The Smyleee Rating
A data-driven quality score for every dental clinic
Example score — built from real-world reputation, profile depth, and verified trust signals
Ranking algorithm update
August 6, 2026
Smyleee Ranking v4: review mentions now count, and every service claim gets verified
v4 activates a review-mention signal that existed in the code for months but never reached the pages people actually see — a positive mention of a specific service in a real patient review now counts toward that service’s Top 10 ranking. It also decouples tagging from eligibility: a clinic can now tag any number of real services it offers, but a service only becomes eligible to headline its own Top 10 page once it’s verified — checked against the clinic’s real website and genuine review mentions — free, and the same process for every plan.
Where to put your attention
- ✓Encourage patients to name the specific procedure in their review — “dental implants,” “Invisalign,” whatever they actually had done. That now directly feeds that service’s Top 10 ranking.
- ✓Tag every real service you offer. There’s no cap anymore, so there’s no reason to leave any off.
- ✓Make sure your own website actually lists everything you tag — that’s exactly what verification checks against.
- ✓Claim and verify your listing. It still unlocks additional scoring categories — tenure, verification, socials, and more.
What changed in v4
- −The old 5-service tagging cap is gone — a clinic offering 8 real services can now tag all 8, not just 5.
- −Tagging a service no longer guarantees it competes for that service’s Top 10 — it has to clear verification first.
- −Review-mention scoring stopped being a dormant feature — it now actually moves rankings on the live site.
The algorithm keeps rewarding what real patients actually say and do — genuine reviews naming a real procedure — over what a clinic simply claims about itself.
The process
How It Works
Data Collection
We aggregate data from multiple online sources, clinic profiles, and patient signals to build a comprehensive view of every dental practice.
Algorithm Processing
Our scoring engine evaluates each clinic across five weighted categories, producing a normalized quality score on a 0-100 scale. We don't publish the exact weighting — that's by design.
Score & Ranking
Clinics receive their Smyleee Rating and those above the qualification threshold enter the ranking pool for Top 10 lists.
Transparent scoring
The Score Breakdown
Every Smyleee Rating is built from 5 weighted categories, normalized into a single score out of 100. We don’t publish the exact weighting or thresholds — that’s intentional, for the same reason no major search engine publishes its exact ranking formula. Publishing it would turn a quality signal into a checklist to game rather than an outcome to earn.
Online Reputation
Your Google rating and review volume, weighted toward genuine, current reputation over a stale review history.
Content Depth
A real, substantial description in your own words, your linked services, gallery photos, and core listing metadata.
Contact & Practical Details
Phone, website, hours, address, and the practical details patients actually look for before booking.
Business Maturity
Years in operation — a longer track record scores higher.
Trust & Verification
Whether the listing is claimed by a real owner, independently verified, and linked to genuine social profiles.
Unclaimed listings are graded fairly, not penalized
Most clinics on Smyleee start as unclaimed, bulk-imported profiles — fields like tenure, verification, and social links are effectively impossible to fill without an owner logged in. Rather than score those as zero against the full scale, an unclaimed listing is graded fairly on the fields it can actually reach, then rescaled back to a 0–100 score. Claiming the listing unlocks grading on every category.
What your score means
Score bands
Every Smyleee Rating maps to one of five tiers. The label appears next to the score everywhere on Smyleee — clinic cards, profiles, and Top 10 rankings.
90+
Outstanding
84–89
Excellent
71–83
Very Good
61–70
Good
0–60
Rated
This is not your Google rating
A clinic's Google rating (out of 5 stars) reflects only the reviews left on Google. The Smyleee Rating is a separate 0–100 score that factors Google reputation in alongside review recency, years in practice, profile completeness, and editorial review. Both numbers are shown on a clinic's profile — they are never merged into a single figure.
Our commitment
Our Transparency Promise
Our goal is simple: help patients find the right dentist, and help great dentists get found — based on merit, not marketing budget. That promise only means something if we show our work. Nothing about a clinic’s rank on Smyleee can be purchased. Not a higher score. Not a faster entry. Not a longer stay in the Top 10.
What Paid Tiers Include
Never affects rank
- AI Visibility Pro tools — custom schema markup, AI-assisted FAQ authoring, and enhanced profile fields that help AI search engines like Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, and Perplexity read and understand a listing more clearly. These improve how a listing is presented and parsed — they don’t add points to a score or move it up a ranking.
- Rank History & analytics — deeper historical visibility into a clinic’s own performance over time.
- Booking & lead-generation tools — a booking CTA and built-in lead form on top of the marketplace listing every plan gets.
- Faster onboarding — expedited profile setup and review processing.
- Verified badge — earned once we confirm the listing is really run by the clinic (a website widget or document review), not a third party. It signals trust to patients; it doesn’t change a clinic’s rank or Top 10 eligibility. A deeper “Smyleee Vetted” tier — license status, credential confirmation, and complaint-history review — is planned on top of this; it isn’t live yet.
What Is Never For Sale
No plan, no exception
- A higher Smyleee Rating
- Priority entry into the ranking pool
- Extended visibility beyond what a clinic’s real score earns
- Eligibility for a Top 10 page a clinic hasn’t earned through a verified service and real reviews
- Suppression of a competitor’s accurate ranking
No manual manipulation, either — every score is computed automatically from verifiable data points, the same code path for every clinic regardless of what they pay Smyleee.
Business model
How We Monetize
Smyleee makes money from clearly labeled sponsored placements. The organic Top 10 rankings are not for sale — here is exactly where the wall between the two sits in the code.
Sponsored Placements
A clinic pays a recurring monthly rate to rotate into a sponsored slot on a Top 10 page — there’s no fixed cap on how many clinics can sponsor a given page. Every sponsored card carries an amber “Sponsored” badge with a star in place of a rank number, since sponsored cards rotate and a rank number would be meaningless. They don’t get the editorial verdict block organic listings get.
- Billed monthly, recurring — not a one-time fee. A clinic can prepay several months at once.
- Sponsor status is never an input to the ranking score — it’s applied as a filter after scoring already happened.
- Time-bound: unpaid holds expire after 14 days, and a daily automated sweep tears down any listing whose paid months have run out.
- Labeled as sponsored even in the structured data we publish for AI search — a separate, explicitly-named “sponsored partners” block, never merged into the ranked list, so an AI reading the page can tell the difference too.
Organic Top 10 Rankings
Cannot be bought at any price. No scored field anywhere in the ranking or rating code reads plan tier, subscription status, or payment — a clinic on Smyleee’s free plan competes on identical terms to a paying one. Position is set entirely by the proprietary, 100-point ranking formula described above: Smyleee Rating, Google rating, review volume, location match, and service relevance.
- Only active, admin-approved clinics enter the ranking pool for a page — pending listings never rank publicly.
- Headlining a Top 10 requires clearing all three qualification gates below — rating floor, score floor, and real review evidence.
- Rankings lock monthly, recomputed the 1st of each month — not recalculated live on every visit.
Ranking eligibility
Top 10 Qualification
Only clinics that meet our quality threshold are eligible for inclusion in Smyleee’s curated Top 10 lists.
All three gates must pass
- 1
A minimum Smyleee Rating
Below the floor, a clinic stays listed in the directory — it just doesn’t headline a Top 10.
- 2
A minimum page-specific ranking score
Out of the separate ranking formula below — Smyleee Rating, Google reputation, review volume, location match, and service relevance combined.
- 3
Real patient-volume evidence
A real base of Google reviews, or a Smyleee Rating strong enough to stand in for a thin review count.
A clinic whose name signals a narrow specialty — a hygienist practice, say — also won’t headline a page outside that specialty even if it clears every gate above. It still ranks, just not as the top pick for a service it doesn’t focus on. We don’t publish the exact numeric thresholds behind these gates — the same reason no major search engine publishes its exact ranking formula.
Every service claim is verified before it counts
A clinic can tag any number of services it says it offers, but a service only becomes eligible for that service’s Top 10 page once it’s verified — checked against the clinic’s own website, and against whether real patient reviews actually mention that service by name. This exists to stop a common industry problem: clinics listing services they don’t actually perform, just to appear on more pages. We’d rather have accurate, narrower listings than inflated, misleading ones — and this check is free and applies equally to every clinic, whether or not they’ve purchased anything from Smyleee. A clinic offering five genuine services, with the reviews and web presence to prove it, is eligible to compete for all five relevant Top 10 pages for free, on merit alone.
Per-Page Ranking
Once a clinic clears every gate, its position on that specific page is set by a combination of its Smyleee Rating, Google reputation, review volume, proximity to the location being featured, and how well its services match what the page is about — weighted by a proprietary formula we don’t publish.
Platform Integrity
This is not a backlink directory
Smyleee is a curated dental marketplace built on data integrity and patient trust — not a website directory for SEO purposes. We actively monitor and enforce the quality of every listing on our platform.
No Ghost Listings
Every listing must represent a real, operational dental practice with verifiable contact information, physical address, and active patient services. Shell profiles created solely for backlinks are identified and permanently removed.
Zero Tolerance for Manipulation
SEO agencies, marketing firms, and link-building services that create or claim listings on behalf of clinics without genuine patient service intent will have their accounts suspended and all associated listings removed without warning.
Continuous Monitoring
Our systems continuously verify listings against real-world data. Clinics that go inactive, show inconsistent information, or fail our periodic quality audits are flagged, downgraded, or removed from the platform entirely.
A message to SEO agencies and marketing firms
Smyleee has been operational since 2012. Our ranking algorithm evaluates clinics across multiple verified data points that cannot be gamed through profile creation alone. Creating a listing without a complete, verifiable practice profile will result in a Smyleee Rating of zero — providing no SEO value, no ranking eligibility, and no backlink authority. We use nofollow attributes on all outbound links until a clinic meets our quality threshold. Your time is better spent elsewhere.
Editorial policy
Editorial Guidelines & Trust
A score is only as trustworthy as the process behind it. Here’s how Smyleee keeps clinic data current and keeps the scoring process independent of who’s paying.
Content Freshness
Clinic and Google data refresh every midnight, in automated batches — not the whole directory at once, but every listing cycles through on a regular schedule. Top 10 rankings recompute once a month and lock for that calendar month, so a ranking stays stable and citable rather than shifting on every page load.
Editorial Independence
Every field that feeds the Smyleee Rating is editable on the free plan — no paid plan can buy rating points, and no scored field anywhere reads plan tier, subscription status, or payment. The scoring code is the same for every clinic regardless of what they pay Smyleee.
How Reviews Factor In
Google rating and review volume both carry real weight, and recent reviews count for more than an old review history — a dormant practice coasting on years-old five-star reviews doesn't outrank an active one earning fresh ones today.
Corrections & Ownership
An owner who claims their listing can directly edit their own profile facts — address, hours, services, and more — at any time. Corrections take effect at the next data sync and rating recalculation, not on a fixed delay.
Why this page matters for AI search
Patients are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, and Perplexity to just find them a dentist — not typing a search and scrolling links. Whether your clinic gets named in that answer depends on whether AI systems can find a specific, verifiable fact to cite. That's exactly what the Smyleee Rating and this methodology page are built to provide.
A single, citable number
AI answer engines favor specific, verifiable data points over vague marketing language. "Smyleee Rating: 92 (Outstanding)" is exactly the kind of concrete, comparable fact a generative engine can quote with confidence — unlike a subjective claim your own website might make about itself.
Structured for machine extraction
Every clinic profile ships with schema.org markup (ratings, reviews, FAQs, business details) built specifically so AI systems — and Google's own AI Overviews — can read and cite your practice's facts directly, not just index a page of text.
Editorial review builds trust signals
Content reviewed by a licensed dentist on our medical advisory board carries the kind of independent verification that answer engines weigh when deciding which sources to trust — the same E-E-A-T signal search engines have rewarded for years.
A transparent methodology to point to
This page itself is part of the signal: a publicly published, specific methodology (this page) gives AI systems something concrete to verify a claim against, rather than an opaque "trust us" score.
Why we built it this way
AI search engines like Copilot and ChatGPT are increasingly how people find local businesses — and those systems are good at recognizing when rankings have been manipulated by money. If we let payment influence our rankings, two things would happen: patients would get worse recommendations, and AI engines would eventually stop trusting our data altogether. Keeping our ranking system genuinely merit-based isn’t just an ethical choice — it’s the reason Smyleee’s Top 10 pages are trusted and cited by AI search engines in the first place. We intend to keep it that way.
Want to see whether your clinic is actually being cited in AI answers today? The AI Citation Dashboard on AI Visibility Pro tracks it directly, with a monthly report on where you show up and where you don't.
How 8 AI search engines discover and cite content
Every answer engine patients now use to find a dentist retrieves and cites the web differently. Listing on Smyleee and keeping your AI Readiness Indicator high is what makes a profile legible to all eight.
ChatGPT
When a question needs current or local information, ChatGPT browses the live web and cites the specific pages it drew the answer from.
Your profile provides: A verified rating, structured FAQ, and clear service listings to quote directly — plus a robots.txt policy that never blocks its citation crawler.
Perplexity
Built around live web search from the ground up — every answer is a set of numbered citations pulled from its own web index and real-time search, never an unsourced claim.
Your profile provides: schema.org markup and a specific, quotable Smyleee Rating — exactly the concrete fact Perplexity favors over vague marketing copy.
Claude
Claude's web search tool fetches pages live when a question needs current information, reading the page's structured data and visible content before citing the source.
Your profile provides: Clean, crawlable HTML with real content rendered in the page itself (not streamed behind a loading state) and an llms.txt index built for exactly this kind of retrieval.
Microsoft Copilot / Bing AI Search
Grounded in Bing's own search index, Copilot synthesizes an answer from top-ranking pages and shows inline citations back to the source.
Your profile provides: Unblocked Bing indexing and the same schema.org entity data that helps Google understand a clinic profile also helps Bing's index do the same.
Grok / X (Twitter) AI Search
Grok combines real-time X conversation data with live web search, surfacing and citing a business's own website or profile page alongside social signals.
Your profile provides: A public, always-current profile page with structured facts — rating, services, hours — for it to draw on whenever a web search triggers.
Google AI Overview
Generated directly from Google's own search index — an AI-written summary at the top of results, drawing from and linking out to the same pages that rank organically.
Your profile provides: The same technical SEO fundamentals that earn organic ranking: indexable pages, valid structured data, fast and clean rendering.
Google AI Mode
Google's conversational search mode — a back-and-forth chat interface layered on Search that follows up, narrows down, and cites sources inline as the conversation continues.
Your profile provides: The same indexable, structured, fast-loading profile that earns organic Google visibility — AI Mode draws from the same underlying index.
Google Gemini
With Google Search grounding switched on, Gemini retrieves and cites live pages the same way AI Overview does; without it, Gemini has no way to know about a specific local clinic at all.
Your profile provides: Being indexed and citable in Google Search in the first place — the only way a local clinic ever enters Gemini's grounded answers.
The AI Citation Dashboard actively tracks real citation captures across all eight engines above — schema markup, FAQ data, and editorial trust signals are what make a profile citable in every one of them.
Questions about the Smyleee Rating
What is the Smyleee Rating?
The Smyleee Rating is a data-driven, 0–100 quality score computed for every dental clinic listed on Smyleee. It's built from 5 weighted categories — online reputation, content depth, contact and practical details, business maturity, and trust and verification — normalized into a single number out of 100. We don't publish the exact weighting, the same way no major search engine publishes its exact ranking formula.
Is the Smyleee Rating the same as my Google rating?
No. Your Google rating (out of 5 stars) reflects only the reviews patients leave on Google. The Smyleee Rating is a broader 0–100 score: it factors in your Google reputation alongside review recency, years in practice, and profile completeness. Both numbers appear on your Smyleee profile and are never combined into one figure.
What do Smyleee Rating scores mean?
Scores map to five tiers: 90 and above is Outstanding, 84–89 is Excellent, 71–83 is Very Good, 61–70 is Good, and below 61 is Rated. These labels appear next to a clinic's score everywhere on Smyleee, including Top 10 rankings and clinic cards.
Can a clinic pay to improve its Smyleee Rating or its Top 10 ranking?
No. Both are 100% algorithmic — no scored field in either the rating or the ranking formula reads plan tier, subscription status, or payment. Sponsored Top 10 placements are clearly labeled, billed separately, and never enter the ranking score computation; they're filtered in only after organic scoring is already complete.
What's the minimum score to appear in Top 10 rankings?
A clinic needs to clear three gates: a minimum Smyleee Rating, a minimum page-specific ranking score, and evidence of real patient volume — either a real base of Google reviews, or a Smyleee Rating strong enough to stand in for a thin review count. Clinics that don't clear all three stay listed in the directory but aren't eligible for Top 10 placement. We don't publish the exact thresholds.
How do I improve my Smyleee Rating?
Focus on real-world reputation first — Google rating and review volume are the largest single factor, and a recent review counts for more than an old one. Write a real, substantial description in your own words rather than boilerplate. Claim and verify your listing to unlock additional scoring categories, including a bonus for verified ownership.
How often is clinic and ranking data refreshed?
Clinic and Google data refresh every midnight, in automated batches — every listing cycles through on a regular schedule. Top 10 rankings recompute once a month and lock for that calendar month, so a ranking is stable and citable rather than shifting on every page load.
How does a clinic become eligible for a specific Top 10 page, like Dental Implants?
A clinic must actually offer that service. We verify this by checking the clinic's own website and whether real patient reviews mention that specific service by name — free, and the same process for every clinic regardless of plan. This exists to stop clinics from listing services they don't actually perform just to appear on more pages.
Who do I contact with questions about my ranking?
Email hello@smyleee.com — whether you're a clinic owner asking about your specific score or a service listing, or a patient with questions about how a list was generated. We're glad to walk through it.
If you’re a clinic owner and want to understand your specific score, or believe a service listing was incorrectly approved or rejected, contact us at hello@smyleee.com — we’re glad to walk through it. If you’re a patient with questions about how a specific list was generated, the same applies. Transparency isn’t just a policy for us; it’s the whole product.
For clinics
Want to improve your score?
Claim your listing and complete your profile to maximize your Smyleee Rating. The more complete and accurate your profile, the higher your score.