Every practice on this site gets a score out of 100, and that score decides where it lands on our “best of” pages. This is a walk-through of what goes into it and, just as importantly, what doesn’t — the exact weights and constants are published in full, and kept current automatically, on our editorial policy page.
Three inputs, not one
The score is built from three things: a Bayesian-adjusted rating (60% of the score), verified treatment coverage (20%), and profile completeness (20%). Nothing else feeds into it — not how long a practice has been listed, not how often someone views its page, and not whether it pays us anything.
Why the rating is adjusted rather than used raw. A practice with a 5.0 average from three reviews and a practice with a 4.7 average from four hundred reviews are not equally trustworthy signals, even though the first number looks better. We pull each practice’s rating toward a global average in proportion to how few reviews back it up — a handful of five-star reviews can’t out-rank a long, consistent track record. A practice with no rating at all scores zero on this component rather than being quietly excluded from the comparison; a missing rating is information too.
Why verified coverage matters. This counts treatments we’ve actually confirmed a practice offers — from their own website, or from the practice itself once claimed — not every treatment category a general dentist could plausibly perform. A practice that has verifiably told us what it does is more useful to a reader than one where we’re guessing.
Why completeness is in there at all. This is the one component fully inside a practice’s control: how much of their profile is actually filled in — hours, insurance, financing, languages, photos, a real description. A complete profile is more useful to read, full stop, and it’s the input a practice can act on directly rather than waiting on reviews to accumulate.
The firewall
Featured — paid placement — changes exactly one thing: where a practice appears within a directory listing page, like a city’s dentist list. It is always visibly labelled when it does. It has no effect, at all, anywhere in this formula. A Featured practice with a mediocre score still shows up below better-scoring practices on every one of our “best of” and comparison pages, which are ordered on score alone.
This isn’t a policy we’re asking you to trust — it’s provable from the pages themselves. Look at any city’s main listing next to that same city’s “best dentists” page: the ordering is different, because one of them puts Featured practices first and the other doesn’t consult Featured status at all. If they ever matched, that would be the bug.
What this means practically
If you’re comparing practices through our “best of” pages, you’re looking at a ranking that a subscription cannot move. If you’re browsing a regular city listing, Featured practices are shown first and clearly marked as such — and everyone below them is still ordered by the same score described above.