Original research · August 2026

Healthcare Practice Google Review Benchmark

We examined 748 dental, medical-spa and plastic-surgery profiles. Median ratings barely moved, from 4.8 to 4.9, while median review counts ranged from 77 to 147.

See where you stand

The finding

Ratings look similar. Review volume does not.

Across all three specialty cuts, the middle rating sits within one tenth of a star. That makes “we have excellent ratings” less distinctive than it may feel inside the practice.

Review counts tell a different story. Their medians vary substantially by specialty, which is why a surgeon, dentist and medical spa should not be judged against the same number. This report compares the cuts side by side; it does not combine them into one misleading healthcare-wide median.

Sample size, geography, median Google rating and median review count by specialty
Specialty	Sample	Geography	Median rating	Median reviews
Dental Practices	462	Washington State	4.9	147
Medical Spas	137	United States	4.9	101
Plastic Surgery	149	United States	4.8	77

Median rating

A narrow range across all three cuts.

Dental Practices4.9

Medical Spas4.9

Plastic Surgery4.8

Median review count

The larger difference appears here.

Dental Practices147

Medical Spas101

Plastic Surgery77

These are three separate specialty samples, not one pooled sample. The dental cut is Washington State; the medical-spa and plastic-surgery cuts draw from United States prospect research. The comparison is directional because the sampling frames differ.

Specialty cuts

Compare like with like.

462 practices · Washington State

Dental Practices: 4.9 stars and 147 reviews

A recurring-care category naturally creates more opportunities to ask

Dental practices had the highest median review count in this study. That does not demonstrate better care. One plausible explanation is opportunity: many dental patients return repeatedly over years, creating more appropriate moments for a review request than a one-time procedure does.

The dental sample is also geographically different from the other two cuts. It covers Washington State rather than a nationwide prospect-research sample, so 147 is a useful reference point for this sample, not a universal target for every dentist.

137 practices · United States

Medical Spas: 4.9 stars and 101 reviews

A 4.9 rating is common in the measured aesthetics sample

Half of the medical spas measured had a rating at or above 4.9. A high rating still matters, but 4.9 by itself does not establish that a practice is unusually strong within this sample.

The median profile carried 101 reviews. Repeat treatment patterns may help medical spas create more review opportunities than surgical practices, although this study measured the profiles, not the cause of the difference.

149 practices · United States

Plastic Surgery: 4.8 stars and 77 reviews

Lower review volume should not automatically be read as weaker reputation

Plastic-surgery practices had the lowest median review count of the three cuts. A surgical episode usually creates fewer natural review opportunities than recurring dental or aesthetics care, which may help explain the difference.

That interpretation is informed by how the categories operate; it was not tested by this dataset. The useful comparison for a surgical practice remains the surgeons patients genuinely consider for the same procedures and market.

Use the benchmark

The national number is a sense check. Your local comparison is the decision.

01
Start with your specialty
Use the relevant median to avoid comparing businesses with very different patient relationships.
02
Then define your real market
Look at the practices a patient sees for the same treatment, procedure or service, not every provider in your city.
03
Inspect more than the total
Read recent reviews, recurring themes and practice responses. A review count alone cannot tell you what patients are learning.

Method

What we measured and what we did not.

All three cuts were collected in August 2026. We recorded the public Google Business Profile rating and review count for each practice. We did not score clinical quality, patient outcomes or the sentiment of individual reviews.

Population: Practices were identified from public sources: state licensing registries, the national provider registry, professional association directories and OpenStreetMap. No directory was scraped in violation of its terms; where a source restricted automated access we used its own export or public-records route.
Measurement: Rating and review count were collected from public business listings. Nothing was self-reported by the practices and no practice was contacted for this research.
Inclusion guard: A specialty is only published where the sample is at least 30 practices and the median review count is at least 20. Below that threshold the underlying data is too sparse to describe a market.
Privacy: No practice is named, in any cut, ever. These measurements were taken during commercial prospect research, and publishing identities would be a misuse of that context regardless of whether the finding was flattering.
Reproducing it: Any practice can check its own position in about a minute: open your Google Business Profile, read your rating and review count, and compare. That is the whole comparison. We are not asking you to take our number on trust, only to look at yours.

A cut we did not publish

84 dermatology practices were measured, which clears our sample-size threshold. The median review count was 5, which means review data was mostly never collected for this cut rather than that these practices have five reviews. Publishing a dermatology benchmark from it would have produced a confident and wrong sentence, so there is no dermatology benchmark on this site until the collection gap is fixed.

Limitations

Read the numbers within their limits.

This is a snapshot, not a trend. It describes where these practices stood during the collection window and says nothing about direction.
The sample is practices that entered our prospect research, not a random sample of the specialty. It skews toward independent practices with a website, and away from very new practices and hospital-owned groups.
Rating and review count are visibility and reputation signals. They are not measures of clinical quality and should not be read as any.
Medians describe a middle, not a target. A practice can sit below the median for good reasons, including being newer or serving a smaller market.
We have not published distribution, quartiles, or AI citation rates for these cuts because we have not computed them to a standard we would defend. When we do, they will appear here with the same disclosure.
The dental and national specialty cuts use different geographic sampling frames. Their side-by-side comparison is useful context, not a controlled estimate of the effect of specialty.

Common questions

What practice leaders usually ask next.

What is a good number of Google reviews for a healthcare practice?

There is no universal number. In these samples, the median was 147 for dental practices, 101 for medical spas and 77 for plastic-surgery practices. Geography, specialty, practice age and visit frequency all affect the useful comparison.

Does a higher review count mean better clinical care?

No. Review count measures published patient feedback and may influence discovery or trust, but it is not a measure of clinical quality.

Should a practice compare itself with a national benchmark?

Use a national or regional benchmark as a sense check. The more decision-relevant comparison is the set of practices a patient sees for the same service in the same realistic market.

The benchmark is the starting point. Your competitive set is the useful one.

We will measure the practices patients actually compare with yours and show you where the meaningful reputation gaps sit.

Get Your Growth Roadmap