Our Editorial Process

The short version

• Every price on the site is tied to a named source: a government claims file, a provider registry, a published price list, a peer study, or an itemized treatment plan a reader sent us.
• Every page is written and read by a person before it goes live. Software helps us aggregate and check; it does not decide what we publish.
• We publish cost and market research, not medical advice. No dentist reviews our pages, and we say so on every page rather than pretend otherwise.
• Mistakes are corrected in public, on a dated corrections log, and datasets are versioned with a DOI so a citation never changes silently.

Step 1: Sourcing. Where a number is allowed to come from

We rank sources by how directly they observe a real transaction. A page may only use the tiers below, and each pricing page names the tier it relies on.

We do not use: unattributed industry estimates, prices copied from other content sites, numbers derived by multiplying one procedure by an assumed ratio, or any figure we cannot trace back to one of the tiers above. In July 2026 we removed an entire family of derived braces and veneer city prices for exactly that reason; the removal is documented on the corrections page.

Step 2: Research and drafting

1. Question first. Each page starts from what readers actually search and ask (search-console data and reader emails), not from a keyword list. If we cannot add something the top results do not already say, we do not publish a new page; we improve or merge an existing one.
2. Numbers before prose. The data table, chart or calculator for the page is built and checked first, from the source tiers above. The text is written around verified numbers, never the other way round.
3. One page, one owner. A member of the team owns the page from draft to publication and is responsible for its sources, its Reviewed date and any later correction.

How we use software, and where it stops

We are a two-person-scale team publishing hundreds of data-heavy pages, so we use software heavily, including AI-assisted tools. Here is exactly what that means:

• What software does: loads and aggregates public datasets (millions of Medicaid claim cells), computes state and city statistics, checks that the same number is identical on every page that cites it, drafts tables and first-pass text from numbers we have already verified, and flags pages whose figures disagree with the source file.
• What a person does: chooses the sources, decides which pages exist, reads and edits every draft, checks each figure against its source, writes the judgement calls (what a "$499 denture" really includes, when a chain is a good deal and when it is not), answers reader emails, and signs off before publication.
• What we do not do: we do not bulk-generate pages, we do not publish text nobody has read, and we do not let a tool invent a price, a citation, a quote or a clinic. When automated checks fail, the page is held, not published.

Automated checks run before every release: the 51 state fact sheets alone pass roughly 9,800 numeric and consistency tests (values against the source file, canonical URLs, structured data, cross-page consistency). A build with a failing check does not ship.

Step 3: Review before publication

Before a page goes live, a second read covers:

• Source check. Every figure is opened against its source (file, URL, or reader document) and the as-of date is recorded.
• Consistency check. The same procedure must show the same national and state figures everywhere it appears (calculators, charts, FAQ answers, structured data).
• Claims check. Superlatives ("the cheapest state", "the only plan that...") are only allowed when the ranking in our own data supports them; otherwise they are rewritten as "what we measured".
• Scope check. The page must stay within pricing and market research. Anything that reads as a clinical recommendation is removed.

Pages that touch insurance, Medicaid or financing get an extra pass on eligibility rules and dates, because those change every year.

Step 4: Publication and labelling

• Each page shows the byline "Researched and verified by the Real Dental Costs Data and Research Team", a Reviewed date, and a link to the methodology.
• Each page states that its content is pricing and market research, not medical advice.
• Advertising is labelled and served by a third-party network. Affiliate links are disclosed on the page and on our affiliate disclosure. Neither is present on our data, methodology, corrections, citation or about pages.
• No provider, chain, insurer or advertiser can pay to change a price, a ranking or a recommendation. There is no sponsored content on the site.

Step 5: Updates and re-review

• Government data (T-MSIS, NPPES) is re-processed when a new release is published; the edition is stated on the page and in the open dataset.
• Chain price lists are re-crawled on a schedule (quarterly, or sooner when a chain announces a change) and the as-of date is updated.
• Benchmarks from payer and cost studies are refreshed when a new edition is available.
• Every page is re-read at least once a year; the Reviewed date changes only when a person has actually re-checked the page, not on a timer.

Step 6: Corrections

Accuracy is the reason the site exists, so we would rather publish a correction than defend an error.

• Anyone can report a wrong price or a broken assumption by email; we answer within 72 hours and update the page once the correction is verified against a source.
• Corrections that change a published figure are listed on the corrections log with the date, what changed and why.
• When a correction affects an open dataset, we publish a new DOI version rather than editing the old one, so any citation of the earlier version still resolves to what was cited.

What this process does not claim

• We are not dentists and no licensed clinician currently reviews our pages. Our expertise is in cost data, public claims files and price transparency, not in diagnosis or treatment. Please take clinical decisions with a licensed dentist.
• Our figures are averages and ranges, not quotes. Your price depends on your mouth, your dentist, your plan and your ZIP code. Use our numbers to check whether a quote is in a normal range, not to predict it to the dollar.
• We publish what we can source. Where a state, a chain or a procedure has no usable public data, we say so on the page rather than fill the gap with an estimate.

Frequently asked questions