HomeResearch
October 2026 snapshot: who held page one in 14 towns
This covers one search phrase, "veterinarian [town] [state]", run once in each of 14 towns on October 21 and 22, 2026, on a desktop browser, signed out, from Austin. It cannot tell you what your own town shows: results vary by device, by where the searcher stands and by the hour. Treat it as a snapshot, not a study. The full table is below, and so are the limits.
Method
One search per town, typed the way a person would type it: "veterinarian tyler tx", "veterinarian joplin mo", and so on. The searches were run in a desktop browser 1,366 pixels wide, with English and United States settings, no Google account signed in, from Austin, Texas, with the search location left to Google. We recorded four things from the first page: whether an AI Overview appeared, how many clinics the map pack listed, how many ordinary web results were on the page, and what kind of site held each web result. We sorted the web results into four kinds: the website of an individual practice, a directory or review site (Yelp, a vet directory, a pet insurance directory), a page belonging to a corporate chain, or something else (one city government site).
Ads are not counted. Google shows ads unevenly to a signed-out browser, so an absence of ads in our snapshot says nothing about whether ads run in that town.
The 14 towns were chosen to spread across states and regions, with populations roughly between 20,000 and 130,000 (inside the 5,000 to 150,000 range the free check covers), and because they are the kind of towns this service is built for: Tyler, Texas; Joplin, Missouri; Bowling Green, Kentucky; Grand Junction, Colorado; Dothan, Alabama; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Bend, Oregon; Muncie, Indiana; Yakima, Washington; Lafayette, Louisiana; Johnson City, Tennessee; Rapid City, South Dakota; Florence, South Carolina; Sioux City, Iowa.
What we found
The map pack appeared in all 14 towns, listing three clinics in 11 towns and two in Grand Junction, Lafayette and Rapid City. No AI Overview appeared in any of the 14. In these 14 searches, Google answered with a map every time.
The ordinary web results ran 7 to 9 per town, 120 in all. 94 of the 120 were the websites of individual practices. 21 were directory or review sites: Yelp in every town, a vet-finder directory in three, a pet insurance directory in two, two others once each. 4 were pages belonging to corporate chains, in three towns (two in Grand Junction, one each in Tyler and Florence). One was a city government site, in Muncie.
The table scrolls sideways: after web results come practices, directories, chain pages and other.
| Town | AI Overview | Clinics in map pack | Web results | Practices | Directories | Chain pages | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tyler, TX | no | 3 | 9 | 7 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Joplin, MO | no | 3 | 8 | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| Bowling Green, KY | no | 3 | 9 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Grand Junction, CO | no | 2 | 9 | 6 | 1 | 2 | 0 |
| Dothan, AL | no | 3 | 9 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Hattiesburg, MS | no | 3 | 9 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Bend, OR | no | 3 | 9 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Muncie, IN | no | 3 | 8 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 |
| Yakima, WA | no | 3 | 7 | 6 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Lafayette, LA | no | 2 | 9 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Johnson City, TN | no | 3 | 9 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Rapid City, SD | no | 2 | 9 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Florence, SC | no | 3 | 8 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Sioux City, IA | no | 3 | 8 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| All 14 | 0 of 14 | 39 | 120 | 94 | 21 | 4 | 1 |
What it might mean for one clinic
In these 14 searches, the first page was mostly other clinics. A chain's page appeared in 3 of 14 towns, and no clinic branded as a chain appeared in any map pack (a clinic owned by a group but still trading under its old name would not show as one; we count by branding only). A veterinary practice competing for the three map spots is competing with the clinic across town, and the thing to beat for the web results below the map is usually Yelp, which was on page one in all 14 towns.
The three things Google says the map rests on (relevance, distance, prominence) are the whole contest, and only two of them can be worked on, because the clinic cannot move. It also follows that review count and review recency are measurable against the two or three clinics that matter, which makes a realistic target possible: the clinic does not need a thousand reviews, it needs more recent ones than the clinic that is currently third.
What the snapshot does not show: it says nothing about ads, nothing about how results differ for a person standing in the town (the map pack is weighted to the searcher's location), nothing about "near me" searches, and nothing about how often people search at all. It is a snapshot of one day.
An earlier check: ranking counts over five years
In a separate check, also in October 2026, we used a third-party tool's estimates of how many searches each clinic's website ranks for and compared today's count with the count five years earlier, for the independent clinics we could identify in four of the towns: Tyler, Joplin, Bowling Green and Grand Junction. Of the nine clinics we checked, four had lost a third or more of the searches they used to rank for. A corporate chain's page was on page one in two of the four towns. We do not name the clinics or the tool.
Nine clinics is a small sample, and the tool's figures are estimates of ranking counts, not of visits or clients. We will replace it with a larger sample if we extend the snapshot.
What the profession is reporting
Vetsource, which sees transaction data from close to 6,500 practices, counted visits per practice down 3.1% in 2025, the fourth straight year of decline: 3.5% in 2022, 1.4% in 2023, 2.6% in 2024, 3.1% in 2025. About a quarter of practices grew their visit count in 2025, against half the year before. Prices rose 6.57% and revenue grew 5.4%.
Vetsource, January 15, 2026 (press release); Today's Veterinary Business, February 1, 2026 (Consumer Strain Reshapes Pet Care); MyVetCandy, March 26, 2026 (year-by-year figures).
The AVMA's October 2024 reading of the same kind of data found new clients down 8.6% year over year and new puppies and kittens down 9%. The average gap between a patient's visits had stretched from 57.6 days to 85.8 days in three years. New clients were about 8% of revenue, and every long-term client started as one. Annual revenue per patient was $622 in the year to August 2024, $499 of it professional services. An earlier Vetsource analysis of 2019 data from 1,894 hospitals found that visit frequency explains about two-thirds of revenue per patient, and that visits per year start to fall once the average client transaction passes about $300.
AVMA News, October 29, 2024, Less foot traffic at veterinary practices spells declining revenue; Vetsource, May 26, 2020, revenue model, and AVMA News, December 9, 2020, on the same VetSuccess data.
Estimates of how much of general practice is corporate-owned run from a quarter to a third. Brakke Consulting's 2022 estimate, cited in a May 2025 paper in Frontiers in Veterinary Science, puts it at about 25% of primary care practices and about 75% of specialty and emergency practices; the AVMA's October 2024 reading of the Vetsource sample put it at about 35%. The share of veterinarians who own a practice fell from 26% in 2023 to 21.3% in 2025, and solo practices are now fewer than 9% of the total, according to a veterinary newsletter's summary of the AVMA's 2026 economic report.
Traub-Werner et al., Frontiers in Veterinary Science, May 13, 2025; AVMA News, October 29, 2024 (above); Weekend Rounds, The state of veterinary economics in 2026 (secondary summary of the AVMA 2026 report).
What pet owners say they want
The AVMA asked 1,000 US dog and cat owners in September 2023 which factors were in their top three when choosing a veterinarian: 76% said the pet's health and safety, 48% affordability, 46% that the vet works with their kind of pet, 40% positive reviews or recommendations, and 40% an office close to home. Online or telemedicine availability came last at 11%, and 72% want to meet the veterinarian in person before that vet cares for their pet.
AVMA, 2023 Pet Owner Attitude Survey, key findings (PDF), November 2023; fielded September 8 to 14, 2023, by TRUE Global Intelligence.
For scale on the paid side, LocalIQ's June 2026 benchmarks for the animals and pets category put the average cost of a Google search click at $4.06 and the average cost per lead at $31.50.
LocalIQ, search advertising benchmarks, June 1, 2026.
Corrections and additions
If you run one of these searches and see something different, that is expected; results change by hour and by location. If you think we have miscounted a row, write to [email protected] and we will re-run the town and correct the table with a note.