A patient choosing a dentist, and an AI assistant answering for them, look for the same facts: who will treat me, are they registered, who inspects the practice and what will it cost. This guide sets out what the General Dental Council (GDC) and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) say, apart from what we found on practices’ pages. The CQC material applies to England; elsewhere, check with the body that inspects your practice.
What the GDC asks a practice website to show
A dental professional mentioned on a website as providing dental care “must ensure” the site displays their professional qualification, the country it comes from, and their GDC registration number.
Whoever is responsible for a practice website must ensure it displays the name and geographic address where the service is provided; contact details including an email address and telephone number; “the GDC’s address and other contact details, or a link to the GDC website”; the practice’s complaints procedure and who patients can contact if not satisfied (the relevant NHS or equivalent body for NHS treatment, the Dental Complaints Service for private treatment); and “the date the website was last updated”. The information must be kept up to date.
Practice publicity must make clear whether the practice is NHS (or equivalent), mixed or wholly private.
“You must give clear information on prices in your practice literature and on your websites - patients should not have to ask for this information.” Standard 2.4.1 separately asks for a simple price list in the reception or waiting area.
Note what the guidance does not say. It asks for the GDC number and for the GDC’s contact details or a link to its website; it does not require a link to each dentist’s own register entry. The GDC register is free to search and shows each registrant’s status, registration number, registrant type, dates of registration and qualifications, so a link to the entry is a short step that lets a patient, or software, confirm the number. That link is our advice.
What the CQC says about dental services
The CQC says it inspects 10% of dentists in England each year and does “not give ratings to dentist services”; its page for each service carries the latest inspection report, older reports, who runs the service and its contact details.
Its guidance on displaying ratings lists primary dental services among the services it does not rate, and says registered providers may use its “Regulated by” graphics. The legal duty to show a CQC rating on a website applies to services that have a rating.
So a dental practice without a rating has none to display. Naming the CQC and linking to your own location page is our advice: it is where a patient would check you.
What we checked
In our review of eight dental practices’ implant pages in Leeds and Manchester, captured on 27 September 2026, we read each implant page and, where linked, its fees page. We recorded what the pages showed; we did not assess any practice’s compliance, and information we did not find may appear elsewhere on a practice’s website.
Seven of the eight published an implant price and seven named a dentist. Three showed a GDC registration number for a named dentist, and one linked to a dentist’s entry on the GDC register; three others linked to the GDC’s home page or register search page.
Four named the CQC; two linked to their own CQC page in the page code, and one more did so only after its scripts ran in a browser. Two carried a visible date. Two practices gave different figures for the same item on different pages.
A checklist you can apply
Open your home page, one treatment page and your fees page. Items marked “rule” restate a requirement quoted above; items marked “our advice” go further than the rules. The tick boxes are only a reading aid and save nothing.
- Show all three beside each name. rule
- Link each GDC number to that dentist’s entry on the GDC register. our advice
- Display them on the site; a footer on every page is an easy place. rule
- A link to the GDC website meets the guidance; a link to the register does more. rule
- Make it clear; saying so in words, not only in a logo, helps software read it. rule
- Give clear prices so patients do not have to ask. rule
- Date it, say what each price includes and what costs extra, and use one figure per item on every page. our advice
- Link the complaints procedure and name the NHS body or the Dental Complaints Service as appropriate. rule
- Name the CQC and link to your own location page on its website. our advice
- Show the date, and keep staff and services current. rule
Sources
Each source was fetched on 28 September 2026; the requirements above are taken from these pages as they read that day. Rules change, so check the current version before relying on this guide.
- GDC, Guidance on advertising, www.gdc-uk.org/standards-guidance/standards-and-guidance/gdc-guidance-for-dental-professionals/guidance-on-advertising (fetched 28 September 2026)
- GDC, Standards for the Dental Team, principle 2, standards.gdc-uk.org/pages/principle2/principle2.aspx (fetched 28 September 2026)
- GDC, The registers, www.gdc-uk.org/about-us/what-we-do/the-registers (fetched 28 September 2026)
- GDC, Search the register, olr.gdc-uk.org/SearchRegister (fetched 28 September 2026)
- CQC, Find a dentist, www.cqc.org.uk/care-services/find-dentist (fetched 28 September 2026)
- CQC, How providers must display ratings, www.cqc.org.uk/cqc-ratings-and-promotional-graphics/how-providers-must-display-ratings (fetched 28 September 2026)
This guide is a content aid, not legal or regulatory advice. It separates what the rules say from what our review found; where it recommends something the rules do not require, it says so. Have the responsible person at your practice approve any change to regulated information before it goes live. Send corrections, with the passage, to hello@answari.co.uk.