Claim RateMDs Profile: Free Doctor Listing Guide

To claim a RateMDs profile, find the listing RateMDs already has for you, click the “Claim Profile” button under your photo and verify through the email link RateMDs sends. RateMDs’ help center describes a Free plan that covers updating your details and responding to ratings, with paid Promoted plans as optional monthly upgrades. Our take: the claim is worth doing for the response and correction tools alone, and the paid tiers are the part to be skeptical of, because RateMDs itself says nobody can pay to edit, delete, hide or manipulate a rating. Our catalog labels RateMDs free, which is right for the claim and the Free plan, though paid upgrades exist.

RateMDs is on 5 of our industry citation lists: chiropractors, counsellors-therapists, dentists, doctors and health-medical. This guide covers the claim, what the free plan allows, what is paid, how rating removal and responses work, and what to do about a profile you cannot delete.

A note on sources

Everything about RateMDs here comes from RateMDs’ own help center at help.ratemds.com. We opened its articles on why to claim a profile, the Promoted plans, the rating system, removing ratings why a rating is removed or not published, the Rating Concierge service and profile deletion. Two sources we could not open: the main RateMDs site redirected our tools to a host that did not resolve, so we could not read the Terms of Use or its plans pages, and the claim article keeps its steps in an interactive guide with no readable text. Where a point rests only on text quoted in search results of those pages, we say so.

How to claim your RateMDs profile

RateMDs lists providers before they ever log in, so most doctors claim a profile that already exists rather than creating one. The steps below come from the text of RateMDs’ help article on claiming as quoted in search results (the article itself keeps them in an interactive guide):

1. Go to your profile on RateMDs. Search for your name and location if you do not have the link.
2. Click the “Claim Profile” button below your profile photo.
3. Choose the plan you want and click Select. RateMDs’ help center describes a Free plan and optional monthly upgrades, so look for the Free plan on this screen and confirm no charge before you continue.
4. Check your email, including the junk folder, and open the verification link.

If the button is not there, RateMDs says the profile is currently claimed by an account. To reclaim it under a different account, contact RateMDs through its help center. A practice with several providers can claim multiple provider profiles under one user account, which RateMDs describes as easier to manage. If you cannot find your profile at all, the help center has an article on creating a profile for yourself, which we could not read in full.

What claiming gets you

From RateMDs’ own list of reasons to claim:

• Management access to the profile.
• Updating names, specialties and photos, and facility information.
• Updating status, such as whether you are taking new patients or offering virtual appointments.
• Posting responses to ratings.
• The verified checkmark. RateMDs also says “Verified Profiles Only” is one of its search filters for patients.
• Badges for high scores in Staff, Punctuality, Helpfulness and Knowledge.

Notice what is missing from that list: nothing about changing a score. RateMDs calculates each rating as a straightforward average of four equally weighted categories (helpfulness, knowledge, punctuality and staff), and claiming does not touch the arithmetic.

If you manage profiles for a practice

RateMDs’ help center has a separate section for staff, agencies and representatives, with article titles such as “How do I claim my providers’ profiles?”, “How do I update my providers’ practice information?” and “Can I delete a provider profile?”. There is also a provider-side article titled “Can I add my staff to manage my profile?”. We could read only the titles, not the answers, so we cannot tell you how permissions work. What we can say is that the claim is tied to a user account, so decide before you claim whose email owns it: a front-desk address that disappears when someone leaves is how a practice ends up locked out of its own profile and having to ask RateMDs to reclaim it.

What is free and what is paid

Feature	Free plan	Promoted / Promoted Plus
Claim the profile	Yes, via the Free plan described in the help center	Same claim, then upgrade
Update profile details, credentials, facility information	Yes	Yes
Respond to ratings	Yes	Yes
Gallery photos, Rating Concierge	No	Yes, per RateMDs
Additional profile advertising	No	Yes, per RateMDs
Remove or edit a rating	No	No: RateMDs says nobody can pay for this

RateMDs describes Promoted and Promoted Plus as monthly plans and says you upgrade by logging in, opening the Billing tab and choosing a plan. At the time of writing (November 2026) the Promoted plans help article and RateMDs’ other Promoted articles we read list no price, so the cost comes from the Billing tab of your dashboard. We will not quote a figure we could not read on RateMDs’ own pages. Older third-party articles mention a monthly fee; treat any number you find outside RateMDs as dated.

Two paid-tier items deserve a sentence each. The Rating Concierge service is described by RateMDs as giving paying customers real-time notice of new ratings and a seven-day window to preview them privately, which its help article applies to ratings of 3.5 stars or lower. During the window you can appeal, resolve the issue offline with the patient, escalate to the Rating Validation Team or respond. That is a workflow, not a removal right: ratings come down only if they break the Terms of Use. And subscribers to new-rating alerts get a short window to appeal or respond that can delay publication by up to 7 days, per RateMDs.

How ratings and removals work

RateMDs is unusually direct about this, and it is the question providers care about most.

Who can post. RateMDs labels ratings by confidence: a blue “Verified Patient” label for feedback from standardized patient surveys collected by authorized partners, a blue checkmark for a logged-in verified user, and a plain avatar for feedback submitted without logging in. Its labels also consider whether the reviewer’s location, inferred from IP address, matches the provider’s city.

What gets removed. Anyone can flag a rating. RateMDs says flagged ratings go to its Rating Validation Team, that review generally takes about 3 business days, and that a rating is removed only if it violates the Terms of Use. The reasons it lists include hateful or threatening language, spam or astroturfing, repeated posts, hearsay, soliciting, privacy violations and accusations of unlawful activity. It also says ratings tied to court, insurance, workers’ compensation, disability or personal injury claims may be removed because they do not involve a doctor-patient relationship.

What does not get removed. A low score, or a provider finding a rating unflattering. RateMDs also states it does not work with rating removal companies and that claims made by such companies are false. If an offer promises to delete reviews from RateMDs for a fee, that is the offer RateMDs says is false.

How to flag. Click the flag button under the rating and complete the prompts. RateMDs says the flagging system sends no reply. If there is no flag button, the rating is either awaiting review or has already been reviewed and kept.

When a rating stays, RateMDs’ own advice is to claim the profile and respond. For wording that works on any platform, see our guide to responding to negative reviews.

How to respond to a RateMDs rating

You need a claimed profile and an account. Then:

1. Log in to RateMDs.
2. Click Ratings in the left sidebar.
3. Type in the box below the rating and click Add Response.

RateMDs’ articles say a response needs at least 50 characters, and one help article gives the range as 50 to 5,000 characters. The important rule is privacy: RateMDs tells providers not to share patient details or information about their condition and instead to invite the patient to contact the office directly. RateMDs says responses carry a “RateMDs Dashboard” label showing they came from the claimed profile, and that responding also lets you share your standard practices with future patients.

Can you delete or hide a RateMDs profile?

No. RateMDs says profiles stay listed for informational purposes, even for providers who no longer practice, and former patients can still read existing ratings. Its answer is correction, not deletion. Contact RateMDs if a profile shows a residential address or phone number, a wrong photo or facility logo, or an incorrect facility address, phone number or website. If you have retired, RateMDs says it will change the status to “Retired”, which displays the profile as retired, removes it from ranking pages, makes it searchable by name only, removes facility and contact information and deactivates the rating function.

Does RateMDs help local SEO?

It is a local citation on a recognizable provider directory, and for a doctor it also sits beside the Google results patients read when they compare practitioners. We have found no source showing a RateMDs profile is a confirmed Google ranking factor, so the honest claim is indirect: it is one more public place where your name, address and phone should agree with everything else. It also carries a risk worth checking: a profile that shows a wrong address or phone number is a NAP conflict, and RateMDs says to contact it about a residential address or phone number, a wrong photo or logo, or an incorrect facility address, phone or website.

Run your practice details through the free NAP checker after claiming, and read practitioner listings for how a provider profile and the practice’s own listing should coexist. The same logic applies to the other big provider directories: see our guides to claiming a Healthgrades profile and Zocdoc for providers, and the full doctors and dentists citation lists. RateMDs is also on our chiropractors, counsellors-therapists and health-medical lists. If reviews are the bigger worry than listings, how to get more Google reviews is the better next read.

Checklist for claiming

• Find the existing RateMDs profile for each provider before looking for a way to create one.
• Claim with the free plan, verify by email and keep the login somewhere your practice can reach.
• Correct name, specialty, photo, facility address, phone and website, and set your new-patient and virtual-visit status.
• Write a 50 character or longer reply to any open rating, with no patient health information.
• Flag any rating that breaks the Terms of Use, then leave it alone.
• Ignore anyone who offers to delete RateMDs reviews for a fee.
• Check the profile against your other listings, and again after any move or phone change.

Keeping one provider directory accurate is easy. Keeping the same details identical across all of them, for every provider in a practice, is the upkeep our citation building service is there to take on.