Addiction Treatment Center Websites Report Card
Data extracted September 27, 2026
We looked at one page for each of 1,000 US addiction treatment centers: the exact web address that the center lists in the federal treatment locator, FindTreatment.gov. We checked for three trust seals (LegitScript, Joint Commission and CARF), a clickable phone link to the center's own number, an insurance verification form, a link to a privacy policy, chat, and any patient-facing AI.
About 1 in 3 centers that declare Joint Commission accreditation to the locator do not show it on the page they list there. That gap matters because the listed page is where the federal locator sends people, and a missing seal is a missing trust signal at the moment they decide whom to call.
Key findings
- About 1 in 3 centers that declare Joint Commission accreditation to the federal locator do not show it on the page they list there. Set aside Veterans Affairs (VA) facility pages and the figure is 31%.
- About half of analyzable pages show none of the three seals we tracked: LegitScript, Joint Commission, or CARF.
- Online insurance verification is uncommon. Between 1 in 10 and fewer than 1 in 5 pages offer it.
- More than 1 in 4 pages have no clickable phone link to the center's own number.
- About 1 in 4 pages have no link to a privacy policy.
- Patient-facing AI is rare: about 3%, across 13 domains.
How to read this report
The unit throughout is the center. The page we measured is always the page each center lists in the federal locator. For chains, hospitals, and public systems, that is often a location page, not the brand's home page. Showing a seal on that page is not the same as holding the accreditation, and not showing one is not proof that a center lacks it. We report many figures as ranges or approximate values because some content only appears after JavaScript runs, and our reading could not always see it.
Accreditation the locator knows about, the page does not show
Each center in the federal locator reports its own accreditation in a federal survey. That gives us a rare chance to compare what a center told the government against what its listed page actually shows.
Among centers that declare Joint Commission accreditation to the locator, about 1 in 3 do not show it anywhere on the page they list in the federal locator. Set aside Veterans Affairs (VA) facility pages and the figure is 31%. VA pages explain 16 of the 82 centers in this group, because VA facility pages do not display the seal. Both figures are more likely an upper bound than a floor: some seals are drawn by JavaScript, and our reading could not see them, so the real share of pages that don't show it is probably smaller.
Among centers that declare CARF accreditation to the locator, more than 1 in 3 do not show it on the page they list in the federal locator. The same caveat applies: this is more likely an upper bound.
The point is not that these centers are unaccredited. They told a federal survey that they hold the accreditation. The point is that the page a person actually visits does not carry the proof.
About half show none of the three seals we tracked
Across the analyzable pages, about half show none of the three seals we tracked. Those three are LegitScript, Joint Commission, and CARF. We chose three widely recognized marks for this study, and for two of them (Joint Commission and CARF) we can compare the page against what the locator records.
We did not track COA, DNV, ACHC, state licenses, or NAATP membership. Read this figure as a measure of the specific marks we looked for, not as a verdict on a center's standing.
Insurance verification is rare, and it splits by ownership
Between 1 in 10 and fewer than 1 in 5 pages offer online insurance verification. The low end counts a verification form on the page itself and is a floor: it includes appointment request forms that ask for a member ID. The high end adds pages that link out to a separate "verify insurance" page.
Who offers it splits by ownership. 1 in 5 for-profit centers show an insurance form, versus 1 in 50 nonprofits. None of the public centers in our sample show one, though that group is small.
A phone link and a privacy policy are still missing on many pages
More than 1 in 4 pages have no clickable phone link to the center's own number. Stated as a range, that is 28% to 30%. Crisis lines such as 988 did not count as the center's number.
The phone gap also splits by ownership. 1 in 5 for-profit centers have no clickable phone link, versus more than 1 in 3 nonprofits.
About 1 in 4 pages have no link to a privacy policy. In addiction treatment, privacy is not a formality: rules such as HIPAA and 42 CFR Part 2 govern how patient information is handled, and a clear policy tells a worried visitor that the center takes that seriously.
Chat is uncommon. Patient-facing AI is rarer still
Chat or text messaging appears on between 1 in 8 and 1 in 5 pages. It is more than twice as common at for-profit centers as at nonprofits, and that holds at both ends of the range.
Patient-facing AI is rarer still: about 3%, across 13 domains. We counted only an active AI chat agent or an AI tool clearly described for patients. We did not count a page that merely mentions AI in its text.
What to fix on your website this week
- Show every accreditation you hold on the page you list in the federal locator. Add each one as a seal with descriptive alt text and a link to the accrediting body's verification page, and do it on the listed page, not only on your home page. For residential programs that want that listed page to do more of the work, take a look at our page on marketing for residential treatment centers.
- Confirm that the URL you list in the federal locator is the right one and that it loads for a normal visitor.
- Make your own admissions number a clickable phone link in the header and the footer, and keep crisis lines separate.
- Add a short insurance verification form on the listed page, or at least a clear link to a "verify your insurance" page. Even an appointment request that captures a member ID gives a family a reason to start the conversation, which is the heart of turning website visits into admissions inquiries.
- Link your privacy policy from the footer of every page, and explain in plain words how you handle the details people share when they inquire.
- If you run chat, make sure a real person or a clearly labeled assistant answers it, and confirm that it works on the page you list in the locator.
- Fix the page people land on before you spend on ads. If you are weighing how to choose a marketing partner for an addiction treatment center, ask how they would fix the page people land on before they talk about campaigns. And if you plan to run Google Ads for rehab, the setup and LegitScript certification for advertising come before the budget does.
The report's figures and their bases
The first table gives each figure with its count, its base, and a 95% confidence interval; the base is 817 analyzable pages unless a row states otherwise. Where the report gives a range, the low end and the high end appear as separate rows, and every figure can be recomputed from the downloadable CSV.
| Measure | Centers | Base | Share | 95% CI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Centers declaring Joint Commission accreditation that do not show it on their listed page. | 82 | 229 | 35.8% | 29.9 to 42.2 |
| Same, excluding pages of Veterans Affairs (VA) centers. | 66 | 213 | 31.0% | 25.2 to 37.5 |
| Centers declaring CARF accreditation that do not show it on their listed page. | 129 | 342 | 37.7% | 32.7 to 43.0 |
| Pages showing none of the three seals (LegitScript, Joint Commission, CARF). | 425 | 817 | 52.0% | 48.6 to 55.4 |
| Insurance verification, low end: on-page form, including appointment forms that request Member ID. | 90 | 817 | 11.0% | 9.0 to 13.3 |
| Insurance verification, high end: on-page form or link to a separate verify-insurance page. | 147 | 817 | 18.0% | 15.5 to 20.8 |
| No clickable link to the center's own phone number, low end (including JavaScript-added links). | 227 | 817 | 27.8% | 24.8 to 31.0 |
| Same, high end (served HTML only). | 248 | 817 | 30.4% | 27.3 to 33.6 |
| No link to a privacy policy, low end (including JavaScript-added links). | 196 | 817 | 24.0% | 21.2 to 27.0 |
| Same, high end (served HTML only). | 239 | 817 | 29.3% | 26.2 to 32.5 |
| Chat or text messaging, low end. | 109 | 817 | 13.3% | 11.2 to 15.8 |
| Chat or text messaging, high end. | 167 | 817 | 20.4% | 17.8 to 23.3 |
| Patient-facing AI (an active AI chat agent or an AI tool described for patients). | 24 | 817 | 2.9% | 2.0 to 4.3 |
| Pages that could not be analyzed (base: all 1,000 centers). | 183 | 1,000 | 18.3% | 16.0 to 20.8 |
The second table splits the figures by ownership, with each group's base in parentheses; the public group is small.
| Measure | For-profit (362) | Nonprofit (396) | Public (59) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Insurance verification form on the page. | 22.4% 81 / 362 | 2.3% 9 / 396 | 0.0% 0 / 59 |
| No clickable phone link (served HTML only). | 19.1% 69 / 362 | 37.6% 149 / 396 | 50.8% 30 / 59 |
| Chat or text messaging, high end. | 31.5% 114 / 362 | 12.4% 49 / 396 | 6.8% 4 / 59 |
| Chat or text messaging, low end. | 20.7% 75 / 362 | 7.6% 30 / 396 | 6.8% 4 / 59 |
Intervals are Wilson intervals and do not correct for clustering by chains; chains share templates, so the true uncertainty is larger. The not-shown seal figures are closer to a ceiling, because some seals load through JavaScript that we did not read.
Use the data (CC BY 4.0)
Anyone may reuse the tables and the center-level dataset free of charge under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Please cite "Addiction Treatment Center Websites Report Card, Medical Marketing" with a link back to this page. The dataset has one row per center, with state, setting, ownership, the accreditation each center declared to the locator, and every measured variable. It contains no center names and no URLs. Download the dataset (CSV). The underlying facility list is a public domain federal resource from SAMHSA.
Methodology
Source. The data comes from SAMHSA's federal treatment locator, FindTreatment.gov. We extracted the list of substance use treatment facilities on September 27, 2026: 12,424 facilities, of which 11,706 list a website, covering 54 states and territories. Accreditation declared to the locator is self-reported by each center in a federal survey. We did not check it against the Joint Commission or CARF directories.
Sample. We drew 1,000 centers at random from those with a website, stratified by state in proportion to the universe, with a fixed random seed so anyone can reproduce the draw. The unit is the center. Chains often list the same web address for several locations, so the 1,000 centers point to 861 distinct URLs. We requested each URL once.
What we measured. For each center we read the page it lists in the federal locator, as the page is delivered to a visitor's browser before JavaScript runs, plus up to 3 internal pages about insurance. We read the text, the image names and descriptions, and the links. Pages belonging to centers that declared Joint Commission or CARF to the locator but showed no seal in either the text or the image names were reviewed by eye, checking every image on those pages one by one.
Pages we could not read. 183 of 1,000 could not be analyzed. Of those, 106 sat behind an anti-bot wall that works for people but blocks automated reading, 45 did not respond, 18 returned an error, 11 are blank without JavaScript, 2 ask not to be read, and 1 domain now serves unrelated content. That leaves 817 analyzable pages, the base for the figures in this report.
Validation. We ran a blind check on 40 pages not used before, half chosen at random and half chosen among centers declaring Joint Commission or CARF accreditation. Two independent reviewers coded the page source and a sheet of every image on the page without seeing our results, and a third reviewer settled disagreements without knowing which answer was ours. For Joint Commission, our reading found 6 of the 6 seals the reviewers identified, with no false alarms. For CARF, our reading found 13 of 14, and the one it missed was an image-only seal of the kind the visual check is meant to catch. For chat, our reading found 10 of 11, with 1 false alarm, which is why chat is reported as a range. These counts are small, so they indicate reliability rather than prove it. Earlier rounds on 185 pages checked the phone link, the insurance form, and the privacy link.
Limits. We did not run JavaScript, so any seal, phone number, form, or chat widget that loads that way is missed. Anti-bot walls sit mostly on sites with more technical investment, so this report probably underestimates insurance forms and chat and overestimates pages with no seals and no phone link. If we place every unreadable page on one side, the extremes are: no seals from 42.5% to 60.8%; insurance form from 9.0% to 27.3%; no phone link from 24.8% to 43.1%; chat from 16.7% to 35.0%. Those extremes are unlikely. Reweighting by ownership barely changes the results. Counting each distinct URL once instead of each center moves the general figures by at most 3.7 points; for the Joint Commission finding the gap is larger, at 39.8% by distinct URL. Chains share templates, so the true uncertainty is wider than a simple sample margin.
What this report cannot say. Showing a seal is not proof of holding it, and not showing a seal is not proof of lacking it. LegitScript is not recorded in the federal locator, so we cannot compare what centers show against what they declared. The universe is the federal locator, not every treatment center in the US. We publish no figure by state, because the sample within each state is too small. This is a snapshot of September 27, 2026, and the pages were saved as they were delivered that day.
Frequently asked questions
How many addiction treatment centers show their Joint Commission accreditation on their website?
Among centers that declare Joint Commission accreditation to the federal treatment locator, about 1 in 3 do not show it on the page they list in the federal locator. Set aside Veterans Affairs (VA) facility pages, which do not display the seal, and the figure is 31%. Both numbers are more likely an upper bound, because some seals load through JavaScript that our reading could not see.
Where does the data in this report come from?
The list of centers comes from SAMHSA's federal treatment locator, FindTreatment.gov, extracted on September 27, 2026. We drew a random sample of 1,000 centers that list a website, then read the page each one lists in the locator. Of those, 817 pages could be analyzed, and the figures in this report are based on them.
Does not showing a seal mean a center is not accredited?
No. We measured what each page shows, not what each center holds. A center may hold an accreditation and simply not display the seal on the page it lists, and some seals load through JavaScript that our reading could not see.
How many treatment center websites let people verify insurance online?
Between 1 in 10 and fewer than 1 in 5 of the analyzable pages offer online insurance verification. The low end counts a verification form on the page itself, including appointment requests that ask for a member ID, and the high end adds pages that link to a separate "verify insurance" page.
Can I use this data in an article or research?
Yes. The tables and the center-level dataset are free to reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Please cite "Addiction Treatment Center Websites Report Card, Medical Marketing" with a link to this page.