, online consultation and practice software | Doctor and clinic profile details, timings, fees, services, replies to patient feedback | Shared: the booking and patient account sit inside Practo |
| Justdial | General local search engine across categories, with free and paid listings | Business details, photos, category, responses to ratings | Shared: enquiries are routed through the platform |
The last column matters more than it looks. When the booking happens on your own page or phone line, the patient record and the follow-up are yours. When it happens on a platform, you are renting the relationship, which is fine as long as you know that you are.
Google: search, maps and the Business Profile
For most practices, Google is where the listing work pays back first, because the Business Profile appears on both Search and Maps and costs nothing to set up. Google’s guidelines for representing your business are specific about healthcare. Individual practitioners can have their own profile if they are public-facing and reachable at the verified location during stated hours, and departments within hospitals can have separate profiles with distinct names and categories.
Those same guidelines ask for the real-world name as used on signage, a local number rather than a central call-centre line where possible, and no keywords stuffed into the name. I see more listing problems from ignoring these three rules than from any ranking factor.
Google also lets you add links for actions such as booking an appointment, as described on its help page on local business links. For a clinic, that means the “Book” path can point to your own booking page, where you control the form, the consent text and the CRM entry. My detailed setup notes are in the piece on Google Business Profile for doctors, and the broader trade-off is in where hospital enquiries start: profile or website.
Practo: a healthcare-specific directory and booking layer
Practo describes itself on its about page as a platform for finding and booking doctors, with online consultation, diagnostics and medicine delivery, plus practice management software (Ray) and hospital software (Insta). For a doctor, the relevant piece is the free profile, which lists timings, fees, services and patient feedback that the doctor can reply to.
What I value is the verification step. Practo’s profile guidelines require proof of medical registration, which it says is verified against state medical councils before a profile goes live. Practice names must match the signage outside the practice, and localities or taglines cannot be added to the name. Those are good hygiene rules, and they align with Google’s.
Practo also offers paid products for doctors and clinics. Whether they make sense is a commercial decision that depends on your specialty, your city and your own measured enquiry quality. I would never decide it from a sales conversation alone, from either side.
Justdial: a general local search engine with a healthcare category
Justdial calls itself a local search engine and lists businesses across categories, doctors and hospitals among them. Businesses can apply for a listing through its free listing page, and paid advertising options sit alongside that. Patients can reach it on the web and through its app, and the brand’s phone-based search heritage still shapes how many people, especially older users, think of it.
For clinics, the practical implication is that a Justdial listing often exists whether or not you created it, built from public information. That makes it a citation you must keep accurate even if you never plan to buy anything there. I cover the maintenance side in citations and NAP consistency for clinics.
The other places patients look
Treating this as a three-way contest misses where a growing share of discovery happens. In my experience the list a practice should at least monitor includes:
- Other maps apps: Apple Maps (managed through Apple Business) and Mappls from MapmyIndia, both of which let a business add or claim a place.
- Insurer and TPA network lists: for cashless patients, the insurer’s network hospital list is often the first filter, before any search.
- Your own website: doctor pages and specialty pages that rank for doctor-name and “specialty plus locality” searches.
- WhatsApp and word of mouth: a forwarded doctor card or a family group recommendation, which often ends in a Google search for the doctor’s name.
- AI assistants and AI Overviews: patients increasingly ask an assistant for a recommendation, and the answer is assembled from the same listings and reviews. I describe how to check this in what AI assistants say about your hospital.
The pattern across all of them is the same. The patient hears a name somewhere, then verifies it on the surface they trust. Your job is to be consistent and credible on every surface where that verification happens.
Ratings live separately on each platform
One thing clinics underestimate is that reviews do not travel. A doctor with a strong rating on one platform can look new or thinly reviewed on another, and patients who verify on that second surface see only what sits there. Each platform also has its own rules on who can review and how ratings are shown.
That has two practical consequences. First, you need a reply routine on every platform where patients leave feedback, not just the one your team opens most often. Second, when you ask patients for feedback, pick the surface deliberately, usually the one where your own data shows new patients verify you, and never ask selectively only the patients you expect to be happy.
Replies need the same discipline everywhere. Never confirm that a reviewer was a patient, never discuss their care in public, and move the conversation to a phone call or a private message. The wording can be warm; the content must stay general.
How to measure where your patients actually search
This is the part most practices skip. Without it, the platform with the best account manager wins the budget. Here is the sequence I use with clinics and hospital units.
- Give each surface its own entry point. Use a distinct tracked phone number or extension for each major listing where the platform allows it, and UTM-tagged links on the Google Business Profile website and booking links.
- Ask at the front desk, every time. Add a mandatory “how did you find us” field in the appointment or CRM record, with a short fixed list that includes Google, Practo, Justdial, insurer list, referral and returning patient.
- Pull each platform’s own dashboard monthly. Google Business Profile performance data, Practo’s profile insights and Justdial’s lead reports each describe their own funnel. Record them side by side, not as a total.
- Follow the enquiry to the consultation. Count consultations completed, not calls or clicks. The enquiry-to-appointment funnel calculator helps set this up per source.
- Review quarterly, by specialty. A source that works for dermatology may do little for cardiology in the same building.
Expect the self-reported “how did you find us” data to be messy. Patients often say “Google” when they searched a doctor’s name after a WhatsApp forward. That is why I pair it with the tracked numbers and never rely on one method. For the underlying logic, see what patient-journey attribution can and cannot tell you.
Deciding where to put effort
Once you have two or three quarters of your own data, the decision becomes much less emotional. My default order of work, before any paid decision, looks like this:
- Solo doctor or small clinic: a verified, complete Google Business Profile, a free Practo profile with verified registration, an accurate Justdial listing, and a simple booking page you own.
- Multi-specialty clinic: the above, plus practitioner profiles where the guidelines allow them, and consistent department naming across every platform.
- Hospital unit: location and department profiles on Google, facility and doctor profiles on the directories, insurer list accuracy, and doctor pages on your own site that can rank for name searches.
Two adjustments matter outside the metros. In tier-2 and tier-3 cities, phone calls still carry more of the enquiry load, so the tracked-number discipline matters more than click data. And where patients search in Hindi or a regional language, check how your name and locality appear in that script on each platform, because a transliterated name that does not match your signage confuses both patients and maps.
Paid placements on any platform come after this baseline, and only when your own measurement shows that the source produces completed consultations at a cost you can defend to the CFO. Nothing about this is a verdict on any platform. Each can be the right answer for a given practice.
A listing hygiene checklist for doctor discovery platforms India-wide
Whatever mix you choose, the basics are identical across surfaces. I run this checklist every quarter:
- Name matches signage exactly, with no keywords, localities or taglines added.
- Address, pin code and map pin match on every platform.
- Phone numbers are ones you control, and each routes to someone who answers during listed hours.
- Timings, including Sunday and holiday hours, match what the front desk actually works.
- Doctor names, qualifications and registration details are identical everywhere.
- Booking links point to pages you own where the platform allows it.
- Every review or rating in the last month has a reply that protects patient privacy.
- Duplicate or unclaimed listings have been claimed or reported for removal.
The Google Business Profile optimisation template for doctors turns the Google half of this into a working sheet. For reviews across all platforms, the operating model is in patient reviews strategy: volume, velocity and response.
The practices that do well on doctor discovery platforms India-wide are rarely the ones with the biggest listing budgets. They are the ones whose details are right everywhere, whose phones get answered, and who know, from their own records, which surface sends them patients.
Questions people ask
Doctor discovery platforms are the surfaces patients use to find, compare and contact a doctor or clinic. In India that includes Google Search and Maps through the Business Profile, healthcare directories such as Practo, general local search engines such as Justdial, other maps apps, insurer network lists and increasingly AI assistants. Each works differently, and a practice needs accurate, consistent details on all of them before deciding where to spend.
There is no independent public dataset that answers this reliably, and each platform describes its own reach. The behaviour also changes by specialty, city size, language and urgency. The only answer worth planning on comes from your own records: tracked numbers per listing, a mandatory source field at booking, and completed consultations by source, reviewed over two or three quarters.
Ask for the cost per completed consultation, not per lead or per call, and ask how it will be measured using your own records rather than the platform’s dashboard alone. Run the baseline free listings properly first, then trial any paid placement for a defined period with a tracked number. If the source cannot be isolated, you cannot judge its return, so defer the spend.
For many small clinics, complete and verified free listings on Google, a healthcare directory and a local search engine, plus a simple booking page you own, cover most of what matters. Paid options can add visibility in competitive specialties or cities. Decide after measuring what the free listings already produce, since paying to amplify an incomplete or inaccurate listing wastes money.
Google’s guidelines allow individual practitioners to have their own profile if they are public-facing and reachable at the verified location during stated hours. Where several doctors share a location, each practitioner profile carries only the doctor’s name. A solo practitioner who is the only public face of the clinic can use a combined format. Check the current guidelines before creating anything.
Corrections to names, hours and phone numbers usually show on the platforms within days to a few weeks, depending on each platform’s review process. The effect on enquiries takes longer to read because you need enough volume to compare periods. Plan on one full quarter of clean data before drawing conclusions, and keep a change log so you can match changes to shifts in enquiries.
Inconsistency. A clinic updates its timings on Google but not on the directories, or changes a phone number on the website only. Patients then call a dead line or arrive at a closed door, and write about it. Keep one master record of name, address, phones, timings and doctor details, and update every platform from it on the same day.
One named owner, usually in marketing or digital, with access to every platform account and a documented backup. Front desk or unit teams should flag changes such as new timings or a doctor leaving, but should not edit listings directly. Agencies can do the work, but the accounts must be owned by the organisation, never by an individual employee or vendor.
Combine three methods. Use a distinct tracked phone number or extension per major listing where the platform allows it, add UTM tags to the website and booking links on your Google profile, and make the booking source a mandatory field in your appointment system or CRM. None of these is perfect alone, so read them together and focus on completed consultations.
They add a layer rather than replace the others. When a patient asks an assistant for a doctor recommendation, the answer is typically assembled from public listings, reviews and web pages. Accurate, consistent listings and clear doctor pages on your own site therefore matter more, not less. Check periodically what common assistants say about your practice and correct the underlying sources.
The reviewer should confirm that doctor names, qualifications, registration details and specialties are correct and identical everywhere, that service descriptions do not overstate outcomes or make claims the practice cannot support, and that nothing implies guaranteed results. Clinical accuracy of any descriptive text is theirs to sign off. Marketing owns format and consistency; clinicians own what is said about care.
Monthly, with each platform’s own metrics shown separately and not added together, plus the practice’s own source data from the booking system. The report should list every change made that month, every duplicate found and every unanswered review. The headline measure should be completed consultations by source, with the agency’s commentary on what changed and why.
Yes, indirectly. Listings often exist whether or not you created them, built from public information. If those carry an old number, wrong timings or a doctor who has left, patients act on them and blame you. Claiming and correcting listings is defensive work that protects the enquiries you already earn, even if you never pay any platform.
The same principles apply, but they need a central master record, named owners per unit, a change control process and consistent department and doctor naming across units. Group-level governance of Google profiles is its own discipline. Treat the directories the same way: one account structure owned by the organisation, with unit-level access and a quarterly consistency audit.
Read my takes first in Google Search
