Model study finds most negative vet reviews focus on operations, not medicine

A new analysis of 9,154 one- and two-star Google reviews from 296 veterinary practices in eight U.S. metros found that 70.6% of labeled reviews mainly criticized how the practice was run. The study says staffing, communication, pricing clarity and access issues showed up more often than clinical complaints.

Why it matters: - The findings suggest many low-rated veterinary reviews are driven by operations issues, not just medical care. - Practice owners can use the themes to spot breakdowns in callbacks, estimates, wait times and scheduling. - The study covers reviews from eight major U.S. metros, giving the results broad geographic reach.

What happened: - Sales Roadmap published a study of 9,154 written one- and two-star Google reviews of 296 high-review-count veterinary practices. - Kamyar Shah, founder of World Consulting Group, conducted the study. - The practices were in Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, Columbus, Denver, Tampa and Kansas City. - The reviews came from Google listings retrieved through the DataForSEO business data API. - The review dates ranged from 2008-08-11 to 2026-09-30.

The details: - A model classified the main reason in 9,149 reviews, and 70.6% of those were mainly about how the practice is run. - The model classified veterinary medicine as the main reason in 28.1% of the labeled reviews. - Another 1.3% of labeled reviews were unclear. - Core-service issues, covering the medicine and handling of the animal, appeared in 39.6% of all 9,154 reviews. - Clinical quality appeared in 35.8% of all reviews. - Staff conduct was the most common theme at 45.5%. - Communication failure showed up in 40.9% of reviews. - Pricing transparency appeared in 38.3% of reviews. - Scheduling and access appeared in 22.6% of reviews. - These theme shares overlap because a single review could receive more than one label. - One reviewer wrote, "I called twice and asked for a call back. They couldn't be bothered." - Another wrote, "Waited over 35 minutes for my dogs to be taken back for an appointment" - The 296 sampled practices had 227,903 lifetime Google reviews. - Of those, 15,220 reviews, or 6.7%, were one or two stars. - Five-star reviews made up 86.7% of the total. - The study says the figures describe what reviewers wrote, not verified events. - The study says none of the figures is a share of clients. - Up to 200 listings were screened in each metro. - After filters, including a cap of two locations per brand, the 40 businesses with the most Google reviews were sampled. - Twenty-four businesses were excluded, including 6 emergency veterinarian services and 9 specialty or emergency referral hospitals. - Still, 14.3% of the 9,154 reviews matched keywords tied to emergency, specialist, referral, oncology, neurology or after-hours vocabulary.

Between the lines: - The review mix points to a customer-experience problem that sits alongside clinical complaints. - The model’s results are useful for pattern detection, but the study does not verify whether any practice actually committed the cited failures. - The sample is skewed toward heavily reviewed practices, so the results may not reflect the full market of veterinary clinics. - No sample was checked against human coding, which limits independent validation. - A second model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, reviewed 200 of the same reviews and agreed with Claude Haiku 4.5 on the binary question of operations versus all other main reasons 92.5% of the time, with Cohen's kappa at 0.83. - Shah said a practice owner can read the reviews as a list of handoffs to check in their own records. - Shah also said the study counts what reviewers wrote and how a model labeled it, and does not judge whether any practice did anything wrong.

What's next: - The full study, including the themes, method and limitations, is available in the full report. - Kamyar Shah is directing readers to additional background at more information and World Consulting Group. - The study may give veterinary practices a checklist for tightening operations around communication, wait times, estimates and scheduling.

The bottom line: - In this review sample, the biggest complaint was not medicine itself. It was how the practice worked day to day.