How many Google reviews does a dental practice need? 1,489 UK towns measured
We searched every city, town and suburb in the United Kingdom for a dentist, and measured the 6,182 practices ranking in them. The answer depends on how many practices compete in your town: 70 Google reviews holds a place on the map where five or fewer compete, 249 where twelve or more do. Five years of search data then shows what patients are asking for, when they ask, and which counties are still open.
Practice Radar shows a dental practice where it ranks against every practice nearby, and does the work to move up.
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Correction, 24 October 2026. Some places in this study had been given the wrong location. When we matched each search to a place on the map, more than eighty were matched to a place of the same name somewhere else: Oxford to a suburb of Stoke-on-Trent, Portsmouth to a place in Yorkshire, and every town in Northern Ireland to a point in Great Britain. The searches themselves had been run for the right places, so what Google showed did not change. What changed is everything that depends on where a place is: its region and county, the maps, the county and nation comparisons, and the rule that tells a group of practices from a single one. Putting that right, we also found six places counted twice from one search, seven searches for a county or a district rather than a town, two searches we could not match to any settlement, one search whose results mixed two places of the same name, and 27 places whose results were for a village or hamlet of the same name, which sits outside a study of cities, towns and suburbs. Those 43 are removed. NHS health boards, local Healthwatch branches and a few directories that had been counted as practices are removed too. The study now covers 1,489 places and 6,182 practices.
Most headline figures are unchanged or have moved by less than a point: the national review bar of 113, the median rating of 4.8, the five practices in the median place, Facebook on page one in 81% of places. The review bars in finding 1 are now 70, 108, 188 and 249 reviews, where they were 70, 113, 176 and 246. Findings 2 to 5 move by small amounts. Finding 6 still holds on the corrected regions: region predicts nothing. The maps in finding 11, the county quadrant in finding 12 and the comparison of the four nations beneath it are redrawn. The September seasonality finding has been revised: measured across four years, January is the peak month for dental searches, not September. The data file has been regenerated with the corrected places.
Key findings. We searched 1,489 UK places and the 6,182 dental practices ranking in them on 13 September 2026. Two terms used throughout: a map pack place is one of the three practices Google shows on the map at the top of the results, and search share is our estimate of how much of the Google traffic to practices in a town each practice receives.
- The bar for a map pack place is a median 113 reviews nationally, but that national figure is not a target for anybody: it is 70 where five or fewer practices compete and 249 where twelve or more do.
- Star ratings separate almost nobody: the median is 4.8 and 72% of practices in a map pack sit at 4.6 or better. Review count is what varies.
- The median UK place has five dental practices ranking for its own name. 54% of places have five or fewer, 24% three or fewer.
- In towns with three or more practices we could measure, the top three take 93.7% of the search share and the leader alone 54.8%. That is mostly a function of how few compete.
- A median of four of the top ten search results are a practice in that town. The other six are directories, the NHS, the regulator and social networks.
- Facebook ranks in 81% of UK places, ahead of the NHS website at 74%. No dental brand reaches a third of the country.
- Region predicts nothing. Apparent regional differences are town size wearing a regional label.
1. Your star rating is table stakes. Your review count is what decides it.
Across 2,493 practices holding a map pack place with a review count, the median rating is 4.8 and 72% sit at 4.6 or better. Ratings cluster so tightly that they separate almost nobody. Review volume does the opposite. Line up every practice holding a map place by review count: the one a tenth of the way up has 12 reviews, the one nine tenths of the way up has 556, a gap of 46 times.
"Practices ranking in the town" here, and everywhere below, means every dental practice appearing anywhere on page one when the town's own name is searched. The national median for a pack place is 113 reviews, but that single figure is a national average, and no practice competes in a national average. The number that matters is the one for a town your size. To find yours, how many Google reviews your practice needs shows how to count the practices competing in your town and read off the number for a town that size.
| Practices ranking in the town | Median reviews to hold a pack place | Plausible range |
|---|---|---|
| 5 or fewer | 70 | 62 to 78 |
| 6 to 8 | 108 | 89 to 126 |
| 9 to 11 | 188 | 163 to 210 |
| 12 or more | 249 | 220 to 318 |
See this for your own town.
Every practice competing with yours on one map, sized by the share of local search each one holds, re-checked every week. The sample town shows the whole thing now, with no sign-up.
Run on our own practice first: ninth of the 14 practices measured in its town in May, first of 18 in September, on UK-wide search value. Page-one keywords: 6 in May, 194 in September.
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2. A UK dental market is five practices, not fifty
The median place in the United Kingdom has five dental practices ranking for its own name. Not fifty. Five.
Throughout this report, "practices ranking" means every dental practice appearing anywhere in the page one organic results for that place's own name, counted once per place. It is the same definition in every table below.
More than half of all UK places have five or fewer. Almost a quarter have three or fewer. And 176 places, better than one in ten, have two or fewer practices visible in search at all.
| Practices competing for a place's own name | Places | Share of the UK |
|---|---|---|
| None at all | 5 | 0.3% |
| One or fewer | 47 | 3.2% |
| Two or fewer | 176 | 11.8% |
| Three or fewer | 360 | 24.2% |
| Five or fewer | 811 | 54.5% |
| Eight or fewer | 1,192 | 80.1% |
This is what the dental access shortage looks like from the patient's side of the screen. In a quarter of the country, somebody searching for a dentist in their own town is choosing between three names or fewer.
3. "The top three hold 94%" is arithmetic, not dominance
Across the 1,179 places with enough practices to price, the top three take a median 93.7% of the search traffic Google sends to practices in that town, and the leader alone 54.8%. Those numbers are quotable and close to meaningless on their own, because concentration is mostly a function of how many practices compete rather than how strong the leaders are.
With 1,179 places we can show the whole curve. Every figure carries the range it moves across when the places are resampled 4,000 times.
| Practices ranking in the place | Share held by the top three | Plausible range | Places |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 to 5 | 99.9% | 99.8% to 100% | 507 |
| 6 to 8 | 90.5% | 88.4% to 91.8% | 375 |
| 9 to 11 | 78.5% | 76.5% to 81.2% | 172 |
| 12 to 14 | 69.9% | 67.0% to 74.9% | 87 |
| 15 or more | 59.2% | 53.0% to 69.2% | 38 |
4. Six of the ten results are not a practice in that town
The five practices in the second finding are every practice that ranks anywhere on page one. Counted by position rather than by practice, a median of four of the top ten organic results are a practice in that town. The other six go to directories, social networks, the NHS, the regulator and national chains. In 500 places, one in three, the first organic result is not a practice in that place at all.
5. Facebook outranks the NHS, and both outrank every dentist
No dental practice, group or brand in the country appears in more than a third of UK places. Seven non-clinical domains beat all of them.
| Domain | UK places it ranks in | Share of the UK |
|---|---|---|
| 1,204 | 81% | |
| nhs.uk | 1,107 | 74% |
| Care Quality Commission | 933 | 63% |
| dentalchoices.org | 929 | 62% |
| Yell | 602 | 40% |
| WhatClinic | 592 | 40% |
| 498 | 33% | |
| mydentist | 443 | 30% |
| Bupa | 336 | 23% |
mydentist and Bupa are the two largest corporate dental groups in the UK. Both are beaten by a social network and by a regulator.
6. Region predicts nothing
Ranked by region, the numbers look like a story. Wales sits at 98.4% and London at 84.9%, and 16 of the 66 regional pairs separate cleanly.
They are an artefact. The regions differ in what kind of place they contain. London in this data is 49 places, 22 of them boroughs, with a median of eleven practices competing. The North East is towns with a median of four. Compare places with the same number of competing practices and the regional differences vanish: none of 157 like-for-like pairs separate, where chance alone would produce about 8.
Each region holds between 43 and 169 places with a share we could measure, enough for a difference of any real size to show. None does. Anyone selling regional dental search insight is selling you town size.
7. Most published local share figures overstate groups, badly
Search visibility is usually measured per domain. That is fine for a practice with one website and one address. It is badly wrong for a group of practices sharing a site, because traffic earned by every location is credited to whichever town you happen to be looking at.
| Measured at domain level | Apparent share | Measured on the town's own pages |
|---|---|---|
| A 22-practice group, in Maidstone | 71.8% | 3.3% |
| A three-practice group, in Barnet | 47.3% | 2.5% |
| A national insurer, in Chester | 7.9% | 0% |
The groups have done nothing wrong. Their national traffic is real; it is simply being counted in the wrong town. The effect on everyone else is real. Correcting Maidstone moved the leading independent practice from an apparent 7.3% to a measured 25.8%, and from second place to first.
8. Repair is growing steadily. Cosmetic is splitting.
Everything above is a single day's reading. This section adds five years of it. The dental marketing trade sells cosmetic growth, and five years of weekly search data says the demand is moving somewhere less glamorous.
Wisdom tooth removal is up 112% over five years, root canal 47%, tooth filling 41%, the hygienist 38% and dentures 33%. Wisdom tooth removal, root canal, tooth filling and the hygienist each rose in every one of the five years, and dentures in four of them, which is what separates a trend from an event. Cosmetic work has split rather than risen together: composite bonding is up 66%, teeth whitening only 11%, and veneers are down 10%. A practice reading the category as one trend has been reading it wrong.
Searches naming a treatment lead five-year growth; generic searching falls hardest
Two searches are missing from that chart and the reason matters more than the numbers would have. Dental implants and dental crown each carry a burst of ten and six times their own median, six sustained weeks in July 2024 and February 2026 respectively. We cannot attribute either. Measured against the year before such a burst the treatment looks transformed, and against the elevated year after it looks collapsed, so both are excluded rather than reported as trends.
9. Generic searching is collapsing
Five years ago the front door was somebody typing "dentist near me" and choosing from a list. That search is down 44% and "dentist" itself is down 7%, while 11 named treatments rose by more than a fifth. People arrive knowing what they want.
Searches naming a treatment rose while searches for a dentist fell by almost half
The other movement worth watching is who patients expect to pay. "Private dentist" rose 20% in the last year alone against 6% for "NHS dentist", after four flat years. That is a recent inflection rather than a trend, and it should be watched rather than banked.
10. Demand peaks in January
Across four years of Google Ads data, October 2022 to September 2026, January is the busiest month for dental searching in every one of the four years. It runs at 117 against its own year's average of 100, and December is the quietest month at 87, a 34% swing. March is the second peak at 109. September sits at 97, just below an ordinary month.
A single eleven-month window from September 2025 to July 2026 puts September first, at 117. That window is misleading: Google Ads volumes fell by about a quarter across that year as Google changed how it counts them, which lifts the first months of any window that starts in the autumn. Setting each month against its own year removes that fall. Measured another way, against a moving twelve-month average, the median January is 114 and the median September 96.
January is the peak and December the trough, a 34% swing
Campaign timing, recruitment and the months a practice chooses to push a treatment should follow that shape: ready in December, the quietest month, for the January peak and the second rise in March. Most practices spread their spend evenly across a year that is not even.
11. Competition piles into the cities, and demand per practice is highest in London
They are not the same places. The left map is every one of the 1,489 places, sized by how many practices rank for that place's own name. The right map prices the demand by county: circle size is total monthly searches, and shade is how many monthly searches each competing practice gets, which is the number that decides how hard a county is to win.
Competition piles into the cities. London has by far the most demand per practice
12. The north and east offer the most demand per practice for the lowest review bar
Demand alone is the wrong thing to chase. What decides whether a county is worth entering is how much demand each competing practice gets, set against what it costs to be visible there, and the cost of visibility is the review bar from finding 1. Those are two separate numbers and they need two axes.
The north and east give the most demand per practice for the lowest review bar
The upper left is the quadrant to want: more demand per practice than the median county, and a lower bar to clear. Durham carries the most demand per practice of any county in that quadrant, 67 searches per ranking practice against a pack bar of 111 reviews. Norfolk and Cheshire come next with 56 each, against bars of 113 and 127. North Yorkshire is the cheapest way in, 50 searches per practice against a bar of 86, and Suffolk sits close by at 41 against 87. Cambridgeshire has more demand, 71 per practice, but asks 190 reviews for it, which puts it on the wrong side of the bar.
The lower right is the quadrant to avoid, and it is largely the home counties and the west midlands. Warwickshire asks for 294 reviews and offers 32 searches per practice. Central Bedfordshire asks 254 for 29. Surrey asks 217 for 33. A practice in those counties is paying the highest price of admission for the smallest room.
Greater London sits off the chart and deserves its own verdict. The arithmetic favours it: 220 searches per ranking practice against a bar of 264 is the best ratio of any county with ten or more places measured. But a bar of 264 reviews is a multi-year project, not a campaign, so London rewards the practice already established there and punishes the one arriving. If you are in it, reviews are the whole game. If you are choosing where to open, the upper left counties give you nearly three quarters of the same ratio for well under half the review bar.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are reported whole, because Google prices only a handful of counties inside them, too few to compare fairly. England carries 63 searches per ranking practice against a median pack bar of 162 reviews. Scotland has 30 against 50, Wales 24 against 71, and Northern Ireland 31 against 30. England has about double the demand per practice of any other nation, and a bar between two and five and a half times higher to match. Northern Ireland has the lowest bar in the United Kingdom: 30 reviews holds a map pack place there, against 162 in England. A practice in Belfast or Derry is competing for less demand, but it is competing for it far more cheaply.
Read that alongside finding 1. The review bar is set by how many practices compete, so the counties in the upper left are asking less to win more. That is the whole playbook in one sentence.
Method, and what this is not
One live mobile Google search for "dentist [place]" in every place in the cohort, depth 20, run on 13 September 2026. Organic results were reduced to practice domains after removing directories, regulators, public bodies, social networks and multi-site groups. Each surviving domain's organic search value was priced and expressed as a share of the total across the practices ranking in that place. Local pack occupants were captured with the rating and review count Google reported at the moment of the query. A practice holding a pack place in more than one town is counted once, so a large practice visible across several neighbouring towns cannot weight the review figures twice.
The cohort is every UK location that Ordnance Survey classifies as a city, town or suburban area, plus the 22 London boroughs and 47 Northern Irish towns Ordnance Survey's dataset does not cover. Each place is located from official sources: Ordnance Survey Open Names in Great Britain, the OSNI gazetteer and NISRA's settlement boundaries in Northern Ireland, and ONS boundaries for the London boroughs, with region and county read from the ONS Postcode Directory at that point. Each is then checked against the registered addresses of the practices Google showed in its map pack, from the CQC register and the NHS dental practice lists of the four nations. Where Google's results were for a village of the same name, the place is left out. Six places Ordnance Survey files as other settlements, Romford and Acton among them, are counted as suburban areas because the practices in their own map packs confirm them. Postcode districts were removed, because "dentist NR29" is not a search anybody makes. Villages and hamlets were excluded from the share statistics, because a place with four practices has a top three near 100% by arithmetic and including them would have inflated every concentration figure here.
A domain ranking in four or more places whose towns span more than 80 miles is treated as a group and removed from the practice population. Groups that stay inside 80 miles are removed by name where the CQC register or the Northern Ireland dental surgery list shows the same practice name or website at more than one address. Directories, NHS bodies, Healthwatch branches and social networks are removed by name wherever they rank.
What this is not. It is not every practice in the UK. It is the 6,182 that ranked on page one for a place's own name, out of roughly eight thousand in England alone. A practice that ranks for nothing does not appear, and its absence is the point of the second finding. Search value is an estimate of organic traffic value, not revenue and not patients. And it is one search on one day: single-place figures are a reading rather than a constant, which is why everything here is reported across the cohort.
Five-year direction, and the demand figures
Findings 8, 9, 11 and 12 use two further sources, collected on 15 September 2026 for $7.13, and finding 10 uses a four-year Google Ads series collected in October 2026. Direction over time is Google Trends, 262 complete weekly points from September 2021. Trends normalises to 100 within each request, so values from different requests are not comparable: every batch therefore carried a common anchor search and was rescaled on it. Two tiers were needed, because anchoring everything on "dentist" crushed most of the smaller searches to a median of 0 or 1, so mid-sized searches were re-pulled against "invisalign" and the two scales chained on their overlap. Nineteen searches clear the floor of a median weekly value of 5 or more with fewer than one week in ten at 2 or below. Six are too small to measure and are excluded rather than quietly dropped: clear aligners, dental check-up, periodontist, sedation dentist, smile makeover and teeth straightening.
Absolute volume and seasonality are Google Ads monthly search volume. For volume the first and last month of the series are partial and both are dropped, leaving eleven complete months. Seasonality uses four complete October to September years, 2022 to 2026, of 94 distinct dental searches, each month set against its own year so that a fall in Google's counted volume across a year does not pass for a season. Volumes are folded on their sorted content words, because Google reports one volume for a whole close-variant group and stamps it on every member: unfolded, "dentist near me", "dentist near ne" and "near dentist to me" each claim 246,000 and the raw total overstates the market by 1.8 times.
Two things are deliberately absent. There is no year-on-year growth taken from the Google Ads data, because its trend field is quantised to Google's volume buckets, so every category reported between -18% and -33%, which means "fell one bucket" rather than anything about dentistry. And there is no regional claim about competition: finding 6 is that apparent regional differences are town size wearing a regional label, so demand is reported by geography while competitive intensity is reported per practice, which controls for it. England is by county; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are reported whole, because Google prices too few counties inside them to compare fairly.
For editors
Everything in this study is free to reproduce with attribution to Practice Radar, under Creative Commons BY 4.0. No permission needed and no embargo.
Charts, ready to publish
- How many dental practices compete for a UK place (PNG, 2400px)
- Who holds page one for a dentist search in the UK (PNG, 2400px)
- Google reviews needed to hold a map pack place (PNG, 2400px)
The data
uk-dental-search-index-2026-09.csv, one row for each of the 1,489 places, with county and coordinates so you can filter to your patch, and a column glossary beside it. If you want a cut for a specific region, county or nation, ask and we will prepare it. The file carries coordinates, so it joins to any geography you already use.
Contact
Jack Henty, who compiled this study, co-owns Bollington Dental Practice in Cheshire and built Practice Radar. He is available for interview and for questions about method. Email hello@practiceradar.co.uk and it reaches him directly.
If a figure here does not match what you find, tell us which place and we will re-measure it.
Cite and reuse
To cite this study. Practice Radar, “How many Google reviews does a dental practice need? 1,489 UK towns measured”, 13 September 2026, corrected 24 October 2026, https://practiceradar.co.uk/blog/uk-dental-search-market-2026
The data. UK dental search index, per place (CSV, 1,489 rows), with a README that explains each column.
Licence. The data is free to reuse under Creative Commons BY 4.0. Attribution means crediting Practice Radar and linking to this study. It is built from public sector information, so please also keep this line: “Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.”
Embed a chart. Copy one of these into your page. Each loads the chart from our site, with its own description for screen readers and a source line linking back to this study.
How many dental practices compete for a UK place
<img src="https://practiceradar.co.uk/assets/charts/practices-per-place.png" alt="Column chart of 1,489 UK places by how many dental practices rank for the place's own name, in equal groups of three: 0 to 2 practices, 176 places. 3 to 5, 635. 6 to 8, 381. 9 to 11, 172. 12 to 14, 87. 15 or more, 38." style="max-width:100%">
<p>Source: <a href="https://practiceradar.co.uk/blog/uk-dental-search-market-2026">Practice Radar</a></p>Who holds page one for a dentist search in the UK
<img src="https://practiceradar.co.uk/assets/charts/who-ranks-page-one.png" alt="Bar chart. Share of 1,489 UK places where each domain appears on page one for a dentist search. Facebook 81 per cent, nhs.uk 74, Care Quality Commission 63, dentalchoices.org 62, Yell 40, WhatClinic 40, Instagram 33, mydentist 30, Bupa 23. Facebook and nhs.uk are highlighted as the two that beat every dental brand." style="max-width:100%">
<p>Source: <a href="https://practiceradar.co.uk/blog/uk-dental-search-market-2026">Practice Radar</a></p>Questions we get asked about this data
How many dental practices compete in a typical UK town?
Five. That is the median across 1,489 UK places measured on 13 September 2026. More than half have five or fewer.
Does the review count holding the map vary from town to town?
Yes, with how many practices compete in that town. The median is 70 reviews where five or fewer compete and 249 where twelve or more do. The national median of 113 is not a useful target for any individual practice. The one-page guide gives the number for a town your size.
Does dental search competition vary by region in the UK?
No. Apparent regional differences disappear once you control for how many practices compete in a place. None of 157 like-for-like regional comparisons separate, where chance alone would produce about eight.
Who ranks first for "dentist" searches in UK towns?
Often not a dentist. In 500 of the 1,489 places measured, one in three, the first organic result is not a practice in that place. Facebook appears on page one in 81% of UK places and the NHS website in 74%.
Can I quote these figures?
Yes, with attribution to Practice Radar, September 2026. The full per-place data is published: download the CSV, one row for each of the 1,489 places, with its county and coordinates, how many practices rank there, the share held by the top three, whether the top result is a local practice, whether Facebook is on page one, and the review counts holding its map pack. A column glossary and the known limits sit beside it. Reuse with attribution under Creative Commons BY 4.0.
See your own town measured
This index is the national picture. Practice Radar reads one town at a time: every practice competing in it, what share each holds, and what it would take to move.
Run on our own practice first: ninth of the 14 practices measured in its town in May, first of 18 in September, on UK-wide search value. Page-one keywords: 6 in May, 194 in September.
Thirty days free. No card, and nothing starts automatically when it ends.