The short answer
Google does not publish a number, and anyone who quotes you one without naming its source is guessing. What the 2026 data does show is a floor patients care about, a wide spread among dental practices, and a strong preference for recent reviews. The number that matters for your practice is set by the practices that appear above you in the map results, and you can work it out in about 20 minutes. This post, part of our Grow Your Practice Online series, goes through what each dataset says, what it cannot tell you, and the worksheet.
What patients say they need
BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 asked a panel of 1,002 US adults, through SurveyMonkey, how they use reviews for local businesses. It was published on February 11, 2026, and covers all kinds of local businesses, not dental offices in particular. The findings that bear on a review target:
- A floor of about 20. 47% said they won't use a business with fewer than 20 reviews, and only 9% said they are willing to use one with five or fewer.
- Recent beats old. 74% said they seek reviews written in the last three months, and 32% look for reviews from the last two weeks, up from 20% the year before.
- Higher rating expectations. 31% said they will only use a business rated 4.5 stars or more, up from 17% in 2025, and 68% will only use one with four stars or more.
- Replies are expected. 89% said they expect owners to respond to reviews.
Where dental practices actually are
Two 2026 sources describe dental practices specifically, and they disagree. That is useful in itself.
In MouthWatch's 2026 survey of 448 dental professionals, collected in June 2026, 47.5% reported fewer than 100 Google reviews and 12.1% reported 500 or more. MouthWatch sells products to dental practices, and the figures are self-reported.
Citevio, an agency that works with cosmetic and Invisalign dentistry, published a June 2026 scan of 527 US dental offices "in 7 metros plus 9 smaller nearby towns," of which 523 had a rating on file. The median was 250 reviews at 4.9 stars. A quarter had fewer than 102 reviews and a quarter had more than 474. The article does not say how the offices were chosen.
Read together: in a self-reported survey whose respondents range from solo and group practices to DSOs, community health centers and specialty practices, nearly half sit under 100; in a scan of metro-area offices, the middle office has 250. Your market decides which picture applies to you, which is why the worksheet below starts with your own competitors rather than either figure.
What the AI-visibility studies show, and do not show
Does your review count decide whether ChatGPT recommends you? Two 2026 studies touch on it. Insites, a vendor, ran a 10,000-business sample of US local companies through ChatGPT and Perplexity and found that businesses surfaced by both averaged 133.4 Google reviews, against 10.7 for those surfaced by neither, which it calls "the single strongest correlating signal in the entire dataset." That is a correlation across all industries, with no dental breakdown, and it does not show that reviews cause the difference: businesses with many reviews may also be older, busier and better known.
The Citevio piece above asked the dental version of the question and declined to answer it: "we don't know, and this data can't tell you." In its scan, ChatGPT named just three of the offices and Perplexity eighteen, too few to compare. Treat any claim that a set number of reviews gets you into AI answers as unproven.
What Google says
Google's page on local ranking puts reviews under prominence and says: "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." It gives no number, and it adds: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."
Google's review policy also lists, under rating manipulation, "Content exhibiting unusual volumes or patterns of review contributions that are indicative of efforts to manipulate a place's rating." And in its April 2026 Maps safety update, Google said that if it sees "a sudden spike in spam reviews," it will remove the fake content and "pause new reviews on the profile." Google's wording is about spam, not about a busy week at a real practice. Still, in our view a steady monthly pace is a safer shape than a one-week push, and it serves patients better, as the next section explains.
Why the last 90 days matter more than the total
Google does not say recency is a ranking factor, so this section is our reasoning, not Google's. Patients read the newest reviews first, and BrightLocal's respondents said they look for reviews from the last three months. A practice with 400 reviews, most of them from before the current associate joined, tells a patient less than one with 150 reviews and a dozen from last month. A steady monthly pace also keeps your rating current when the practice changes, and avoids the spikes described above. So the target we set has two parts: a total that closes the gap with the practices above you, and a monthly pace at least equal to theirs.
Set your number: a 20-minute worksheet
You need a phone, a spreadsheet and your appointment count for the last month.
- Pick your most important search, usually "dentist" or your main treatment. Search it on a phone from where your patients live, signed out, and note the practices that appear above you in the map results. Our post on why a practice is missing from the map results explains how to search without your own location skewing the result.
- For each of those practices, write down the total number of Google reviews and the star rating.
- Open each practice's reviews, sort by newest, and count how many arrived in the last 90 days. Divide by three for their monthly pace.
- Do the same for your own practice.
- Your total target is the highest total among the practices above you. Your monthly pace is their highest monthly pace, plus enough to close the total gap over 12 months: subtract your total from the target and divide by 12. Compare it with your own pace from step 4; the difference is how much your asking has to grow.
- Check the pace against your monthly visits. If it is a large share of them, stretch the timeline rather than change who you ask.
- Repeat the count every quarter. The practices above you are not standing still.
A worked example
These numbers are invented to show the arithmetic; they are not from a real practice. Say the practices above you have 310, 240 and 180 reviews and collected 24, 15 and 9 in the last 90 days. Your target total is 310, and the fastest pace among them is 8 a month. You have 130 reviews, so the gap is 180, which is 15 a month over 12 months. Your pace is 8 plus 15, or 23 reviews a month. If the leader keeps its pace, you are level at 406 after 12 months. If you complete 400 visits a month, 23 reviews means roughly one for every 17 visits. If that is out of reach for your practice, close the gap over two years instead.
Ask every patient the same way
The pace comes from asking consistently, not from choosing whom to ask. Google's review policy allows businesses to "Solicit or encourage the posting of content that does represent a genuine experience," and its review tips suggest asking customers "to visit a Google link or scan a QR code." The same policy says businesses may not "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers," may not offer incentives such as "payment, discounts, free goods and/or services" "in exchange for posting any review," and "should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises, nor should they request that specific content be included." It also lists "Merchants requesting that staff solicit a certain number of reviews" as prohibited, so keep the monthly pace as the practice's own target and never turn it into a quota for staff.
The FTC's questions and answers on its reviews rule, in effect since October 21, 2024, say the rule exempts "generalized solicitations to purchasers" to post reviews from its fake- and insider-review provisions (section 465.2(d)). On asking only customers you think are happy, the FTC says "The rule does not contain a specific prohibition against such conduct. But this practice could violate the FTC Act." The FTC rule does not prohibit some incentives that Google's policy forbids, so for Google reviews, follow Google's stricter line: no incentives at all.
For how to build the asking step into checkout and follow-up, see our review system for practices. If you plan to send requests by text, a later post in this series covers consent rules first. For where reviews sit among everything else that affects local search, see our guide to ranking for "dentist near me".
Want your review gap measured for you?
Request a free audit and we will record a video walkthrough of your local search presence, including how your reviews compare with the practices that appear above you and the monthly pace that would close the gap. If you are at the San Diego Dental Convention on November 20-21, 2026, come by Booth 9 and we can run the numbers with you.