Moving a dental practice: the step-by-step checklist to stay visible on Google

Take a fictional practice, the Lices dental practice in Angers. Its two dentists are leaving a second-floor walk-up for a ground-floor space in the same neighborhood. The lease is signed, the French Dental Council (Ordre national des chirurgiens-dentistes) has been notified, the movers are booked. On the Monday the practice reopens, the Google Business Profile still shows the old address, so does the website, and two patients ring the wrong doorbell.

People usually talk about the paperwork and the equipment. This article covers the other half of the move: getting the new address everywhere a patient looks for it, in the right order.

Why a move costs you patients online

59.8% of French people look for health information online (Eurostat, 2025). Many patients do not write down your address. They type your name, then follow the suggested directions. If the address shown is wrong, they end up at a locked door, and some assume the practice has closed.

A move also affects the map. Google chooses which practices to show based on three official criteria: relevance, distance and prominence (Google help). When you change address, you change the distance between the practice and every patient who searches. The neighborhood you are leaving sees other practices that are closer, and the one you are moving to does not know you yet. The article on dentist searches and the Google Maps local pack explains these three criteria.

The Google Business Profile: edit the address, never recreate the profile

The practice's Google Business Profile carries its history and its reviews. You keep it. Google says so in its help center: do not create another profile when you change address. You edit the address on the existing profile. Google specifies that if the business moves and keeps the same name, the reviews are transferred automatically. They remain subject to the same approach, described in the article on Google reviews and the dental practice. Hence one rule: do not change the practice's name on the same day as the address.

Two points need to be handled in advance:

1. The new verification. According to Google's help page on editing a profile, a business that is already verified and moves must be verified again. A nameplate in place and a visible entrance make that check easier.
2. The right day. Google reviews every change before showing it. Make the edit when the new premises are seeing patients, not weeks earlier, or the map will send patients to a construction site. Closure days go in as special hours.

Then update everything tied to the location: photos of the building front and the reception area, access, hours. The Google Business Profile for dentists page covers every field. When the practice has several dentists, each dentist's profile changes address too, following the rule explained in the article on the Google Business Profile of a multi-dentist practice.

The practice website: the address appears in more places than you think

On a dental practice website, the address is not only on the contact page. Make the list before you touch anything:

• the footer, repeated on every page;
• the directions or contact page, with the map, public transit and parking;
• the treatment pages that mention the neighborhood;
• the schema markup (structured data), the invisible lines that describe the practice to search engines: it has no direct effect on rankings, but a wrong address there contradicts the visible address;
• the legal notice and downloadable documents, such as the directions map.

If a page changes URL, for example because it included the old street name, the old URL must point to the new one through a redirect. Otherwise, patients who had saved it land on an error page.

A few weeks before, a short message at the top of the website can announce the date and the new address. It is useful information for patients, within the fair and honest communication required by article R.4127-215-1. That text must be in the page itself, not displayed by a script, because the crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity do not read JavaScript. The dental practice website page describes a website that is easy to update.

Doctolib and the directories: the sources that keep the old address

On a dentist's name, the page on Doctolib, France's leading online booking platform, often outranks the practice website. If it keeps the old address, that is the one the patient follows. The guide Doctolib outranks my website explains why. Have the address of the consultation location changed, then reread the confirmation message sent to patients: it often repeats the address.

Next come the directories. The health directory of the French national health insurance (Assurance Maladie) relies on the information held by your local health insurance office: declaring the new address to the CPAM therefore matters online too. Then the others: Pages Jaunes (the French Yellow Pages), the town hall website, the practice's Facebook page. Everywhere, the same name, the same address and the same phone number, written identically. A "12 bis" on the website and a "12B" in a directory are enough to create doubt for a machine. The Facebook page deserves particular attention, because Google reads the same practical information there: we explain its role in the Facebook page for a dental practice.

The timeline, from two months before to the third month after

The check to run yourself, from a phone

In the first month, take ten minutes and your phone, in a private browsing window.

1. Type the practice's name into Google. Read the address on the profile, then on each result on the first page.
2. Type each dentist's name, paying particular attention to the Doctolib page.
3. In Google Maps, type the old address. If a profile for the practice still shows up there, it is a duplicate: you will need to ask Google to remove it, without touching the main profile.
4. Type "dentist" and the name of the new neighborhood. See whether the practice shows up, and with which address.
5. Start directions to the practice. They should lead to the right door.
6. Ask an AI tool for the practice's address, with its name and town, following the method in the article does your dental practice show up in ChatGPT.

Fix every source that still shows the old address, then run the check again in the third month.

AI search and the old address

56.6% of French people already use artificial intelligence, including to find a dentist (Arcom and Médiamétrie, April 2026). And since July 22, 2026, Google has shown its AI Overviews and AI Mode in France. These answers pull together the website, the profile and the directories. As long as one source keeps the old address, an AI can repeat it.

You do not correct an AI directly: you correct its sources, with the address written out in full in the website text. You then measure the percentage of correct answers, never a position. The AI search for dentists page explains how these crawlers read a practice.

If the move comes with a change of dentist, the article on buying a dental practice completes this checklist. Once the new address is in place everywhere, the next step is getting known in the new neighborhood, with treatment pages that name it.

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