How this directory is built
Directories are easy to fill and hard to trust. This page is the whole method, including the parts that make the site smaller.
Last updated .
Where the listings come from
Practitioners are found through Google Maps business listings, pulled in August 2026 through two independent providers so that neither one’s gaps decide who exists. Every listing that named a cranial modality was then checked against the practitioner’s own website. The website is what decides; Google’s description is only what started the search.
That produced 123 candidate listings for the Los Angeles area. Today 107 are published, 6 were dropped, and 10 are held back.
What is checked by hand
Anything a source did not clearly support is marked low-confidence and stays off the site until a person reads the evidence and decides. That is not a formality — it is most of the work, and it is the only thing separating this from a scrape.
- Listings that mention cranial work only in passing. A Google description listing craniosacral among ten services it does not really practise looks identical to a genuine practitioner miscategorised as a chiropractor. Forty-four listings fell into that net and each was read individually against its own website.
- Every uncertain field. A bio, a price, a training lineage — if the evidence was a sentence that might have been about a colleague, it does not publish. 46 of the 107 published listings currently carry a biography, and the rest show less rather than showing a guess.
- Locations. Twelve listings had no address in either source. Eight of those carried map coordinates that turned out to be the search query’s own centre point rather than anybody’s location, so those coordinates were deleted. Where a practitioner could not be honestly placed, they are not placed.
Why some cities have no page
A city gets a page only when at least 3 practitioners can be published there. Cranial work is a thin field, and a directory that mints a page for every place name ends up with hundreds of near-empty pages that waste everybody’s time. The build refuses to generate a page below that line.
10 cities clear it. 7 Los Angeles neighbourhoods are listed on the Los Angeles page rather than getting their own — a practitioner appears on exactly one city page, never on every city they might travel to. 6 separate cities have one or two practitioners each and no page yet; they are not folded into a neighbouring city, because that would be a claim about geography that is not true.
How this list is ordered
Practitioners are ranked by how complete their profile is, out of 100. A verified listing adds 12 points, a Google-verified business adds 4, and review volume adds up to 8 more on a sliding scale that flattens quickly — a practitioner with 20 reviews and one with 500 score the same. Google's star rating is shown but is not part of the order. Nobody pays for a position in this list; paid placements are labelled and sit outside it.
Profile completeness is scored over the fields a person actually reads when choosing: a biography and a price list count for most, parking for least. A practitioner can raise their own position by filling their listing in, and that is the only lever anyone has.
Naming the modality
Craniosacral therapy, biodynamic craniosacral, cranial osteopathy, SOT/CFR and craniosacral massage are related but genuinely different traditions — different training, different licensure, a different hour on the table. This site never uses them interchangeably. A profile may name only the tradition that practitioner’s own material uses; a city page may name only the traditions present in its list. The build runs a check over every rendered page and fails if a heading, title or description names a tradition the page’s own data does not support.
What this site will not publish
- Google’s ratings as if they were ours. Star ratings are shown with the date they were read and a link to the source. They are not collected here, review text is never reproduced, and they are never marked up as this site’s own rating data.
- An address or a map pin we do not have. A fabricated location is the one failure a directory cannot apologise its way out of. A listing with no confirmed address shows no address.
- Medical claims. This is a directory. It does not say what these therapies treat.
Corrections and removal
Every listing carries the date it was last verified and a link to update or remove it. There is no charge for either, and removal is honoured without argument — a listing was compiled from public sources, not agreed with the practitioner, and anybody who would rather not appear should not have to negotiate. Write to info@cranialtherapists.com.
How the site pays for itself is set out on a separate page.