# How the Dental Practice Health Snapshot works — Xona

> What the snapshot checks, what it deliberately does not check, and how evidence, confidence, and freshness are labeled.

Source: https://xonark.com/dental-practice-health-snapshot/methodology/

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Methodology

# What we check — and what we deliberately don't

The snapshot is an outside-in, public-data report. It reads only what a patient, buyer, or search engine can already see. It never touches private practice systems, patient records, or login-protected pages.

## What we check

### Google Business Profile basics

Rating, review count, website link, booking link, hours visibility, and profile activity — the signals patients see before they call.

### Website patient-access paths

Visible phone number, tap-to-call, contact form, email visibility, and how many clicks a patient needs to reach a request path.

### Booking path

Booking or appointment-request links on the website and on the Google profile.

### After-hours patient capture

Whether a patient who looks after closing finds a 24/7 request path: online booking widget, request form, or chat — or phone-hours only. We never place calls.

### CDCP visibility

Whether the website publicly mentions CDCP / the Canadian Dental Care Plan. Visibility only — we never claim a practice does or does not participate.

### Public patient journey

The Find → Open → Contact → Request path a new patient actually walks, step by step.

### Inbound/social channels

Publicly discoverable Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and similar profiles — flagged as unverified for monitoring.

### AI/search visibility

robots.txt, sitemap, canonical, noindex, local-business structured data, AI-crawler access, and whether service/location content is readable.

### AI answer presence

When run, we ask web-search AI assistants for a dentist in the practice’s area and report how often the practice was mentioned in the test answers — a sampled presence check on the test date, never a ranking.

### Local peer context

Anonymous comparison against cached nearby practices in the same category: rating and review medians, booking-link presence. Peers are never named.

### Technology signals

Public hints of booking/practice-management platforms — always labeled low-confidence and directional.

## What we do not check

These need internal systems or staff participation. The report says so explicitly instead of guessing — they are the “verify privately in Xona” items.

- ✕ Private practice-management or dental-software data
- ✕ Call logs, missed-call counts, voicemails, or response times
- ✕ Patient records or any PHI
- ✕ Financial statements, production, or valuation data
- ✕ Actual appointment availability behind a login
- ✕ Form submissions — we never submit forms or message patients
- ✕ Phone answering or after-hours phone handling — we never place calls
- ✕ Actual CDCP participation or CDCP directory presence
- ✕ Staff performance or any individual-level data

### Evidence

Every finding states what was actually observed and where: a profile field, a scanned page, or a cached public record.

### Confidence

High for direct observations, medium for inferred signals (like platform detection), low for partial or stale data. We band readiness instead of faking a precise 0–100 score.

### Freshness

Findings are labeled live-scan vs cached, with the scan time on the report. Public data changes; the report says when it looked.

## Fairness and corrections

- Report links are unlisted and marked noindex — they are not published or ranked.
- Peer comparisons are anonymous cohorts. We never name competitors in a report.
- This is not a valuation, a clinical assessment, or a verified audit.
- If something is wrong or outdated, every report has a correction link — we review and refresh.

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