Glossary

Every term, in one sentence.

The words you will meet in DentalGraph, what each one means, and where the figure comes from. If a word on any page is not here, tell us at hello@dentalgraph.net and we will add it or stop using it.

Start your 7 free days

Accepts implant referrals: The practice's website invites other dentists to refer implant patients to it.
Advert we could not check: We could not look a practice up on one of the registers — we hold no website domain for Google, or no Facebook page we could resolve for Meta. Their advertising there is unknown, and it is never counted as "not advertising".
Advertising here (paid competition): How contested paid advertising is in one neighbourhood (UK) or ZIP area (US): the practices running an advert when we looked, out of the practices we looked up. Always shown with that second number, because a count of advertisers means nothing without knowing how much of the area we measured.
Advertising register: The public record each platform keeps of the adverts it is running: Google's Ads Transparency Centre and Meta's Ad Library. Both are free and open, and both are the platform's own statement rather than our inference.
Advertising right now: An advert for the practice was running when we last looked, read off the platform's own public register — Google's Ads Transparency Centre or Meta's Ad Library — with the platform's own start and end dates. It is not the advertising tag on their website.
All-on-4: A full-arch treatment where a whole row of teeth sits on four implants; we record it when a website says so, and file it under full-arch.
Area: A UK neighbourhood, council area or region, or a US ZIP area, county or state, with its own population, income and practice figures.
Area map: The Local markets areas drawn on a map, coloured by how well served they are or by opportunity score.
Area table: Every area in a country in one sortable table, ranked by practices per resident, income and age.
Ask a question: Type a search in plain English; we show exactly what we understood and what we could not use.
Average rating: The average Google rating of the practices in an area, over those that have one.
Background: A change that is useful context but not a reason to call this week, such as a job advert or a rating drop.
Bad or very bad health: The share of a UK area's residents who described their health as bad or very bad in the census.
Balanced: An area's band: practices per 10,000 residents in the middle two fifths of the country; the cut-offs are printed on the filter.
Before opening: The stage of a new practice where we have a company formed, a planning application or planning approved, but no register entry yet.
Below the poverty line: The share of a US area's residents living below the federal poverty line, from the census survey.
Best fit (placing an area): Where a published table does not state which larger area a smaller one belongs to, we place it in the one holding most of it, and say so with the share behind the choice. A published relationship is never described this way, and a best-fit one never reads as published.
Brand (implant brand): The implant maker a practice's website names (Straumann, Nobel Biocare and so on); naming no brand is not the same as using none.
Business type codes: The codes Companies House uses to say what a company does; 86230 means a dental practice.
Calculated: A figure we worked out from other figures we hold, such as a score, a band or a rate; hover it to see which.
Call list: A ready-made saved search of practices worth a call, counted live and ranked by implant activity (UK) or Google rating (elsewhere).
Can be compared: A single-implant price that includes the crown and is an exact or "from" price, not a range or offer, so it can sit in a comparison.
Cannot be compared: A price that covers less than the whole treatment, or is a range or a special offer; shown as published, left out of comparisons.
Care regulators: The bodies that register dental practices: the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in England, Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS), Healthcare Inspectorate Wales (HIW) and the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority (RQIA) in Northern Ireland.
CBCT scanner (3D X-ray): A cone-beam CT scanner used to plan implants; "mentioned" means the practice's website says it has one.
Certainly in the last 90 days: Google publishes no review date, only a label such as “7 months ago”, so each review is held as the whole interval that label admits rather than as a day inside it. This counts only the reviews whose entire interval falls inside 90 days. Reviews whose interval straddles the line are counted separately as “might be” and are never added to the certain count.
Changed hands: An existing practice re-registered under a new owner or company; not a new practice.
Changed hands (our match): A change of hands we worked out ourselves because a practice at the same address closed and the same people appear at the new one; labelled with how sure we are.
Changes: Things that happened at a practice (a loan, a change of owner, a price change, a job advert and so on), each dated by the filing or page itself.
Cheapest quarter: Among practices within 5 miles that publish a comparable single-implant price, the lowest 25%.
Companies House: The UK register of companies; gives us directors, controlling owners, secured loans and filed accounts.
Company matched: A UK practice we have linked to its company at Companies House, with the rule and how sure we are.
Controlling owner: A person or company that controls a company; Companies House calls them a "person with significant control" (PSC).
Council area: A UK local authority district; used for planning records and for grouping neighbourhoods.
Council planning records: Applications to councils that mention dental use; one of the three places a new practice shows up first.
Declared parent (US): The parent organisation a US practice named itself when it registered with the federal provider registry. The registrant states it and nobody verifies it, and in most states a practice must be owned by a licensed dentist — so the parent named is often the dentist's own company rather than the brand on the door.
Degree or higher: The share of an area's adults with a degree or a higher qualification, from the census.
Dental Implants Local: Our sister directory, where patients look for implant practices; the source of Google ratings, implant services and shared-website groups, and of everything we hold outside the UK.
Dental shortage area: A US area the government lists as short of dentists (a dental Health Professional Shortage Area, designated by HRSA); we mark an area when at least half of it sits inside one.
Dentists (GDC register): Dentists the General Dental Council's register or a team page links to a practice.
Deprivation: How deprived an area is, from 1 (most deprived) to 10 (least). Each UK country is ranked against itself, so a decile compares an area with its own country.
Direction of travel: Which way a practice is moving, from every movement we can evidence in the last three years: rising, steady, declining, or nothing we can evidence with two readings. It is not a growth rate and it is not a score — we publish no single momentum number, because there is no defensible way to turn a Companies House figure and an Internet Archive capture date into one. The fourth answer is about our readings, not about the practice.
Director: A person appointed to run a company, as filed at Companies House.
Directory listing: The practice's entry on Dental Implants Local.
Existing owner expanding: A new register entry for an owner who already runs other practices.
Export: A spreadsheet (CSV) of any search or list, up to 5,000 practices, with the source and date beside every fact.
Facebook advertising tag: A tracking tag on a website; its presence does not mean adverts are running.
Fact: One thing we read from one source on one date; we add facts and never overwrite them.
Federal provider registry (NPPES): The US register every clinician who bills anyone must hold a number on, giving the address they practise from and their specialty. We read the dentists out of it, so “dentists registered here” is a registry reading, not a staff list: a dentist who moved and did not update it still counts, and one who bills under the practice’s own number may not appear at all.
Filed accounts: The accounts a UK company files at Companies House each year. We read the figures out of the filing itself: net assets, cash, what it owes within a year and later, and the average number of people it employed. They are for your information; never quote them back at a practice.
Find practices: The main search screen: every practice we hold, with filters.
First seen by DentalGraph: The date we first saw any sign of premises (a company, a planning application or a register entry); never an opening date.
From price: A price published as "from £x"; a lower bound, shown as such.
Full-arch: A whole row of teeth on implants; on a website it appears as All-on-4, same-day teeth, an implant bridge or an implant-retained denture.
GDC register: The General Dental Council's register of dentists; gives us who works where, their registration number and specialist lists.
Google Ads tag: A tracking tag on a website; its presence does not mean adverts are running.
Google rating: The star rating and review count on the practice's Google listing, mostly from the directory's copy, with the date the listing was last updated; from Google directly for West Yorkshire.
Group: An owner with four or more practices (UK register), or four or more practices sharing one website (elsewhere); a count, not a judgement about how the company is structured.
Hiring: The practice's website has a careers page or a vacancy, or a job board advert has been matched to it.
HM Land Registry price paid data: Every home sale registered in England and Wales; we take the middle price of standard sales in an area over the last year, needing at least five.
Home territory: The territory Your territory, Call lists and What's changed use when you tick "My home territory".
Homes owner-occupied: The share of an area's homes lived in by their owners rather than rented, from the census.
Household income: Household income for an area: the middle (median) household in the US, from the census survey; an average for UK neighbourhoods, and we say so.
How sure: A number from 0 to 1 that says how reliable a match rule usually is (0.95 for a shared director); not a check of that row.
How well served: An area's band, from ranking every area in the country by practices per 10,000 residents: No practices, Underserved, Balanced, Well served, Saturated, Unknown.
HRSA: The US Health Resources and Services Administration, which designates the dental shortage areas we show for US ZIP areas.
Implant activity: A score from 0 to 100 built from seven signs a UK practice is active in implants; three signs are not collected yet and count as zero, and the breakdown says so.
Implant content: How much a practice's website says about implants (pages and words); a stand-in for volume, which no record holds.
Implant services (from the website): The implant services a practice's website lists, such as dental implants or full-arch restoration, as the directory recorded them.
Implant-trained dentist: A dentist whose website entry or register entry names implant qualifications, memberships or titles.
Implants first mentioned online: The date of the earliest copy of the website in the Internet Archive that mentions implants.
Independent: A practice whose owner has fewer than four practices (UK).
Internet Archive: The public archive of old web pages (the Wayback Machine); tells us when a website, and its implant pages, first appeared.
Intraoral scanner: A digital impression scanner; "mentioned" means the website says it has one.
Kind of registration: How we classified a new register entry: changed hands, existing owner expanding, new company belonging to an existing practice, or genuinely new.
Last checked: When we last read anything about a practice; marked old after 90 days.
Legal form: Limited company, LLP, partnership or sole trader, from Companies House or the register.
Local markets: The screens about areas: how well served each is, who lives there, and the practices in it.
Matched by us: A link we made by rule rather than read from a register; always labelled with the rule and how sure we are.
Matched records: The register entry, directory listing and website we have joined into one practice, and how sure we are they are the same place.
Median age: The middle age of an area's residents: half are older, half younger.
Median home value: The middle home price in an area: what a home sold for over the last year (UK, HM Land Registry; a council average in Scotland) or what owners say theirs is worth (US, census survey).
Median household income: The middle household income in a US area, from the census survey; for UK neighbourhoods we hold an average, not a median, and say so.
Median monthly rent: The middle monthly rent in an area: gross rent from the US census survey; not loaded for the UK yet.
Membership plan: A practice's own monthly plan for patients, when its website names one.
Metro area: A US metro or micro area (a Core Based Statistical Area): whole counties grouped by commuting to a shared urban centre, as the Census Bureau delineates them. It has no state, because 59 of them cross a state line.
Movement: One thing that changed at a practice, held as the difference between two dated readings of the same thing — a figure in a filing against the comparative figure in the same filing, or a page in the Internet Archive against an earlier capture of the same site. Both readings are printed, with the date of each and what that date is. We publish no movement without both of them: a change with no endpoints is a guess wearing an observation's clothes. From Companies House (free, Open Government Licence) and the Internet Archive (free, public), compared monthly for the UK and US.
My lists: Practices you have saved, with your notes, ready to export.
My territories: Areas you have saved (postcode districts, regions or a radius) to reuse on every screen.
Neighbourhood: A UK census area of about 7,000 residents (statisticians call them middle layer super output areas, MSOAs; in Scotland, intermediate zones); the smallest area we hold figures for.
Net assets change: How far a company's net assets moved between the accounting period and the comparative period in the same filing at Companies House, as a percentage. Both figures come out of one document, so they are comparable. UK companies only; from Companies House under the Open Government Licence, refreshed as new accounts are filed. It is for your information and is never quoted back at a practice.
Network (US): US practices that look like they belong together. Either the federal registry names a parent the practice declared, or we grouped them ourselves by rule — a shared website, a shared phone number, the same person signing the registrations. The two are never added together and never share a heading, and neither says anybody owns anything: the United States has no company register to check.
New company, existing practice: A new registration under a new company that Companies House shows belongs to a practice we already know.
New federal registration: A US dental organisation given a number by the federal provider registry (NPPES) for the first time. It is the closest thing the United States has to a dated national registration, and it is not an opening date.
New practice: A registration with no previous practice, no existing owner and no company link: genuinely new.
New practices: The screen that shows practices before opening, newly registered and changed hands.
New to implants: A practice whose website first mentioned implants in the last 12 months, according to the Internet Archive.
No: The source says no; information, not a gap.
No health insurance: The share of a US area's residents with no health insurance, from the census survey.
No practices: An area's band when people live there and we hold no practice with a postcode in it; a real count, not a gap.
No score: A score that has not been calculated, usually because a figure it needs is missing; the tooltip says which.
Not checked yet: We have not read this practice's website, or matched a Google listing, or checked the Internet Archive, or looked the company up; the tooltip says which.
Not fetched yet: We know the company exists but have not fetched its directors, owners and loans yet.
Not filed: A figure that is genuinely absent from a company's filed accounts, not one we failed to read. Micro-entity and small-company accounts are a balance sheet with no profit and loss account, so most carry no turnover figure at all. Not filed is never zero.
Not on the register entry: The care register does not carry this field for this practice.
Not on their website: We read the website on the date shown and it does not mention this; not a "no".
Not read yet (reviews): Nobody has opened this practice's Google reviews panel, so we hold no count of what its patients name. It is our reading, not a practice whose patients say nothing, and it is never shown as a zero. Every practice we have opened is recorded whether the read worked or not, so “we opened it and Google showed no reviews” and “nobody has ever looked” are different answers.
Not stated: The short form of "not on their website" or "not on their listing" used in tables; never counted as "no".
Nothing we can evidence with two readings: We hold no pair of comparable readings for this practice, so we cannot say what moved. It is a statement about our reading and never about the practice: the profile prints, for each thing we looked at, the sentence saying what it did not tell us. It is never shown as a zero, a dash or “no growth”.
Old: A fact past its refresh period (90 days for most facts; longer for loans, register entries and ratings); still shown, with its date.
Online booking: A booking system on the practice's website; "none found" means we read the website and found none.
Open Payments: The US federal record of what drug and device makers pay each clinician: manufacturers must declare it by law and CMS publishes it. We count the dentists at a practice who appear in it, with the manufacturer, the amount and the date. It records a commercial relationship — teaching, consulting, a study-club lunch — and is never a suggestion that anything improper happened.
Opportunity score: A calculated score from 0 to 100 for an area: a weighted average of local figures (ten for the UK, nine for the US since September 2026), each shown next to it; where one is missing we say so and rebalance the rest.
Opportunity score (UK, ten parts): The UK score's parts since September 2026: demand vs supply 25, income 15, NHS access 10 (not loaded yet), weak competition 10, few implant practices 10, home value 10, growth in registrations 5, degree share 5, age profile 5, poor health 5.
Opportunity score (US, nine parts): The US score's parts since September 2026: income 15, over-65s 15, room for another practice 15, degree share 10, home value 10, population 10, dental shortage area 10, insurance cover 10, population growth 5.
Over-65s: The share of an area's residents aged 65 or over, from the census.
Patient finance: A finance provider named on the practice's website for spreading the cost of treatment.
Percentile (in the score): Where an area's figure sits among every area of the same size in its country, 0 (lowest) to 100 (highest); every part of the opportunity score is one, or a share.
Planning applied for / Planning approved: A council planning application mentioning dental use, and the same once permission is granted; permission is not an opening.
Population: The residents of an area, from the census (UK) or the census survey (US).
Population change: How much an area's population grew or shrank between the last two census counts, as a share of the earlier one.
Postcode district: The part of a UK postcode before the space (LS1, BD20).
Practice: One dental practice at one address; duplicates from different sources are merged into one entry.
Practices per 10,000: How many practices an area has for every 10,000 residents; the figure areas are ranked on.
Premises: An address that may become a practice (a company formed, a planning application, permission granted); not yet registered, and counted separately from practices.
Price covers: What a published price includes: the whole treatment (includes crown), excludes crown, crown only, or a mini implant.
Price type: Whether a published price is exact, a "from" price, or a range.
Record (record completeness): How complete and current our record of a practice is: the share of key facts checked in the last 90 days, weighted by how sure we are the sources describe the same practice; complete, partly complete or thin.
Regional report: A report on one region generated from our records on a stated date, checked before publication, totals only.
Registered owner: The owner the care register names for a practice (the register calls it the provider).
Registered with the regulator: The date a practice's register entry starts; not the same as opening.
Replaced: The practice a new register entry took over from, when the register names one.
Review text: The words patients wrote in their Google reviews, read off the public reviews panel. It is not the star rating: the rating is a number on the listing, this is the sentences. Every quote is reproduced exactly and is never summarised, because a paraphrased review is no longer evidence. We never store the reviewer's name, only a salted hash that tells two reviewers apart and identifies nobody. Read for the UK and US; free, no API.
Reviews naming a problem: How many of the reviews we read name a specific problem — a wait, a cancellation, an unexpected cost, pain, a refund. It is what those patients wrote and never a finding about the practice, the patient's own sentence is printed beside the count, and it is not something to raise on a call.
Reviews that name implants: How many of the reviews we read say something about implants in the patient's own words. It is not a count of implant cases: a practice that places implants quietly and a practice whose patients write about them look different here for reasons that have nothing to do with volume. Always shown with the number of reviews we read and the number Google published.
Reviews we read: How many review cards we captured on one dated read of a practice's Google reviews panel, always shown beside the total Google displayed at that moment. Every review-text count is a count over the reviews we read and never over everything the practice has published — “six of the forty we read, of the two hundred and forty-eight published” is the fact; “six reviews” on its own is not.
Saturated: An area's band: practices per 10,000 residents in the top 15% of the country.
Secured loan: A loan registered at Companies House against a company's assets (Companies House calls it a charge); for your information only, never for a conversation with the practice.
Sedation: Whether a practice's website says it offers sedation.
Seen by an NHS dentist: The share of a UK area's adults seen by an NHS dentist in the last two years; not loaded yet.
Set up to advertise: A Facebook or Google advertising tag is in the website's page code, so the practice can measure and retarget the people it advertises to. It says the plumbing is installed. It does not say an advert is running, and "set up to advertise with nothing running" is a real state we can show you.
Share: The share of practices we hold a fact for, out of all practices; not how common the thing is.
Shared, but not a group: A website or a phone number several practices give that we have decided is not a dental group — a directory, a lead-generation site, a web agency, a page host. We keep each one with the reason and the date we checked, rather than dropping it silently.
Sign of a new practice: A new company, a planning application or a register entry that may become a practice; linked to an existing practice where we can.
Single-implant price: The price a practice publishes for one implant, ideally including the crown; the comparison figure across practices.
Single-site: Outside the UK: a practice whose website is shared with no other practice.
Source: Where a fact came from: their website, the register, Companies House, the GDC register, council planning records, the Internet Archive, the directory listing, Google, a job board, a statistics office, or a calculation.
Special offer: A price worded as a promotion; shown, but left out of comparisons.
Territory: An area you save once (postcode districts, regions, or a radius) and reuse on every screen.
The group's adverts: Adverts found through a website or Facebook page a practice shares with other practices. They belong to the group, not to that one practice, and we say so on every row rather than crediting them to the practice.
Travel-to-work area: The UK area inside which most residents both live and work, drawn by the Office for National Statistics from commuting. It is the closest UK equivalent of a US metro area, and it is not a metro: it is a different construction and we never call it one.
Typical price: The middle (median) of comparable single-implant prices among nearby practices.
UK House Price Index: HM Land Registry's monthly index; where price paid data stops at the Scottish border, a Scottish neighbourhood carries its council's average price from it.
UK only: A fact we collect for the UK and not for the country you are looking at; the column is not shown and one line says why.
Underserved: An area's band: practices per 10,000 residents in the bottom fifth of the country.
Unemployed: The share of an area's labour force out of work and looking for work, from the census.
Unknown (area): An area with no population figure, so no band and no score.
Vacancy: A job advertised on the practice's website or matched to it on NHS Jobs, BDJ Jobs or dentaljobs.co.uk.
Warning signs: Overdue accounts, a strike-off notice, liquidation or administration at Companies House; shown to reps and investors only.
Website first archived: The date of the earliest copy of the practice's website in the Internet Archive.
Website quality score: How much work a practice has put into its website, 0 to 100, from nine things we read on the page: what it says about implants, published prices, online booking, whether it is set up to measure its marketing, equipment named, ways to pay, contact details, the team named, and an implant brand named. Every part is printed with the score. A website we have not read has no score at all — never 0, because a 0 would be a verdict on their website when what happened is that we did not read it.
Website read: Whether and when we last read the practice's website; we read websites for the UK only today.
Well served: An area's band: practices per 10,000 residents in the top 40% of the country but not the top 15%.
What that date is: Every date beside a movement says which kind of date it is: a day we measured on, the end of an accounting period, or an upper bound on when something appeared. A company's accounts are dated by their period end, not by the day we read them, and an Internet Archive capture is the first time the Archive saw a page rather than the day it was published.
What's changed: The feed of changes across all practices, newest first, with "worth a call" marking the ones that matter.
Where this came from: The panel behind every fact: source, date, page and the exact text we read.
Who owns what: The screen that lists companies and owners with more than one practice, from the register, with our own matches shown separately.
Worth a call: A change that usually means a buying moment: a new loan, a change of owner, a closure, a new practice, a change of hands, a price change, starting implants, an expansion, a scanner or brand added.
Your territory: The first screen after sign-in: who to call this week in your home territory, and why.
ZIP area: A US census area matching a ZIP code (statisticians call it a ZIP code tabulation area, ZCTA); the smallest US area we hold figures for.