Most dental practice reviews that appear unasked for come from patients who had something to complain about. That's not usually a reflection of a practice's care, it's a reflection of who feels moved to write something.
If you want to know how to get more Google reviews that actually represent your practice, the starting point is accepting that the good ones have to be requested.
Think about a straightforward appointment. The patient arrived on time, was seen by a clinician they trust, understood what was happening and left with a clean bill of health. Ask them how it went and they will tell you it was fine. Then they go back to their day and nothing appears online, because nothing out of the ordinary happened.
Now think about the patient who was looking for parking for 10 minutes, waited 15 minutes past their appointment time and left with a bill they weren't expecting. That patient has a reason to write, and often does so the same evening.
The result is a review feed that measures strength of feeling rather than quality of care.
Working Feedback's analysis of 851,267 patient reviews collected across the UK and Ireland between 2019 and 2024 found that 96% were positive. The vast majority of patients are satisfied, but very few of them say so without being asked.
Most practices treat reputation as damage control. Something negative appears, everybody reads it, someone drafts a response and the team feels deflated for a week.
It helps to see it as arithmetic instead. A single one-star review is the story of your practice when it sits next to four others. It is one person's bad day when it sits among 80 recent patient reviews from those who were properly looked after. You don't need to remove negative feedback, if you outnumber it.
Duthie Dental, a family-run practice in Liverpool, went from 96 Google reviews to 444 in just over a year. Their rating did not slip under the extra volume, it rose to 4.9 stars. More reviews made the average more accurate, not more fragile.
None of which means ignoring criticism. Recurring complaints about waiting times, parking or unclear pricing are the cheapest improvement plan a practice will ever be handed, and responding to them professionally in public does more for trust than a perfect score would. The point is that constructive feedback should sit in proportion alongside everything else patients think.
Here is the practical problem with asking manually.
It's Monday morning. Reception is being overrun, both phone lines are ringing, an appointment is delayed by 20 minutes, a nervous patient needs reassuring and somebody has just cancelled a long treatment slot. Your team absorbs all of it, keeps the diary moving and sends every patient out feeling looked after.
That might be the best show of work your practice does all week. But it's also the moment when nobody has a spare second to say "would you mind leaving us a review?" The busier and more difficult the day, the more your team deserves the recognition and the less likely anyone is to ask for it.
There is a second friction too. Plenty of staff find asking awkward, particularly when a patient has just paid for treatment. So the ask gets skipped, or it happens only with the regulars who are happy to help.
The numbers bear this out. Practices collecting reviews manually averaged around 5 Google reviews a month. Practices with an automated integration averaged almost 9.
Paul Lowe Dentistry, a well-regarded private practice in Solihull, had collected just 10 online reviews across 35 years of good work before it changed its process.
This is what Working Feedback is for. It connects directly to EXACT, and every patient receives a feedback request after their appointment. Responses are moderated and then published to your website and to Google. Nobody has to remember, and nobody has to feel awkward about asking.
For Duthie Dental, integrating with their practice management software took them from an average of 1.3 reviews a month to 23.2, with no extra staff resource. They also reached page one of Google for terms like implants and whitening, where they previously did not rank at all.
"Partnering with Working Feedback to upscale reviews for our practice has been transformational! It's helped to unlock great quality feedback from patients while also helping to build our online presence."
Ros Duthie, Strategic Business Manager, Duthie Dental
Working Feedback builds a question set around your practice, so the same request that asks how the appointment went also asks whether the patient is interested in anything else you offer. The five most requested across roughly 90,000 opportunities were:
The patient chooses. Nobody has to sell. Across the data, 15% of reviews generate a treatment opportunity worth an average of £271, and in 2024 the 706 participating practices averaged £81,264 in identified opportunity value. Duthie Dental surfaced £150,000 of further opportunities in line with their own model of ethical selling.
"There is a constant flow of great reviews to share on social media. We have lots of interest generated regarding our other services, such as Invisalign, which converts into consultations and the uptake of treatment."
Mia Gartland, Treatment Coordinator, Social Media and Marketing Manager, Paul Lowe Dentistry
Your patients think more highly of your practice than your Google profile suggests. The data says so, and so does every patient who has been coming to you for 20 years without ever writing a word about it. The only question is whether that opinion ends up somewhere a prospective patient will read it.