SAVI Report · UK Veterinary Practices · 2026
When an owner asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI to recommend a vet, it reads websites and puts a few names forward. We checked 1,977 UK veterinary practice websites to see how ready each one is to be picked. Not one is fully ready. Here is what the rest are missing.
A solid website is the easy part, and nearly every practice manages it. Giving the AI clear, well-labelled information, who the vets are, what the services are, what people say, is the part that wins the recommendation, and almost no one does it.
Every practice gets a score from 0 to 100 for how ready it is to be found and recommended by AI. To reach the top "AI-Ready" band you need 80, and not one practice gets there.
A quarter of practices are Strong and nearly six in ten sit in the middle. When someone asks an AI to recommend a vet, it names two or three, not ten. When nearly every practice looks the same, the few that stand out win far more than their share.
The score is built from eight areas. Practices do well on the things their website builder handles automatically, and fall down on the two AI leans on most: tidy labelled information, and signs of a known, trusted brand.
On our measure, UK vets sit mid-pack: they average around 52 for AI-search readiness, level with dentists and accountants, behind aesthetic clinics at around 56 and ahead of law firms at around 47. And not one of 1,977 clears the AI-Ready bar. The practices that come closest are not doing anything exotic. They do a few specific, cheap things the rest have skipped.
Vets build technically solid sites: on the technical basics they average around 79, near the top of every sector we measure. But they give AI almost nothing to trust or read: brand authority averages 34 and structured data 36, the two weakest areas. In a field where owners are choosing who to trust with a pet's health, that gap costs them.
Only 12% of practices name a qualified vet in a way AI can read, leaving the other 88% effectively anonymous to the tools doing the recommending. Practices that name their vet tend to score around 12 points higher.
Structured FAQs and AI-answer markup each add around 12 points, yet fewer than one practice in fifty has done either. The highest-impact moves are the ones nobody has touched.
The same thing keeps happening. Practices write the content, hold the expertise and answer the questions, then never add the small labels that let AI read and trust any of it.
Only 12% of practices name a qualified vet in a way AI can read. The expertise is real, and invisible to the machine.
Fewer than one practice in fifty adds the FAQ tag that lets AI use their questions and answers. The hard part is finished; the quick part is missing.
Not one practice clears the AI-Ready mark. The leader, Your Family Vets, reaches 78.1. The recipe is known, and no one yet follows it fully.
Adding structured FAQ markup is worth about 12 points on its own, one of the biggest single wins a practice controls. Fewer than one in fifty has it.
Choosing who to trust with a pet's health is won on trust and credentials: named, qualified vets, genuine reviews, real memberships. Yet brand authority averages just 34 and structured data 36 across the index, so the very things an owner (and an AI) look for before booking are rarely labelled in a way AI can read. This is the open goal.
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How we did this. We checked each practice's live website the same way an AI reader would, looking at more than 250 things that affect whether AI can find, understand and recommend it, and turned that into a score out of 100. The benchmark covers 1,977 UK veterinary practices identified from public listings and the SearchScore veterinary index, each audited in 2026 for AI-search (GEO) visibility. We name only the ten highest-scoring practices, all notified before publication; the rest stay anonymous.