Where the facts come from, and how we show what we don't know.

Counted 7 Sep 2026. Out of 14,153 UK practices.

Areas counted 7 Sep 2026. Cut-offs are practices per 10,000 residents, calculated 5 Sep 2026. Figures a country never holds (health insurance, poverty and shortage areas are US census and HRSA measures; general health and deprivation are UK ones) are not listed for it, and the product says so on every page.

We hold a Google rating for 12,206 of 14,153 UK practices, mostly from our sister directory’s copy of the Google listing; we checked Google directly for West Yorkshire only. The date on a rating is when the directory last updated, which is the latest it could have been read. Where we have no listing the page says ‘not checked yet’. We don’t hold review text, so we don’t track what reviews say or how ratings move.

Counted 7 Sep 2026.

A Facebook advertising tag or a Google Ads tag on a website tells us the tag is there, nothing more. We do not know whether the practice is running adverts or what it spends. The product labels these as tags.

Separately from the tags, we look each practice up on the two advertising registers the platforms publish themselves — Google’s Ads Transparency Centre and Meta’s Ad Library. Where an advert is running we can show you which platform it is on, the platform’s own start and end dates, how many adverts, whether the words mention implants or offer finance, and one real sentence out of the advert itself. We never paraphrase an advert.

Three things this does not do, all of which the product says out loud rather than hiding. We do not know what anyone spends: neither register publishes it. Where an advert was found through a website or a Facebook page a practice shares with others, the advert belongs to the group and the row says so instead of crediting it to that practice. And where we could not look a practice up — Meta refused most of our lookups in the first national sweep — we print ‘we could not look’ and never ‘not advertising’.

The website quality score is 0 to 100, from nine things we read on the page: what the site says about implants (16), whether prices are published (14), online booking (12), whether it is set up to measure its marketing (12), a scanner, 3D X-ray or lab equipment named (10), ways to pay (10), contact details on the page (10), the team named (10) and an implant brand named (6). Two of the nine only apply to a site that shows implant work. Every part prints with the score on the practice’s profile, with the date of the read it came from, so you can disagree with any of it by opening their website in a tab.

The weights are not an opinion about good websites. They are how far each sign separates one practice from another: a sign nearly every practice has cannot rank anything, and nor can one almost nobody has. And a website we have never read, or that did not load, or that answered with nothing we could grade, has no score at all — never 0. A 0 out of 100 reads as a verdict on the practice, and in all three of those cases what happened is that we did not read their site. The sentence saying which of the three it was is printed in the score’s place.

In the United States a metro or micro area is the Census Bureau’s own definition: whole counties grouped by commuting to a shared urban centre. In the United Kingdom the closest real geography is the travel-to-work area, which the Office for National Statistics draws so that most residents both live and work inside it. Both are built from where people travel, which is why they sit together in the product — and they are not the same construction, so we never call a travel-to-work area a metro.

Neither sits on the ordinary ladder of sizes: 59 US metros cross a state line, and a UK travel-to-work area routinely spans several councils and more than one region, so neither has a parent to drill up into. Where a published table says which ZIP area belongs to which metro, we use it and say it is published. Where none exists — a UK neighbourhood can straddle a boundary — we place it in the area holding most of it, label it a best fit, and print the share behind the choice.

‘UK only’ means we never look for it in that country. ‘Not checked yet’ means we would, and haven’t yet for this practice. We keep the two apart.

After 90 days for most facts, six months for loans, 13 months for register entries and Google ratings, 18 months for first-seen and registration dates. Old facts stay visible and show their age. We never quietly keep an old fact as current.

Things we cannot yet detect, so we claim no figure: 3D printers, milling machines, how common membership plans are, advertising activity, what reviews say, how ratings move, how many implants anyone places.