What people search for when they need a dentist
3,723 searches, over 2 days, typed into a free US dental directory by the people using it. Not keyword tool estimates: the actual words.
Search engines stopped telling websites what was typed to reach them years ago, and the tools that sell keyword volumes are modelling it rather than counting it. A directory with its own search box is one of the few places the real thing still exists. This is ours, published because it is more useful in the open than in a database.
What they were asking about
Every search that named a need rather than a place, sorted into the plainest categories we could make. 0% of them are about money, and 0% are somebody in pain.
| What it was about | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Not enough yet to break down. | ||
What we could not answer
51 of the 3,723 searches, 1%, found nothing at all. Some of that is spelling, which the site now learns and fixes by itself. The rest is a real gap: a place with nothing in it, or a question a directory cannot answer.
The wordings people used most
Only wordings that 25 or more separate searches used. Nothing typed by one person appears here, and nothing about a person is recorded anywhere: house numbers, email addresses and phone numbers are stripped before a search is written down.
| Typed | Times |
|---|---|
| No single wording has been used often enough to name. | |
How to use this
Free to quote, chart and republish, including commercially, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Attribute it as: Dent-OX, "What people search for when they need a dentist", https://dent-ox.com/research/what-people-search-for.
Counted over the last 90 days and recalculated as the site is used, so the numbers move. Directory figures come from the National Provider Identifier registry, loaded 2026-08-28.