How we use AI as a tool and what you gain from it

People looking for psychological support are above all looking for a person who fits. That is why you can now have up to three counselors suggested who fit your concern. The matching is data-based: it works with your answers, the profiles of our counselors and the free appointments. AI is our tool here. It helps with sorting. It does not counsel, it does not rate and it does not decide. Whether you use the matching is up to you. Without matching you book as before: you pick a free appointment, and your counselor follows from it.

This post explains what we built, what we deliberately left out and what we do not know yet.

What research says about fit

For psychotherapy it is well studied that patients' wishes matter. A meta-analysis in the Journal of Clinical Psychology concludes that people drop out of treatment less often and benefit more when their preferences are taken into account (Swift and colleagues, 2018). A second review in JAMA Psychiatry likewise found fewer dropouts and a stronger working alliance when people received the treatment they had wished for (Windle and colleagues, 2020).

Both are studies on psychotherapy. Psychological counseling is something else, and this evidence does not exist for counseling in the same way. We still find it plausible that it helps here too when topic and conversation style fit. Whether that is true, we measure.

What the AI does and does not do

When booking, you answer two short questions: what is it mainly about, and what kind of conversation would you like? You choose your main concern from twelve topic areas, if you wish more precisely and with up to two further topics. The suggestions come from that. Up to this point no AI is involved.

If you additionally describe your concern in your own words and explicitly agree, a language model reads this text and sorts it into our topic tree. You see the recognized topics with the suggestions and can remove each of them. It also names up to three general keywords for what our catalog does not know yet. With your consent we count these keywords without any link to you, so that the catalog can grow. If you explicitly state a wish about the language or the gender of your counselor in it, it takes that over as well. It receives the text without your name and without contact details. It does nothing more.

• It makes no diagnosis.
• It does not assess how burdened you are.
• It sees no profiles of our counselors.
• It sets no order.

We do not tie ourselves to one language model forever. The candidates are Claude Opus 5.5 by Anthropic or Mistral Large 4 by Mistral AI, each processed in data centers in Europe, without storage and without training. Which one is at work is decided by our tests of quality, data protection and price. The details are on our page about the suggestions.

The order is calculated by fixed rules that we developed ourselves. They compare your answers with what our counselors state about their areas of focus and their way of working, and they consider whether an appointment is free soon. For each suggestion you see the reasons. Below the suggestions there is always the way to all free appointments.

What is open and what is not

Which information goes in is stated on our page about the suggestions. How strongly we weight the individual criteria, we keep to ourselves. Our goal is to find the counselor who fits each concern best. That is why we evaluate the feedback after sessions, per criterion only with consent. A person changes the weights when the numbers support it.

Why we have no ranking

One could also sort counselors by ratings. A study in JAMA Psychiatry even shows that matching by therapists' measured strengths can improve outcomes (Constantino and colleagues, 2021).

We decided against it. With few sessions per person, a single rating decides the order. Whoever is rated well early gets more clients and thus even more ratings. New counselors would hardly get a chance. And a good rating says little about whether someone fits your concern.

That is why we only learn at the level of criteria. We evaluate whether a fitting topic or a fitting conversation style leads to a good fit more often. We do not evaluate who counsels better or worse.

What we do not know yet

Whether the suggestions really lead to better conversations, we cannot say today. After every first session we ask how well it fitted, on both routes. In a few months we will know more. Until then we only promise what we can keep: you see why someone is suggested, and you decide yourself.

Who pays for it

We do. The matching is part of what we offer and is included in the price of every session. We did not raise prices when we introduced it, and we bear the cost of the AI service ourselves. We invest in it because we are convinced that we offer the best value for money in psychological online counseling in Germany. Why we are convinced is in our value-for-money promise.

If you would like to try it

In the booking form choose "Matching: find fitting counselors (AI only if you wish)". Without matching you book as before via the next free appointment. Current prices are on our pricing page.

Psychofit offers psychological counseling, not psychotherapy. We make no diagnoses, and counseling is not covered by statutory health insurance. If you suffer from a mental illness, please keep looking for a therapy place in parallel.

In an acute crisis online counseling is not the right place. In Germany you reach the TelefonSeelsorge free of charge around the clock on 0800 111 0 111 or 0800 111 0 222. In an emergency call 112.