Methodology

How the report is built

The product's one claim: every number traces to a public dataset, states its vintage, and carries its uncertainty. This page is the whole method — the sources, the rules, and the places where we decided a number was too weak to print without a caveat.

Last updated 2026-08-01.

The rings

Every figure is computed inside three rings drawn around your address at 2, 3 and 5 miles, with the 3-mile ring as the headline. Those radii were chosen by measurement, not convention. Each candidate radius had to pass three tests:

1. A usable margin of error. A 1-mile ring runs ±9–11% on population in suburbs and up to ±24% in rural areas — wide enough that our own report would flag it as unreliable. At 2 miles the margin is about ±6%; at 5 miles, about ±3%.
2. Each ring must add information. In suburban markets each step outward adds 50–60% more population, so the three rings describe genuinely different markets rather than three views of the same one.
3. The numbers must be sayable. Dentists and brokers talk in whole miles.

In rural markets no small radius passes test 1 — at one validation site, 2 miles held 2,860 residents at ±18.6%, a figure too vague to act on. Where the population inside the widest ring is too thin to measure reliably, the report widens its radii and says so on the cover. Some competing reports vary their radii too, but silently, which makes two of their reports quietly incomparable. Every report of ours names the radii it used and why.

Demographics

Population, income, education, age, and housing come from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, 2020–2024 5-year release on 2020 block-group geometry, the newest available. Block groups rarely align with a circle, so each one's contribution is apportioned by the share of its area inside the ring, computed in a site-centered equidistant projection. Margins of error are propagated through every derived rate — when the report says ±4%, that is the ACS uncertainty carried honestly through the arithmetic, not a decoration.

One honesty note we'd rather state than have you discover: a 5-year estimate is an average over its window, so its effective midpoint is about 2022. Commercial vendors advertise "current-year" and forward-projected figures; those are modeled from the same ACS, trading a citable number with a published margin of error for a more recent nominal year. We use the measured release and state its age — which is also why the report carries population growth separately rather than presenting one snapshot.

Growth, measured twice

The obvious approach — comparing two overlapping ACS releases — is invalid twice over: the 2015–2019 and 2020–2024 releases sit on different block-group geometry, and the Census Bureau warns against comparing overlapping 5-year windows because four of the five years are the same sample. So the report measures growth two ways, each labeled with what it can and cannot say:

• Ring level: the 2020 Decennial Census against ACS 2020–2024 — identical geography, flowing through the same apportionment as everything else. Because the ACS midpoint is about 2022, this understates a fast-growing market, and the report says so.
• Recency: the Population Estimates Program, vintage 2025, at county level — the most current measured population the government publishes. Coarser than a ring, so it is reported as the direction the surrounding county is moving, never silently applied to the ring.

Demand: patients, not headcount

Most such reports divide residents by offices and compare against a rule of thumb. That assumes every resident is a dental patient, and they are not: across Ohio census tracts, the measured dental-visit rate spans 19.5% to 82.9%. The report instead applies CDC PLACES tract-level dental-visit rates to the ring population, producing active patients per general-practice office — the pool of people who actually saw a dentist in the past year, divided among the offices already there.

That figure is read against what one office can absorb: a solo general dentist with one hygienist tops out around 1,300–1,500 active patients (industry practice-management figures from AFTCO and others — the ADA deliberately publishes no recommended ratio, on the grounds that one number cannot fit every market, and the report says that too). More patients per office than an office can serve means unmet demand; fewer means the incumbents are competing for a pool too small to fill their chairs.

Health tracts load for every state the rings touch, not just the one the address sits in, and any share of a ring with no published dental-visit rate is reported as a caveat rather than absorbed into the count. The old residents-per-office figure still appears in the report — every competing report leads with it, so you arrive anchored to it — but it is labeled as the weaker metric it is.

The competitor census

The count of competing offices is enumerated, not sampled. Discovery sweeps the area around your address rather than accepting a single search result, and any patch dense enough that a search could be concealing businesses is searched again more finely until it is not. Where a patch cannot be resolved even then, the report says so as a coverage gap instead of quietly undercounting it.

Each discovered listing then has to survive three passes:

1. Dedupe. Listings are merged by street address, with directionals preserved — N Main and Main St S are different streets — so one practice with four provider records counts once.
2. Exclusion. Labs, suppliers, and non-practice businesses are removed and shown in an expandable excluded list, so you can audit what we didn't count.
3. Classification. Practices are classified general vs. specialist from their own websites, because a specialist in the count inflates your competition. Ambiguous cases get checked; a practice whose name already states its specialty does not, because confirming it changes no decision.

Each surviving office carries a confidence label — verified active, unconfirmed, or likely closed — built from corroborating signals: operating status, reviews, a live website, and the federal NPI provider registry. Only verified-active offices count toward the band. The registry is enrichment, never the count: raw NPI records overstate real offices by a measured 2.49× at five miles. As an outside check, our office count was validated against Census payroll records — 95 vs. 95 across four fully-swept ZIP codes.

The market band

The band is read from active patients per office across all three rings, weighted toward the headline ring, with small adjustments for demand conditions that make a market easier or harder than the headcount alone suggests. The thresholds are absolute, not a curve: a band describes what the ground can support, not how this address ranks against others. What each band means, and the patients per office it starts at:

These were lettered A to F until August 2026. The thresholds have not moved; only the names have. A letter invites a reading the scale does not carry — a "D" looks like a near-failure, when a market at 1,000 to 1,400 patients per office is one operating under pressure rather than one that has failed, and plenty of practices do well in exactly that ground. Reports bought before the change show the new names, because the band is derived from the same stored value the letter was.

We do not publish what share of US markets falls in each band. We have measured it internally and do not yet trust the measurement: it depends on a national list of dental offices that is thinner than the enumerated count this report uses, and the answer moves materially with that one input. A figure we cannot stand behind does not belong beside figures we can.

Your own report shows the working: every ring's patient count and office count, the figure the band was read from, and any adjustment that applied to your address. There is no adjustment that does not appear on the page. The benchmark those figures are read against — 1,300 to 1,500 active patients per full-time general dentist — is stated there too, so you can check the arithmetic yourself.

The written reading

The short narrative at the top of the report is generated by a language model that is given only the report's published facts. Then we don't trust it: the text is read back and every figure it quotes is checked against those facts. If any number fails the check, the narrative is dropped entirely and the report falls back to fixed band copy — a wrong sentence is worse than no sentence.

What the report does not claim

• No projections. Growth figures are measured history with stated vintages.
• No site selection. It screens a market; it doesn't pick your suite or negotiate your lease.
• No production modeling. What a practice would collect here depends on you.
• No false completeness. Censored income tracts, unverifiable listings, coverage gaps, and unpublished health rates are all reported as caveats, not smoothed over.

Sources and vintages

The same appendix, with per-figure citations, ships inside every report — including the free Scottsdale sample.