Across the 12,304 Dental.me practice records in these 10 cities, only 41.1% had a practice website URL on file and 41.0% had opening hours on file. The gap is not the same as proving a practice has no website or no hours; it measures whether those fields are available in the directory data a patient could use to continue researching.
What stood out
Website and hours coverage by city
The chart uses Dental.me's September 13 city cut. Website coverage means a practice website URL is stored on the record. Hours coverage means an opening-hours record is attached.
The 10-city data
| City | Dental.me records | Website URL on file | No website URL on file | Hours on file | Observed price-publishing practices* | Observed price rows* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tampa, FL Price report → | 453 | 240 (53.0%) | 213 (47.0%) | 244 (53.9%) | 2 | 26 |
| Phoenix, AZ Price report → | 960 | 501 (52.2%) | 459 (47.8%) | 455 (47.4%) | 3 | 16 |
| Austin, TX Price report → | 1,010 | 511 (50.6%) | 499 (49.4%) | 494 (48.9%) | 2 | 18 |
| Denver, CO Price report → | 743 | 355 (47.8%) | 388 (52.2%) | 339 (45.6%) | 2 | 25 |
| Houston, TX Price report → | 2,309 | 946 (41.0%) | 1,363 (59.0%) | 1,022 (44.3%) | 4 | 45 |
| New York (Manhattan), NY Price report → | 2,551 | 1,036 (40.6%) | 1,515 (59.4%) | 1,052 (41.2%) | 3 | 24 |
| Miami, FL Price report → | 918 | 336 (36.6%) | 582 (63.4%) | 405 (44.1%) | 2 | 11 |
| Chicago, IL Price report → | 2,024 | 733 (36.2%) | 1,291 (63.8%) | 722 (35.7%) | 2 | 44 |
| Boston, MA Price report → | 754 | 240 (31.8%) | 514 (68.2%) | 160 (21.2%) | 2 | 17 |
| Charlotte, NC Price report → | 582 | 161 (27.7%) | 421 (72.3%) | 154 (26.5%) | 2 | 9 |
*Important: the Dental Verdicts columns are observed counts from our source-linked pricing dataset, not a census of every practice in the city. They should not be divided by the Dental.me record count to claim a citywide price-transparency rate.
The information trail often breaks before price
Price transparency is only one step in a patient's research path. A consumer first has to identify a practice, reach a useful website or profile, and find basic operational information. In this 10-city Dental.me cut, website URL coverage ranges from 27.7% in Charlotte to 53.0% in Tampa. Opening-hours coverage is even lower in some markets: Boston has hours on file for only 21.2% of its records.
That does not mean the remaining practices are unreachable. A practice may have a Google Business Profile, social page, phone listing or a website that simply is not attached to the Dental.me record. The finding is narrower: important pre-contact information is not consistently connected to the structured practice record.
National context
Dental.me's published website-gap study used an August 15 snapshot of 249,344 practice records. It reported 134,912, or 54.1%, with no website URL on file. Spencer Whiteclaw, founder of Dental.me, supplied the September 13 city-level cut used in this study and authorized its use with attribution.
“More than half of the dental practice records in the country have no website URL attached to them. Some of those practices do have a site that simply never got linked anywhere, but from a patient's side the effect is the same: no hours, no service list, no way to check insurance or a price before picking up the phone. Price transparency can't start until a practice is findable, and in a lot of cities that first step is where the trail goes cold.”
Why New York is labeled Manhattan
Dental.me groups records by the listed city name. Its “New York, NY” row contains 2,551 records and effectively represents Manhattan. Brooklyn, the Bronx, Flushing, Staten Island and other Queens localities are stored under their own city names, so we label this row New York (Manhattan) rather than implying it covers all five boroughs.
Methodology
| Dental.me city data | Fresh directory cut supplied by Dental.me founder Spencer Whiteclaw on September 13, 2026. Each row includes every Dental.me practice record whose listed city matches that city. |
|---|---|
| Website field | “Website URL on file” means Dental.me stores a practice website URL for the record. “No website URL on file” does not prove that no website exists. |
| Hours field | “Hours on file” means an opening-hours record is attached to the Dental.me practice record. |
| National figure | The 54.1% no-website-URL national figure uses Dental.me's published August 15 study denominator of 249,344 records, not the later September directory count. |
| Dental Verdicts pricing data | We count unique practice names and row-level observations from the current Dental Verdicts public-price dataset for the matching city and state. Every price row retains its original practice source URL. |
| No composite ranking | We deliberately do not blend website coverage, hours coverage and our selective public-price crawl into one score. The datasets answer related but different questions and use different denominators. |
Sources and downloads
Website Gap by State
Published national website-field study and downloadable state data.
View Dental.me studyCurrent price dataset
Source-linked public prices used for the observed pricing columns.
Download prices10-city access table
City-level Dental.me fields plus the dynamically derived Dental Verdicts price counts shown above.
Download combined CSVHow to cite this study
Dental Verdicts. “2026 Dental Information Access Study: Websites, Hours & Public Prices Across 10 U.S. Cities.” Published September 14, 2026. Dental.me city-level directory data supplied September 13, 2026.
Dental.me-derived fields are reproduced with permission and should be credited to Dental.me with a link to its source research. Dental Verdicts' observed price counts are derived from our source-linked public-price dataset.