Dental reviews: how to ask and how to reply

April is when a practice finally looks at its own profile. The schedule settles after spring break, the hygiene column fills back up, and somebody at the front desk counts the reviews and finds eleven from last year and two from this one.

Then a core update lands in the middle of March, rankings move for reasons nobody can point at, and the review conversation gets louder. Dental practices are the biggest part of our client list, and the same three questions arrive every spring: how do we get more reviews, who should reply, and what are we allowed to say.

Here is what we tell them.

The rules are narrower than most practices think

Google’s position on asking has not changed. You may ask patients for reviews. Your profile gives you a short review link for exactly that purpose. What Google prohibits is being selective about who you ask, and offering anything of value in exchange for one.

Selective is the part practices get wrong. Sending the link only to the patients who smiled on the way out is review gating, and it breaks the rule whether it happens through a platform with a settings screen or through a receptionist’s judgment. The same applies to a form that asks “how did we do” first and only shows the Google link to the fives. Everybody who completed an appointment today gets the same message, or nobody does.

There is also no gift card, no raffle entry, no free whitening, no credit on the next cleaning. Not for patients, and not for the team member who collects the most. A practice doing this can lose the reviews it collected and, in a bad case, pick up a warning on the profile.

The rule that costs practices the most, though, is not Google’s. A dental office is a covered entity. Confirming in public that somebody is your patient is a disclosure, and the reply box is public. More on that below, because that is where the real risk sits.

The ask that works in an operatory

Mechanics matter more than the script. What we see working in the practices whose listings we run:

1. Ask out loud, in the chair, by name. The hygienist finishing a cleaning has the only ask with a real response rate. “If you have a minute later, a review helps other people find us” beats any automated sequence.
2. Send one text the same day. From the practice’s own system, with the direct review link, signed by a person. One text. A second is a nuisance, and nuisance shows up in the stars.
3. Ask a question rather than for stars. “Would you mind saying what you came in for?” produces reviews that say “implant consult” and “root canal on a Saturday”, which is what the next person searching for those things needs to read.
4. Send it to the whole schedule, not the happy half. Every completed appointment, same rule, every day.
5. Let them write it at home, on their own phone. A tablet at the front desk puts every review on one device and one network within an hour of each other, which is the pattern automated filters exist to notice. Reviews collected that way often never appear at all.
6. Give the job one name. Fifteen minutes a day, one person accountable. Reviews that belong to everyone belong to nobody.

New patient exams and emergency visits are the two appointments worth asking after every single time. They are also the two searches that bring new people to the profile in the first place.

Replying: short, warm, and silent about treatment

Every review gets a reply, good or bad, inside two business days. That part is not complicated. What to write is.

Do not confirm the person is a patient. Do not mention what they came in for, what was recommended, what it cost, or whether they paid. Do not correct their version of events with the chart open in front of you. A reply that says “we have treated you for years and the crown was discussed twice” is a disclosure about a specific person’s care. The Office for Civil Rights has settled cases with practices over exactly this kind of reply. It is also the reply that makes everyone reading it decide not to call you.

The pattern that works for a complaint:

Thank you for the feedback. We would like to understand what happened and make it right. Please call the office and ask for the practice manager, or email the address on our contact page.

No details, no defence, no diagnosis. Take it offline. Three sentences and the job is done.

For a good review, thank them, use the team member’s first name if the patient did, and stop. Two sentences. Resist stuffing the service name in for search reasons; the patient’s own words already do that work, and a reply that reads like marketing copy undoes the review it sits under.

Write both templates down, keep them at the front desk, and let one person send them. The reply that causes problems is always the one written in the moment by somebody who was in the room.

What we are telling practices this month

• Send the review link to every completed appointment, and stop filtering who gets it.
• Remove any gift card, raffle or staff bonus tied to review counts.
• Retire the front desk tablet and move the ask to a same-day text from the practice’s own system.
• Write the two reply templates, one for praise and one for complaints, and put a single name against the job.
• Read your last ten replies with the disclosure rules in mind, and edit anything that confirms a person was treated or names a procedure.
• Test the review link from a phone. We have seen those links break after profile edits, and nobody notices for a month.

None of this needs a budget and all of it compounds. A practice that asks everyone, every day, for a year does not have a review problem again. That is how our reviews and reputation work runs for dental practices, and the review link you need is already sitting in the Google Business Profile you own.