Dentist Website Statistics: What We Found Scanning Chicago

The numbers

What these numbers mean if you sell to dental practices

The headline number is the one that surprises people: 24 percent of the dental practices we scanned in Chicago had no website at all. That is the second-highest rate in our whole study, behind only auto repair, and it sits inside a profession that spends heavily on patient acquisition. It is worth being precise about what it means. These are businesses with a live Google Maps listing, a phone number, and patients walking in. They are not failing. They simply never built the asset that most vendors assume exists.

For anyone selling into dentistry, that single figure splits the market into two businesses that need entirely different conversations. A quarter of the market cannot be reached by any tactic that starts with their website: no retargeting pixel, no landing page audit, no SEO teardown. They are reachable by phone and by the address on the listing, and they are almost certainly not being contacted by the vendors who buy lists filtered on "has a website". The other three quarters are a normal digital market with the usual gaps.

The second number to sit with is 13 percent publishing an llms.txt file, the lowest AI-visibility figure of any vertical we measured, against a study-wide average of 20 percent. Dentistry is a category where patients increasingly ask an assistant rather than a search engine, and it is currently the least prepared for that. Whether that is an opportunity or a non-issue depends on what you sell, but it is a measurable, checkable gap that almost nobody in the category is talking about yet.

Against that, 33 percent name a decision-maker on the site, which is well above the trades and reflects how dental practices market themselves: around a named practitioner. Where a practice does have a site, you can usually find out who runs it. That matters more than it sounds, because the difference between reaching the owner-dentist and reaching a front-desk inbox is most of the outcome in this vertical.

The pattern across all four numbers is a profession that markets itself around people rather than around infrastructure. If you sell patient-acquisition services, the 24 percent with no site is your clearest opening and the least contested. If you sell software or systems, the 27 percent with no analytics is the more familiar pitch.

How this was measured

We searched Google Maps for dental practices in Chicago, took every matching business rather than a sample of the well-known ones, and then fetched each business's own website and read what was actually there: whether a site exists and loads, what platform it runs, whether analytics and advertising pixels are present, whether an llms.txt file is published, and whether any person is named as a decision-maker.

Businesses with no website were counted rather than dropped. That choice is why the "no website" figure exists at all: most datasets in this space silently exclude them, which makes every other percentage in those datasets flattering and wrong. The wider study covers 5,443 businesses, 4,524 of which had a website.

Nothing here is a survey, a projection, or an industry estimate. If we did not measure it, it is not on this page. The full cross-industry table is on the research index, and every field we collect is defined in the public data dictionary.

How fast does this data go stale?

A snapshot is only half the picture, so we measured the other half separately. We re-checked 4,527 business websites a median of 106 days after first observing them: 2.1 percent no longer loaded at all, and 1.9 percent of the sites we could read on both passes had switched a core platform such as a CMS, booking system or CRM. In a separate study we SMTP-verified 2,482 business emails scraped from company websites and found 14.2 percent of the decisively checkable addresses were dead.

Applied here: a list of dental practices built one quarter ago is not the list you think you have. Full methodology in the website churn study and the email decay study.

Other industries in this study

• Auto Repair Shop website statistics
• Med Spa website statistics
• Roofing Contractor website statistics
• HVAC Company website statistics
• Veterinary Clinic website statistics

The full cross-industry comparison table, including six industries without their own page yet, is on the research index.