Original research on how dental practices are discovered online
We run large, bounded crawls of the public dental web and publish what we find as transparent, downloadable benchmarks. Every study reports observable website signals at crawl time — never clinical quality, credentials, or patient outcomes — and ships with its full methodology and raw aggregate data so dental teams, agencies, researchers, and journalists can check the work.
A completed Australian cohort of 8,365 dental domains, scored on the shared 37-check framework used across all four markets. It maps recurring gaps in technical foundations, patient-conversion paths, and machine-readable content in Australia.
24.45%
of jurisdiction-resolved domains could not be crawled
72.86%
of audited sites had images missing alternative text
72.64%
had no FAQ page detected
47.20%
were missing Dentist or LocalBusiness structured data
73
median DentalPresence Score
22.40%
of audited domains scored an F
Forms, alternative text, and structured data are the most common fundamentals missing across the Australian cohort.
A completed Canadian cohort of 16,306 dental domains, scored on the shared 37-check framework used across all four markets. Quebec scored notably lower than the rest of the country, and DNS failures were the highest of the four studies.
27.54%
of jurisdiction-resolved domains could not be crawled
78.52%
had no insurance or payment page detected
69.08%
of audited sites had images missing alternative text
50.04%
were missing Dentist or LocalBusiness structured data
71
median DentalPresence Score
24.82%
of audited domains scored an F
Quebec's median score trailed the rest of the country by five points — the largest provincial gap of any reliably-sized jurisdiction.
A completed UK cohort of 13,511 dental domains, scored on the shared 37-check framework used across all four markets. Patient trust was the weakest scored category in the UK cohort.
21.34%
of jurisdiction-resolved domains could not be crawled
83.30%
had no insurance or payment page detected
80.31%
had no FAQ page detected
64.46%
of audited sites had images missing alternative text
70
median DentalPresence Score
22.31%
of audited domains scored an F
Patient trust, not website fundamentals, is the weakest category in the UK cohort — a different pattern from the U.S. and Australian studies.
A nationwide, bounded crawl of 71,323 dental domains scored on the same 37-check framework behind the DentalPresence Score. It maps where U.S. dental websites are strong — and where the same gaps repeat across technical foundations, patient-conversion paths, local signals, and machine-readable content.
29.33%
of attempted domains could not be crawled at all
74.25%
of audited sites had images missing alternative text
68.70%
had no contact or inquiry form detected
38.72%
were missing Dentist or LocalBusiness structured data
77
median DentalPresence Score (interquartile range 67–84)
29.73%
of audited domains scored below 70
The most common failures are not exotic. They are missing forms, missing alt text, and missing structured data — the fundamentals patients and search engines both rely on.
Each study reads robots.txt, sitemap signals, the homepage, and up to two linked internal pages per domain. Browser rendering is not used, so a signal we did not detect may still exist elsewhere on a site — a limit we state rather than hide.
Observational, not clinical
Findings describe public website signals only. They are a large matched open-place cohort, not a probability sample of every dental practice in any covered country, and must not be used to infer clinical quality, credentials, or patient outcomes.
Open data, licensed CC BY 4.0
Aggregate results publish as a downloadable CSV and a full methodology write-up under a Creative Commons licence, so anyone can cite, verify, or extend the analysis.
Put the research to work in your own market
Each market has its own national picture. Compare a region against its country cohort, or score one practice on the same framework, to see which of these gaps apply to you.
