Review policy

Reviews on Best.Dentist are written by patients, on this site, about their own experience with a practice. They are one of the inputs to how listings are ordered (How We Rank), so we run them to a published standard.

Who can review

Someone who is or was a patient of the practice. When you submit a review you confirm that, and in some states we are required to keep your name and contact details privately — never published — so the review can be verified if a dental board asks.

What we publish

Your star rating and review text, shown with your first name, city, the service category, and the month and year. We never publish full names, contact details, photos, or treatment records.

What moderation does

We check that a review is plausibly from a real patient, that it describes the reviewer's own experience, and that it doesn't contain abuse, hate speech, someone else's private information, or clinical detail about another person. We do not edit opinions, soften criticism, or remove a review because it is negative. A review that breaks the rules above is rejected with the reason recorded; the reviewer can appeal to [email protected].

What we never do

We never pay or offer anything for a review, never let a practice pay to remove or bury one, never import reviews from other websites, and never write reviews ourselves. Practices can't see a review before it is published and can't choose which reviews appear. A practice may reply publicly; replies are moderated to the same standard and can't disclose anything about a patient's care.

A note on what reviews can tell you

A review is one patient's experience, not a measure of clinical quality, and individual experiences vary. For licence standing, check the practice's profile — we show when we last verified the responsible dentist's licence against the state board record.