Two of 3,399 UK dental practices are ready to be recommended by AI

Just two of 3,399 UK dental practices are ready to be recommended by AI assistants, according to the UK Dentists 2026 edition of the SearchScore AI Visibility Index. Tower Dental leads the country at 86 out of 100.

Access is not the problem

Access is not the problem. 99% of practices let AI crawlers in. What almost none of them do is lay the information out in a form an assistant can lift. Only 11% label an author in a way a machine can read, and just 3% tag their frequently asked questions in the format an assistant can lift an answer from. Of the practices that went to the trouble of writing a questions-and-answers page, fewer than one in ten added the tag that lets AI read it.

"Somebody sat down and wrote those answers for patients. That is the hard part and they did it," said Ronnie Huss, founder of SearchScore. "Then the one line of markup that would let ChatGPT quote them was never added. It is the last inch of a job that is otherwise finished."

Where practices stand

The sector averages 53 out of 100, above the 43.2 all-web average. Across the sector, 31.8% of practices score Strong (60 to 79), 51.9% sit in the Emerging middle (40 to 59), 15.9% are Low Visibility (20 to 39) and 0.3% are effectively invisible.

"The leaders are not better dentists, they feed AI better," said Huss. "The gap between the top practices and the rest is tidy, well-labelled information, not the quality of the dentistry."

That distribution is the opportunity. When a patient asks an assistant to recommend a dentist, it names two or three practices, not ten. Where nearly every practice looks the same to a machine, the few that label themselves clearly take far more than their share.

All figures are free to publish with attribution to SearchScore, and no permission is required. Custom cuts by region or practice type are available on request. The method is documented at methodology.