If your home is licensed in any of the states AgeSong covers, there is a good chance it is already in our directory. We build our listings from public state licensing data, which means every active licensed home in our coverage area is in the database whether the operator has ever heard of us or not.
Claiming your listing takes a few minutes. It costs nothing. And it changes what families see when they find your home in a search.
What a claimed listing is
An unclaimed listing contains only the baseline information that comes from public licensing data: the legal name, street address, license number, license status, capacity, and license type. That is enough to confirm your home exists. It is not enough to help a family in crisis decide whether to call you.
A claimed listing is the same baseline plus anything the verified operator chooses to add. Once you claim, you can update your phone number (the one in the state database is often outdated), add a description of your home and the residents you care best for, list your specialties (memory care, hospice, specific languages, Medicaid acceptance), upload photos of the interior and exterior, note your current availability, and add the name of the person who answers the phone.
Every piece of that additional information makes a family more likely to call you instead of the home two miles away.
What families actually see
Imagine a family whose mother was just discharged from the hospital. They are searching on their phone from the hospital parking lot. They find three homes within five miles of their mother’s current residence.
Home A: unclaimed. Legal name, address, phone number from the 2019 license renewal, license status “active.” No photos. No description. The family is not sure if this is a real, professional operation or a facility that has stopped answering calls.
Home B: unclaimed. Same structure. Same minimal information.
Home C: claimed. Everything the family sees for the first two, plus four photos of the living room, dining room, garden, and front porch. A one paragraph description written in the operator’s own voice. A note that the home specializes in early-stage dementia. A Spanish-language indicator. A current phone number that rings the administrator’s cell. A line reading “One availability as of last week, call to confirm.”
The family calls Home C first. They do not even call the other two unless Home C is not a fit.
That is not a theoretical scenario. That is what happens in senior care search every day.
The concrete benefits of claiming
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Accurate contact information. State licensing databases are updated annually at best and often contain phone numbers that have not been current for years. Claiming lets you fix this in minutes.
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Photos. A licensed care home without photos is a wall of text. A licensed care home with five warm, honest photos of its common areas and garden is a home a family can imagine their parent living in.
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Description of specialties. The license type tells a family whether you are an RCFE or an Adult Family Home. It does not tell them whether you have experience with Parkinson’s disease, speak Mandarin, or accept hospice residents. Your description does.
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Availability updates. A family searching for placement today needs to know whether you have a bed this week. You can update availability status as often as you want.
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Inquiry management. Claimed listings can route inquiries to the phone or email address of your choice. You are no longer relying on families to find you through a decade-old database record.
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Verification badge. Claimed listings carry a visual indicator showing the information has been confirmed by the licensed operator. Families notice.
How to claim your listing
Go to /claim/ and enter your state and license number or home name. The system will show you the listing as it currently appears. Click “Claim this listing” and follow the verification process, which typically involves confirming you are the licensee or authorized administrator.
Once verified, you will have access to an editing dashboard where you can update every field, upload photos, and publish changes. Updates appear on the public site within minutes.
The whole process, from starting the claim to publishing a complete profile with photos, takes most operators under 30 minutes.
Editorial independence
We want to be explicit about this because other directories are not.
AgeSong does not sell better search position. Editorial and ranking decisions are independent of any commercial relationship with operators. A claimed listing cannot buy its way above an unclaimed listing in relevant search results. A premium listing (see below) cannot buy its way above a non-premium listing of equal relevance. Families searching for homes see the homes most relevant to their search, period.
We also do not sell leads. Families who inquire through a listing contact the home directly. No lead is sold to three, five, or ten operators simultaneously. This matters because lead-broker directories create a perverse incentive where the operator who pays the most gets the most inquiries, regardless of whether their home is actually the best fit.
The AgeSong directory is supported by a combination of premium listings, sponsored educational content that is clearly labeled, and affiliate relationships with professional service providers like elder law attorneys and geriatric care managers. None of these arrangements affect which homes appear for which searches.
For context on what our editorial process looks like, see our editorial standards.
Premium listings, explained
Some operators want more than the standard claimed listing. Premium listings are a separate optional product that adds features like an expanded photo gallery, longer descriptions, video tours, featured placement on related guide articles, and direct messaging integration.
Premium is not required. Premium is not a path to better search rankings. A standard claimed listing is more than enough to be fully competitive in the directory, and the vast majority of our operators use the free tier.
How this compares with pay-per-lead directories
Large national directories that charge operators per placement produce economics that push small homes out. A typical pay-per-lead directory charges $400 to $1,200 per move-in, sometimes structured as one month of the resident’s rent. At scale, a 200-bed community can absorb this cost. A 6-bed home often cannot, especially if the resident ends up being a short-term stay.
The AgeSong model is different on purpose. Our goal is to be the directory a family uses to find a small home and the directory a small home uses to be found, without a placement fee standing between the two. For more context on the small home market in general, see pros and cons of small care homes and how to find a care home.
The National Center for Assisted Living and the American Seniors Housing Association both publish data on senior living marketing economics showing the squeeze that placement fees put on smaller operators. This is the squeeze we do not want to create.
Your next step
Go to /claim/ right now. Claim your listing, upload four photos of your home (exterior, living room, dining room, and one garden or outdoor shot), and write a three-sentence description in your own voice about who lives at your home and what makes it special. That is more than most operators ever do, and it will put you ahead of every unclaimed home on the platform. While you are building out your online presence, it is worth verifying that your state license record is accurate and current on the CMS provider resource page if you participate in any Medicare or Medicaid program.
For the broader picture of how small homes attract residents, read marketing your small care home and how to start a board and care home.