Google Reviews vs Practo vs JustDial: Which Platform Actually Matters for Your Practice

The question every clinic owner eventually asks - "which review platform should I actually focus on?" - has a clear answer that most digital marketing consultants avoid giving because it reduces their billable scope: Google first, always, for everyone. Every practice in India, regardless of specialty, location, or size, should treat Google Business Profile as non-negotiable infrastructure before touching any other platform.

The harder question is what comes next. Practo and JustDial serve fundamentally different functions and carry fundamentally different levels of trust - both from patients and from the platforms themselves. Practo ties reviews to verified appointments and integrates booking into the patient journey, making it the legitimate second choice for most specialists in metro and Tier 1 cities. JustDial has a documented integrity problem: its review ecosystem is vulnerable to manipulation, its sales team actively monetizes that vulnerability, and sophisticated patients have largely learned to discount its star ratings. Claiming your JustDial listing matters. Building a strategy around it does not.

After reading this article, you will understand the structural differences between the three platforms, have a clear prioritization framework based on your specialty and location tier, know exactly what to watch for with JustDial and why, and be able to make an informed decision about where to invest the limited time you have for reputation management.

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Dr. Meenakshi Krishnamurthy runs a dermatology and cosmetic laser clinic in Coimbatore. She opened three years ago, trained at a reputable institution in Chennai, and runs a practice that her existing patients regularly recommend to family members and colleagues. She is not, however, easy to find online. A search for "skin specialist Coimbatore" on Google surfaces three clinics above hers, all of them with 50 or more reviews and 4.5-star ratings. One of those clinics opened eighteen months after she did. When she looks at their review profiles, something feels wrong - twelve reviews posted in a single week, all five-star, all written in nearly identical cadences with suspiciously generic language. She suspects those reviews were purchased. She is almost certainly right. But the result is that these clinics appear to have the trust that she has actually earned, and she is the one losing new patients to the search results.

This scenario plays out in clinics across India every day. The problem is not that Dr. Krishnamurthy has failed to manage her reputation. The problem is that she is competing in a space where the rules of evidence are poorly understood, where manipulation is common and poorly penalized, and where different platforms carry wildly different levels of legitimacy. Her first instinct - to match the competition by investing in JustDial's premium listing features - would be the wrong one. But the right instinct requires knowing why, and that requires someone to explain the structural differences honestly.

The confusion is compounded by the fact that digital marketing consultants - many of whom earn commissions on platform subscriptions - rarely offer a clear hierarchy. Every platform gets presented as critical. Practo's sales representatives will tell a dentist in Nagpur that their Pro subscription is essential to survival. JustDial account managers call clinics relentlessly to upsell listing upgrades and "verified" badges. Google's own interface for Business Profile has become more complex with each passing year, discouraging practitioners who might otherwise manage it themselves. The result is that many clinic owners are simultaneously paying for multiple platforms they do not fully understand, spending time they do not have responding to the wrong audiences, and still not ranking well in the searches that actually drive new patients to book appointments.

The underlying issue is structural. Google Reviews, Practo, and JustDial are not three versions of the same thing. They sit at different points in the patient decision journey, reach different audiences, carry different levels of review authenticity, and require different levels of ongoing management. A dermatologist and a general physician in the same city should not have the same platform strategy. A specialist in Bengaluru and a specialist in Bhilai should not have the same platform strategy either. Getting this wrong is not a minor inefficiency - it is the difference between building genuine digital reputation and spending money on the appearance of reputation while the real work remains undone.

Getting the decision right is not complicated once the structure is clear. But the structure is almost never clearly presented to the people who need it most.

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India's healthcare decision context is unlike any other market in the world. Sharma et al. (2025), studying 5,061 PM-JAY eligible individuals across seven Indian states, found that 48.0% used private outpatient care and only 18.3% used public outpatient care - in a population that qualifies for government-subsidized health insurance. Private healthcare dominates where patients have any real choice, and it dominates precisely because trust and perceived reputation are the differentiating factors patients act on when both options are nominally available. With a median national age of 29 and over 800 million smartphone users as of 2024, the first place an Indian patient looks before visiting any private clinic is their phone. The patient journey in urban India now begins with a search, and that search produces a result shaped by platform reputation data before the patient ever makes a call.

The FICCI-EY Parthenon report (October 2025), surveying more than 1,000 patients and 100 clinicians, found that patients rely heavily on "informal proxies like brand reputation and word-of-mouth" when choosing healthcare providers. Online reviews are, in digital contexts, the formalized version of word-of-mouth - and Google Reviews are the most visible form of that formalization in India today. When a patient in Pune types "cardiologist near me," Google's search results integrate Business Profile data directly into the response, showing rating, review count, location, hours, and photos before a patient ever clicks through to a website. No other platform has this level of integration with the dominant search behavior of Indian patients. Practo and JustDial require patients to go to those platforms intentionally; Google Reviews are present at the moment of intent, inside the search that patients are already conducting.

This matters because Indian healthcare operates with very limited standardization in how patients evaluate clinical quality. The National Medical Commission's professional conduct guidelines restrict what doctors can claim about themselves in advertising contexts, which means online patient reviews become one of the few legitimized public signals of clinical reputation that exist within regulatory norms. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 has created new obligations around how patient data is handled when collected through digital platforms - a consideration that affects how Practo and JustDial handle appointment and contact data, and something clinic owners using these platforms should be actively aware of. The ABDM's ABHA health ID framework is creating national scaffolding for digital health identity, but its adoption has been uneven and it has not displaced platform-based reputation systems as the primary patient decision input in 2026.

The practical result of this context is that platform-based reputation is unusually consequential for Indian private healthcare providers. A clinic with 4.8 stars on Google Business Profile and 60 reviews will outperform a clinic with equivalent clinical quality but 12 reviews and a 3.9 rating in almost every organic local search scenario. The platforms are not neutral infrastructure - they are the mechanism through which trust is either established or forfeited before a patient ever picks up the phone.

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Sharma et al. (2025), published in Global Health Action (PMC11998304), is the most rigorous peer-reviewed study of healthcare utilization behavior among Indian populations currently available in the literature. Its central finding - that 48% of PM-JAY eligible individuals chose private outpatient care despite qualifying for government-subsidized public care - establishes a behavioral baseline that is directly relevant to clinic reputation strategy: trust and perceived quality drive private sector choice even among patients for whom cost is a significant barrier. This finding is important because it demonstrates that private provider reputation is not only a middle-class or urban phenomenon; it operates across income segments. The study's methodology used a multi-state sample of over 5,000 individuals with direct survey responses; limitations include self-report bias and the restriction to PM-JAY-eligible populations, which may not fully represent the urban middle class that represents the core market for most private specialist clinics.

The FICCI-EY Parthenon report (October 2025) surveyed more than 1,000 patients and 100 clinicians across India on healthcare information and decision-making behavior. It is an industry report, not a peer-reviewed study, and EY Parthenon's clients include healthcare organizations with commercial interests in the findings; the report should be read with that context in mind. With that caveat stated: its characterization of patients relying on "informal proxies like brand reputation and word-of-mouth" is consistent with behavioral patterns documented across multiple healthcare markets and is plausible as a descriptive claim about Indian healthcare decision-making. The same report found that 83% of survey respondents aspired to better access to health information - this is an aspiration measure, not a behavioral measure, and should not be cited as evidence of actual current digital health engagement.

Research on the direct impact of online physician reviews on appointment-booking behavior comes primarily from US and European contexts and should be treated as directionally applicable to India only. Studies from the US healthcare market (directionally applicable to India) consistently find that patients consult online reviews before selecting a new provider, with ratings below 4.0 stars materially reducing appointment rates and with review recency mattering alongside overall rating. A commonly cited directional finding from US research is that the majority of patients consult online reviews before choosing a physician - this figure should not be presented as Indian behavioral data. In India, this behavior varies significantly across urban, semi-urban, and rural populations, across age demographics, and across specialty types.

Research specifically comparing platform authenticity in the Indian context is limited and largely absent from the peer-reviewed literature. However, documented cases of review manipulation on local listing platforms - JustDial in particular - have been reported in technology journalism (The Ken, LiveMint, and others) over a multi-year period. This is an industry observation, not a peer-reviewed finding, and should be weighted accordingly. What is structurally verifiable without proprietary data: JustDial's business model includes paid "verified" and "sponsored" placements, and the distinction between organic reputation and paid placement is structurally blurred in ways that Google Business Profile and Practo - to varying degrees - are not. The incentive structure creates conditions under which review manipulation is commercially rational for both the platform and for businesses willing to pay for it.

Practo's platform-specific data is proprietary and should be treated as self-reported industry data requiring independent verification. Practo has claimed 30+ million monthly users across India in various press releases between 2022 and 2024; these figures are not independently audited. What is structurally verifiable: Practo ties its review system to confirmed appointments via its own booking platform, creating a meaningful authenticity barrier that JustDial's open review system does not have. This structural friction does not make Practo reviews impossible to manipulate, but it raises the cost and complexity of manipulation to a level that most actors will not sustain. The appointment-linked review model is a genuine differentiator in terms of review authenticity relative to JustDial.

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The following section is Influx Health's interpretation and opinion, not research.

Across our work with 60+ Indian healthcare organizations - ranging from single-specialty clinics in Tier 2 cities to multi-specialty groups in metros - the most consistent finding is this: practices with the best online reputation outcomes are almost always the ones that got Google right first and got everything else afterward. The inverse is equally consistent. Practices that invested heavily in Practo Pro subscriptions without a clean, well-reviewed, actively managed Google Business Profile almost universally underperformed on new patient acquisition, because most patient journeys begin at Google, not at Practo. Fixing a 3.8 Google rating delivers more measurable new-patient impact than any premium Practo upgrade available at any price point.

The JustDial question comes up in nearly every client onboarding conversation, and our honest answer has not changed over time: claim the listing, keep the address and hours accurate, respond professionally to any negative reviews, and then stop. Do not purchase listing upgrades. Do not design review acquisition campaigns specifically targeting JustDial. Do not build strategy around a platform whose review ecosystem is so consistently compromised that experienced patients in metropolitan markets often use it only to retrieve a phone number - not to evaluate a provider. The phone number is the legitimate use case for JustDial in 2026; the star rating is not a trust signal that analytically inclined patients weight meaningfully. In Tier 2 and smaller Tier 3 markets, JustDial retains more organic search authority than it does in metros, and the calculus shifts somewhat - but even there, Google has been steadily closing the gap in local healthcare searches.

Practo's value proposition is genuinely specialty-dependent in ways that are consistently undercommunicated by the company's own sales organization. For dermatologists, fertility specialists, cosmetic surgeons, psychiatrists, and dentists - specialties where patients are self-referring, price-comparing, and conducting significant pre-appointment research - Practo is often the legitimate second-most-important platform after Google, and the appointment booking integration can create a measurable funnel. For orthopedic surgeons whose new patients largely arrive through GP referrals, or for cardiologists whose referral network is the dominant patient source, the direct patient acquisition value of Practo Pro is materially lower. Practo Pro pricing in 2026 runs between approximately INR 15,000 and INR 50,000+ annually depending on city tier and specialty category, and the ROI calculation is genuinely different depending on how new patients actually find your practice.

One pattern the research does not adequately capture: the interaction between review velocity and review authenticity in Google's algorithm. A clinic that accumulates five genuine reviews per month over two years will almost always outperform a clinic that accumulated 60 reviews in a single month, even if the latter has a higher current average rating. Google's algorithm is not naive about unnatural review velocity, and patients reading review profiles are frequently not naive either - clusters of same-week five-star reviews from accounts with no prior review history are a visible pattern. The sustainable strategy is unglamorous and slow: ask every satisfied patient for a review, make the ask easy with a direct link, respond to every review within 48 hours, and let the volume accumulate over months and years. This advice does not generate commission for any platform sales representative, which may explain why it is rarely given clearly.

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TRIAGE is Influx Health's structured approach to platform prioritization for Indian healthcare practices. Each letter is a decision variable to evaluate in sequence.

T - Trust Foundation: Google Business Profile is non-negotiable infrastructure. Before allocating time or money to any secondary platform, every practice must have a complete, verified, and actively managed Google Business Profile. Complete means accurate hours, address, and phone number; at least 25 reviews; a minimum 4.2-star rating; and a photo set that includes the clinic exterior, reception area, and consultation spaces. If your GBP does not meet this baseline, nothing you do on Practo or JustDial will compensate for it - because most patient journeys begin at Google, not on those platforms. Establish the Google foundation first. There is no legitimate argument for reversing this order.

R - Referral Model: How do your new patients actually find you? Self-referring patients - those who search for a specialist directly without a GP directing them - respond to public platform reputation and appointment availability. GP-referred and peer-referred patients respond to clinical reputation built through professional networks, not public review profiles. Before investing in any platform beyond GBP, honestly assess your new patient acquisition sources. If 70% or more of your new patients arrive through referrals from other practitioners, a Practo Pro subscription is unlikely to deliver sufficient ROI to justify the spend. If a meaningful share of your patients are self-researching before booking, Practo combined with a strong GBP can create a genuine acquisition funnel.

I - Infrastructure: Map your location tier to platform reach. In Tier 1 cities - Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai - Practo has strong organic traffic and patients who know how to navigate the platform. In Tier 2 cities - Pune, Kochi, Coimbatore, Chandigarh, Indore - Practo has variable reach, strong in some markets and thin in others, depending on local adoption. In Tier 3 cities and smaller markets, Google dominates and Practo's reach is limited enough that the Pro subscription case is hard to make. JustDial has residual organic search presence in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets that should be acknowledged - claim your listing there - but should not be overstated. The honest question for any secondary platform is: does it have meaningful organic traffic from your target patient type in your specific geography?

A - Audience: Match your specialty to the right secondary platform. Self-referral specialties - dermatology, fertility, cosmetic surgery, psychiatry and mental health, general dentistry and orthodontics, ophthalmology, bariatrics - benefit most from Practo because patients in these categories are actively comparing providers before booking. Referral-heavy specialties - interventional cardiology, neurology, complex orthopedic surgery, oncology - benefit less from direct platform investment beyond GBP because the referring physician, not the patient search, drives the appointment. Emergency-adjacent practices have distinct needs that neither Practo nor JustDial addresses well. The platform decision should follow specialty logic, not general marketing logic imposed from outside.

G - Gatekeeper: Assess JustDial with clear eyes and constrained investment. Claim the listing. Verify the address, phone number, and hours. Set up notifications for new reviews. Respond professionally to any negative reviews that appear - your response is visible to future patients even when the underlying review is of questionable authenticity, and a measured professional response to an unfair review is itself a trust signal. Do not purchase premium listings or sponsored placements unless you have independently tracked evidence that patients are actively arriving from JustDial specifically. Do not run structured review acquisition campaigns targeting JustDial. The platform has genuine organic traffic, particularly in Tier 2 markets, but it also has a structural integrity problem that makes its review scores an unreliable signal to build strategic investment around.

E - Efficiency: Right-size your time investment to the patient acquisition each platform actually delivers. Google Business Profile requires roughly two to three hours of initial setup followed by 20–30 minutes per week of ongoing management - responding to reviews, updating hours, adding photos periodically, correcting any information errors. Practo, if you choose to invest, requires a more sustained commitment: keeping the profile and available time slots current, managing the appointment flow, and responding to platform-specific reviews on a separate cadence from GBP. JustDial requires only reactive management - check it once a month, respond to any new reviews, correct information errors. No platform should consume time disproportionate to the patient acquisition it actually delivers. Track where new patients say they found you. This data, accumulated over three to six months, will tell you more about platform ROI for your specific practice than any general benchmark can.

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• This week: Search your practice name on Google, Google Maps, Practo, and JustDial. Note exactly what a new patient sees in the first 30 seconds on each platform. Identify the most significant gap - missing or incorrect information, review count below 20, unanswered negative reviews, no photos, or incorrect hours. Fix the most critical gap immediately.
• This week: If your Google Business Profile is unclaimed or incomplete, claim and verify it. Add accurate hours, services listed, and at least five recent photos including the clinic exterior and reception. This takes under two hours for most practices and is the single highest-leverage reputation action available to clinics that have not yet done it.
• This month: Implement a consistent review request process for Google specifically. After each positive patient interaction, provide patients with a simple direct link to your Google review page - use Google's review shortlink, available through the GBP dashboard. Target five new genuine reviews per month as a minimum sustainable cadence; do not set targets so high they incentivize requesting reviews from patients who are ambivalent.
• This month: Respond to every existing unanswered review on all three platforms. On Google and Practo, a thoughtful, professional response to a negative review is visible to all future patients and often creates a more positive impression than the absence of the negative review would. Acknowledge the experience, provide appropriate context without arguing specifics, and offer a direct contact path for resolution.
• This month: If you are in a self-referral specialty in a Tier 1 city and do not yet have a Practo profile, create one and complete it fully - credentials, qualifications, practice areas, and a professional photo. If you already have a Practo profile, audit it: is the credential information complete and current? Are listed appointment slots accurate and available? Is the consultation fee displayed correctly?
• On an ongoing basis: Ask every new patient at registration or during the initial consultation how they found your practice. Track this, even informally in a spreadsheet. Data accumulated over three to six months will tell you definitively which platforms are actually driving your new patient flow, which is more reliable than any external benchmark for making platform investment decisions specific to your practice.

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Q: My JustDial rating is 4.8 stars but my Google rating is 3.9. Which should I fix first?

Fix Google first, without question and without delay. A 3.9 Google rating is actively harmful to your practice in ways that a 4.8 JustDial rating cannot compensate for. Google's local search algorithm factors ratings into ranking decisions for local search results - a 3.9-rated profile will rank lower than comparable 4.3+ rated profiles for the same search terms in your geography. Additionally, the 4.8 on JustDial is not the asset it appears to be. JustDial ratings are routinely inflated by purchased, incentivized, or low-authenticity reviews, and an increasing share of patients in urban markets have internalized this pattern and discount those ratings accordingly. Improving your Google rating requires a structured approach: responding professionally to the existing negative reviews that are currently pulling your average down, identifying which of the underlying complaints are legitimate and addressing them operationally, and systematically accumulating genuine positive reviews from satisfied patients over the following months. There are no shortcuts that do not carry medium-term algorithmic or reputational risk.

Q: Practo keeps calling me about upgrading to Pro. Is it actually worth it?

It depends almost entirely on your specialty and your location, and Practo's sales team has a structural incentive to tell you it is worth it regardless of both. For a dermatologist or fertility specialist in Bengaluru or Mumbai, the appointment funnel that Practo Pro provides can deliver meaningful ROI - patients in these specialties actively use Practo to compare options and book appointments, and the Pro subscription provides priority placement within those searches. For a general physician in a Tier 2 city whose new patients mostly arrive through word-of-mouth and GP referrals, the ROI case is substantially weaker. Before committing to a Practo Pro subscription, ask their sales team to provide data on the volume of appointment bookings made through Practo for your specific specialty in your specific city over the last three months. They may not provide a clean, verifiable answer. The quality and directness of their response to that question is itself meaningful information about whether they can deliver on the value proposition they are selling.

Q: I've heard that competitors are leaving fake reviews on my Google profile. What can I do?

You can flag suspicious reviews for removal through the Google Business Profile reporting function. Google's review removal process is slow, inconsistent, and often frustrating - but reviews that are demonstrably fraudulent can be removed if you build a documentation case. Patterns that strengthen a removal case include: multiple reviews posted from accounts with no prior review history, reviews posted from outside your service area, reviews using identical or near-identical language to reviews on other business profiles, and reviews that describe services or situations that do not correspond to your practice. The more durable defense, however, is volume: a practice with 180 genuine reviews is far less damaged by three suspicious two-star reviews than a practice with 18 total reviews. Building authentic review volume is simultaneously a defensive and an offensive strategy. If you face a coordinated fake review campaign that Google's standard reporting process does not resolve, document the pattern thoroughly, as egregious and sustained cases can sometimes be escalated through Google's business support channels.

Q: Should I respond to every review, or only the negative ones?

Respond to every review - positive and negative - though your responses to negative reviews require more care and more deliberate language. Responding to positive reviews accomplishes three things: it signals to the reviewer that you acknowledged their feedback, strengthening loyalty; it signals to prospective patients reading the profile that you are genuinely engaged with your patient community; and it adds legitimate content to your profile that search systems index. Your response to a negative review is more consequential than the review itself for most readers. A useful response formula: acknowledge the experience without dismissing it, provide context without arguing about the specific facts, and offer a direct resolution path. Critically, never include patient-specific clinical information in a public review response - this is both a DPDPA data protection obligation and a basic professional standard. Keep in mind that your response to a negative review is not written for the unhappy patient who left it; it is written for the next 500 people who read that review and your response together.

Q: We have two clinic locations in the same city. Should we have separate profiles?

Yes, absolutely. Each distinct physical location requires its own verified and managed Google Business Profile, and those profiles should be maintained independently - with location-specific photos, hours, phone numbers, staff information, and review management. A common mistake is managing a multi-location practice through a single GBP listing, which significantly reduces local search visibility for every location. Google surfaces GBP results based on geographic proximity to the searcher; a listing anchored to one address does not rank well for searches originating from several kilometers away, even within the same city. The same principle applies to Practo and JustDial if you are managing presence on those platforms - each location should have its own profile. If you later expand to a different city entirely, the case for separate, independently managed profiles across all platforms becomes even more pronounced.

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Internal - Influx Health Institute - Why Patients Choose You Before They Meet You: The Digital Trust Gap in Indian Healthcare - Responding to Negative Reviews Without Losing Your License or Your Mind - The New Patient First Impression Audit: What Patients See in 90 Seconds

External - Authoritative Sources - Sharma S, et al. "Healthcare utilization patterns among PM-JAY eligible populations across seven Indian states." Global Health Action, 2025. PMC11998304. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11998304/ - Google Business Profile Help Center - managing reviews, verifying listings, and responding to patients. https://support.google.com/business/ - National Medical Commission - Code of Ethics Regulations and guidelines on professional conduct for registered medical practitioners. https://www.nmc.org.in

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Read Next: Responding to Negative Reviews Without Losing Your License or Your Mind - the practical guide to handling negative patient reviews professionally, legally, and within NMC professional conduct guidelines.

Assess Your Practice: Run the Digital Presence Meter - get a 60-second snapshot of how your practice currently appears across Google, Practo, and JustDial, with specific gaps identified and prioritized.

Chat with Influx Health: Talk to our team - if you want a structured review of your current platform strategy and a clear prioritization plan for your specific specialty and location, we work with a small number of practices at a time and can typically give you an honest assessment in one conversation.

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# Content Derivatives: Center 2, Article 2

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Subject line: Google 3.9 vs JustDial 4.8 - which one is actually costing you patients?

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Dear Dr. [Name],

Here is a scenario we see regularly: a clinic with a 4.8-star JustDial rating and a 3.9-star Google rating, wondering why new patient footfall has plateaued despite what looks like a strong reputation online. The answer is straightforward once you understand how these platforms actually function - and it has nothing to do with which star rating is technically "real."

Google Business Profile is where most Indian patient journeys begin. When a patient searches for your specialty in your city, Google surfaces ratings, review counts, photos, and hours directly in the search results page - before a single click is made. A 3.9-star rating on Google is an active barrier to new patient acquisition: Google's local search algorithm factors ratings into how it ranks profiles for local searches. A JustDial 4.8, meanwhile, is a number that an increasing share of patients in urban markets have learned to discount, because the platform's review integrity has been publicly questioned often enough that sophisticated patients treat its star ratings as approximate at best.

The new article from the Influx Health Institute gives you a clear, honest comparison of all three major platforms - Google, Practo, and JustDial - including where each one actually matters for patient acquisition, which specialties and location tiers benefit from Practo Pro, and a direct assessment of the JustDial integrity question that most digital marketing consultants avoid because it shortens their engagement.

Three things worth knowing before you read the full piece:

1. Google Business Profile should be the first two hours of every clinic's reputation investment - before any paid platform subscription is considered.
2. Practo's value is genuinely specialty-dependent; the Practo sales team has a structural incentive not to tell you when it does not make sense for your practice type.
3. Responding to reviews - all of them, positive and negative - is one of the highest-leverage reputation actions available to most clinics right now, and it costs nothing.

Read the full article here: [link to article]

If you want to know how your own practice appears across all three platforms right now, the Digital Presence Meter provides a snapshot in 60 seconds: [/dpm]

With regards, The Influx Health Institute Research Team

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Google vs Practo vs JustDial: The honest comparison (12-minute read)

Most clinics are investing in the wrong platforms - or across all platforms equally, which produces the same inefficient result.

The short version:

1. Google Business Profile first, for everyone. Before Practo, before JustDial, before anything paid. This is where patients start. A rating below 4.0 actively costs you ranking in Google local search.

2. Practo: depends on your specialty. Worth evaluating for: dermatology, fertility, cosmetic surgery, dentistry, psychiatry, ophthalmology. Less relevant for: referral-heavy specialties - cardiology, complex orthopedics, neurology. Tier 1 cities: reasonable to investigate. Tier 3 cities: reach is thin.

3. JustDial: claim it, maintain it, do not invest in it. Genuine organic traffic exists - especially Tier 2 cities. But the review system has documented integrity problems. Claim the listing. Keep the address correct. Respond to negative reviews. Stop there.

What to do this week: - Search your name on Google - what does a new patient see? - Check your Google rating. Under 4.2 needs attention now. - Respond to any unanswered negative reviews on all three platforms. - Send your next 10 satisfied patients a direct Google review link.

Full article - framework, FAQ, platform comparison: [link] Check your digital presence in 60 seconds: [/dpm]

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Most clinic owners are asking the wrong version of the question.

The question they ask: "Should I be investing more in Practo or in JustDial?"

The question they should ask first: "Is my Google Business Profile doing the basic job?"

Here is what we see consistently in our work with Indian healthcare practices: clinics spending INR 30,000 a year on Practo Pro while carrying a 3.7-star Google rating. Practices that respond to JustDial reviews weekly but have not touched three unanswered two-star Google reviews from four months ago. Practices with accurate Practo profiles and an incorrect phone number sitting on Google Maps - the number a patient would actually call if they searched and found the practice.

Google Business Profile is infrastructure. It is the first thing a potential patient sees when they search for your specialty in your city. It is integrated directly into search results in a way that neither Practo nor JustDial is. And it is free to manage.

The new article from the Influx Health Institute provides what we think is the most honest comparison of all three platforms currently available for Indian clinic owners: where each one actually matters, which specialties and location tiers should genuinely consider Practo Pro, and a direct assessment of the JustDial integrity question that most digital marketing agencies prefer to avoid.

The TRIAGE framework in the article gives you a structured way to make the platform prioritization decision for your specific practice - based on your specialty, your location tier, and how your new patients actually find you. It is not generic advice; it is a decision tree that leads to different conclusions for different practice types.

The article also addresses questions practitioners ask regularly but rarely get straight answers to: what to do when you suspect a competitor is gaming reviews, whether Practo Pro is worth the subscription cost for your specific specialty, and how to respond to negative reviews in a way that satisfies NMC professional conduct standards while actually improving how your practice looks to future patients.

The short answer to the title question: Google first, for everyone, without exception. Everything else is secondary and specialty-dependent. Full breakdown at the link in comments.

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1/ Most Indian clinic owners are investing in the wrong review platforms - or across all platforms equally, which is the same mistake. A thread on Google vs Practo vs JustDial: what the research supports, what our fieldwork shows, and what to actually do. (12-min read linked at the end.)

2/ The answer to "which platform matters most?" is unambiguous: Google Business Profile first, for every practice, in every city, at every specialty level. Google is where most Indian patient journeys begin. Search results surface your rating, review count, and photos before a patient clicks anything.

3/ A Google rating below 4.0 is not just aesthetically bad - Google's local search algorithm actively depresses the ranking of low-rated profiles in local search results. You can have the most polished Practo page in your city and still be losing new patients because your Google rating is 3.8.

4/ Practo is a legitimate second platform - but only for specific practice types. Self-referral specialties in Tier 1 cities: dermatology, fertility, cosmetic surgery, dentistry, psychiatry, ophthalmology. The appointment funnel is real there. For referral-heavy specialties, the ROI case is materially weaker.

5/ Practo Pro costs between INR 15,000 and 50,000+ annually depending on city tier and specialty. Before committing, ask their sales team how many appointment bookings were made through Practo for your specific specialty in your city over the last 90 days. The quality of their answer will tell you a great deal.

6/ JustDial: claim the listing, keep the address correct, respond to negative reviews professionally, then stop. The platform has genuine search traffic - more so in Tier 2 markets. But its review ecosystem has documented integrity problems that sophisticated patients in metros have largely already priced in.

7/ The most underused action in reputation management: respond to every Google review, positive and negative, within 48 hours. The majority of patients reading your profile read negative reviews AND your response to them. A measured, non-defensive response to a two-star review often matters more than the review itself.

8/ From our work with 60+ Indian healthcare organizations: the most consistent predictor of strong online reputation outcomes is getting Google right first, then making a deliberate specialty-informed decision about secondary platforms. The practices that skip step one and go straight to Practo Pro almost always underperform.

9/ Sharma et al. 2025 (PMC11998304) found 48% of PM-JAY eligible patients across 7 Indian states chose private outpatient care despite qualifying for government-subsidized care. The private sector wins on trust and reputation. Online reviews are the most visible trust signal available to private practitioners in 2026.

10/ Full article: Google vs Practo vs JustDial - platform comparison, the TRIAGE selection framework, FAQ on fake reviews and Practo ROI. [link to article] Check how your practice appears across all three platforms right now: [/dpm]

--- Article published by the Influx Health Institute. Influx Health is a patient acquisition agency for healthcare organizations in India.