The five inputs
Ranking uses five signals and nothing else. Distance from the ZIP or location you gave us carries 34% of the weight — proximity genuinely matters for dentistry, where follow-up visits are the norm. Verified review quality is 26%, combining the Google score with the number of reviews behind it, so a 5.0 from nine people does not outrank a 4.8 from four hundred.
Case volume in the specific treatment you searched for is 14%, measured over the last twenty-four months. Price transparency is 14% — a practice that publishes a fee schedule ranks above one that will not. Availability is the final 12%, because a brilliant dentist who cannot see you for eleven weeks is not much help when a tooth is broken.
Those weights are applied identically to every practice in every city. There is no manual override, no editorial thumb on the scale, and no per-practice adjustment.
What does not affect ranking
The listing fee. Every listed practice pays $249 a month whether it is a single chair in Boise or a twelve-chair group in Manhattan, and that fee buys a profile page, analytics and forwarded estimate requests. It does not buy position, and there is no upgrade that does.
We are asked. It happens perhaps a dozen times a year, and the answer is always the same: position is not a product. A practice that persists is removed from the directory. We would rather be a smaller directory that is believed than a larger one that is not.
We also take no commission on treatment. If you book a $28,000 full-arch case through a listing, we earn exactly the same $249 that month as if you booked nothing. That is deliberate — a directory paid per booking has an obvious reason to push you toward expensive treatment.
How verification works
Before a practice appears, we check the licence number against the issuing state board and confirm it is active and unrestricted. We obtain a certificate of insurance directly from the malpractice carrier rather than from the practice. We read the practice's own Google Business Profile rather than the testimonials they send us. We require a written fee schedule, and for treatment-specific listings we ask for case volume over twenty-four months.
All of it is re-checked at each licence renewal cycle. Anything we cannot verify does not appear on the listing — we leave the line off rather than printing a claim we have not stood up.
What we cannot verify is clinical outcome. No directory can. Case counts are self-reported and spot-audited, and we label them as such on every profile.
Reviews
Reviews come from each practice's own Google Business Profile. We do not solicit them, we do not host our own review system, and we do not filter by score. Three- and four-star reviews appear alongside five-star ones.
A practice cannot pay to have a review hidden. Asking us to suppress one is itself grounds for delisting, and we have acted on that.
Where a page exists at all
We publish a ranked page for a city-and-treatment combination only where we list at least three practices for it. A page with one name on it is not a ranking, it is an advertisement with a headline pretending otherwise.
Where we have no coverage in your ZIP, the search says so plainly and offers the nearest metro we do cover. It does not quietly show you results from two states away.
Complaints and corrections
If a listing is wrong, tell us and we will correct it. If you had a bad experience with a practice we listed, tell us that too — we investigate every complaint, and a pattern removes a practice regardless of what it pays us.
Practices can dispute their own analytics. Rejected events are retained with the reason they were rejected, so we can show the working rather than a bare total.