A dental practice is really two businesses sharing a building. One holds an NHS contract and a waiting list it could not advertise its way out of if it wanted to. The other sells private treatment in open competition with every practice within driving distance. Marketing only applies to the second business, and right now the second business is where the entire sector is moving.
The numbers behind that shift are stark. LaingBuisson valued the UK high street dentistry market at £12.16 billion in 2023/24, up 9.2 per cent in a year, with private work now around two thirds of it. A 2023/24 survey of 4,969 English dental surgeries found 82.8 per cent were not accepting new adult NHS patients. Roughly one in five people in Britain paid for private dentistry in 2024, many of them for the first time, and not by choice.
Every one of those first-time private patients is making a decision they have never had to make before: which dentist, at what price, on what evidence. That decision is made online, and most practices give them remarkably little to work with.
The CMA has noticed the same thing
In March 2026 the Competition and Markets Authority launched a market study into private dentistry, with a final report due by 4 March 2027. Its stated concerns read like a mystery-shopper exercise: patients face limited price transparency, inconsistent information and real difficulty comparing providers or switching between them.
It is worth pausing on what that means for marketing. The regulator overseeing the sector has effectively announced that the average practice website fails the people using it. Whatever the study concludes, the direction of travel is towards published prices and comparable information. Practices that get there voluntarily, before any of it becomes mandatory, collect the trust benefit for years while competitors are dragged along afterwards.
There is a second, quieter reason to publish prices, which we cover below: AI assistants have started answering cost questions, and they can only cite practices that put numbers on pages.
What the GDC lets you say
Dentistry is unusual in that its advertising rules are mostly about identity rather than claims. The General Dental Council's guidance on advertising is specific about how a practice and its people present themselves.
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| GDC number in advertising | Registrants advertising their services are expected to include their GDC registration number. |
| Website basics | Practice websites should carry the GDC's contact details, the practice complaints procedure and the date the site was last updated. |
| “Specialist” is a protected word | Only clinicians on one of the GDC's 13 specialist lists may call themselves a specialist. “Special interest in”, “experienced in” or “practice limited to” are the compliant alternatives. |
| No implied specialisms | Titles like “smile specialist” or “denture specialist” are out for anyone not on the relevant list. |
| Tooth whitening | Whitening is the practice of dentistry. Only GDC registrants may legally provide it, which is worth saying on the page because patients comparing you with a beautician's offer do not know it. |
| Regulated premises | Practices in England must be registered with the Care Quality Commission, and inspection reports are public. |
None of this is onerous. It does mean the standard agency playbook of superlatives, comparison claims and manufactured urgency sits badly here, and a practice website written that way reads as neither compliant nor credible.
What patients actually type
Dental search intent splits cleanly, and the split should drive the site structure.
- Access searches. “Dentist near me accepting NHS patients”, “emergency dentist” plus a town. Enormous volume, mostly unservable if your NHS list is closed. A page that says honestly whether the list is open, and what the private alternative costs, converts a share of it anyway.
- Treatment searches. Implants, Invisalign and aligners, whitening, composite bonding, dentures. High value, privately funded, comparison-shopped. Each deserves its own page with a real price or a price range, not “from” theatre.
- Anxiety searches. “Does a root canal hurt”, “sedation dentist”. Lower commercial intent, high trust value. This is where a practice earns the bookmark before the booking.
- Membership searches. Practices moving away from NHS work need plan uptake. A clear page on what the monthly plan includes, against pay-as-you-go maths, does more for conversion than any advert.
AI assistants have started quoting dentists
Ask ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews what dental implants cost in the UK and you get a specific answer with sources. The sources are practices and dental groups that published clear, dated price information on ordinary crawlable pages. The practices that treat pricing as a phone-call secret are not in the answer, and the patient never learns they exist.
This is the same transparency the CMA is pushing towards, arriving through a different door. Our generative engine optimisation guide covers the mechanics, and our free crawler access checker will tell you in one click whether AI crawlers can read your site at all, because a surprising number of dental sites block them by accident.
Where the marketing money actually works
- Local SEO first. A practice serves a radius. Google Business Profile categories per treatment, consistent NAP, and review velocity beat almost everything else on cost. Our local SEO guide applies almost unedited.
- Treatment pages with prices. The single highest-leverage change on most dental sites, for patients, for the CMA direction of travel and for AI citation all at once.
- Reviews, systematically. Ask at the moment of a good outcome, reply to everything, never incentivise. Volume and recency both matter.
- Paid search on high-value treatments. Implant and aligner campaigns can carry acquisition costs in the hundreds of pounds and still pay, but only with a landing page that answers price honestly.
- Plan marketing to the existing list. Converting existing patients to a membership plan is worth more than most new-patient campaigns, and costs almost nothing.
Frequently asked questions
Can a dental practice advertise NHS availability?
Yes, and honestly stating whether your NHS list is open is one of the most searched questions in the sector. What you cannot do is use NHS branding misleadingly or advertise availability you do not have.
Can we use patient testimonials and before-and-after photos?
Yes, provided they are genuine, consent is documented, and images are unedited and fairly representative. Claims of superiority over other practices are where the GDC guidance draws the line.
Should we publish prices when competitors do not?
That is precisely why you should. Patients comparing three practices remember the one that gave them a number, the CMA is moving the whole sector that way, and AI assistants can only cite prices that exist on a page.
Do you work with dental groups as well as single practices?
Yes. Multi-site groups mostly need location page architecture and review operations at scale, which is the same discipline applied per site.
If your practice is somewhere in the shift from NHS to private and the website has not caught up, tell us where you are trying to get to and we will tell you honestly what we would do first.
