How We Gather (and How to Interpret) Our Data
Last updated November 2025
Our ratings will be more valuable to you if you know how the data were gathered and how they should be interpreted.
Opinion Surveys
We regularly survey area consumers for their feedback on services they have used. We primarily survey our subscribers, but also invite other randomly selected consumers to provide ratings.
On our surveys, we ask consumers to rate their experiences with services they had most recently used on several aspects of service. Our ratings tables show the percent of each practice’s surveyed patients who provided a rating of “superior” (as opposed to “inferior” or “adequate”) for questions on our survey.
Our ratings tables include all of the dentists for which we received at least 10 ratings on our customer surveys. If a dentist is not listed on our ratings tables, it simply means we did not receive at least 10 ratings for them.
Since many dentists were rated by rather small numbers of raters, small differences between two dentists in the percentage of raters who gave a particular rating (say, “superior”) should be ignored. The table below gives a rough guide to minimum differences you should look for in deciding on one practice over another.
When using these survey data, remember that the questions are to some degree subjective and that the differences among dentists might be explained by differences in the personalities, backgrounds, critical standards, and other characteristics of the raters or by biases these raters might have.
All of the data must be interpreted in view of timeliness. Our customer survey data are from surveys conducted from January 2015 to October 2025. Survey respondents were asked to report on experiences in the preceding year.
Surveys of Dentists
We also regularly survey almost all actively practicing dentists in the area and ask them to name one or two specialists in six fields they would consider most desirable to care for a loved one. In our ratings tables, we denote for specialists the dentists named most often in those surveys of other dentists—and how often each was mentioned.
Top Ratings
We give checkmarks to companies that score highest on a scoring system that we devise for each service field. Our scoring systems weight the various data in our tables and text based on our subjective judgment of their importance. Since the scores are based entirely on information presented, you can apply your own subjective judgments, and decide whether you prefer companies we have not given checkmarks. Where we do not have important data on a company, we cannot give our checkmark.
| A Rough Guide for Deciding Whether the Difference Between Two Percentages is Important | If one company had this number of ratings: | And a second company had this number of ratings: | Do not give much importance to the difference between the frequency with which the two companies experience a particular rating or result unless the difference is at least this many percentage points: |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assuming the average of the two companies' percentages is 50 percent | 10 30 60 120 |
10 30 60 120 |
45 26 18 13 |
| Assuming the average of the two companies' percentages is 80 percent | 10 30 60 120 |
10 30 60 120 |
36 21 15 10 |