Durham Region Dental Data
What Dental Patients Ask: Durham Region Visit Data
Five years of genuine written inquiries to our Kingston Road practice (124 messages, Mar 2021 – Jul 2026), 530,172 classed search impressions over 16 months, and 138 Google reviews — aggregated, anonymized and published so patients, journalists and researchers can see what dental care in Pickering, Ajax, Whitby and Scarborough actually looks like.
59.7%
of genuine written inquiries are appointment requests (74 of 124)
22.6%
ask about cleanings, hygiene or checkups — the #1 named topic (28 of 124)
141,607
search impressions in 16 months for coconut-oil brushing questions our content answers
77%
of location-classed search demand reaching our site names Pickering (200,750 of 261,717 impressions)
4.8★
across 138 Google reviews (129 five-star)
First-party data
What patients write to a Durham dental office
Between March 2021 and July 2026 our website contact form received 358 submissions. After removing our own test messages, mechanical spam and hand-reviewed business solicitations (full method below), 124 genuine patient inquiries remain. Here is what they were about:
Topics of the 124 genuine inquiries. Categories below our 5-count privacy floor are not listed.
What people were asking for
| Request type | Inquiries | Share of 124 |
|---|---|---|
| Appointment request | 74 | 59.7% |
| Cost / insurance question | 22 | 17.7% |
| Admin, records & hours | 13 | 10.5% |
| Clinical question | 7 | 5.6% |
Request types below our 5-count privacy floor, and messages that fit no named type, are not itemized. Only 7 of 124 written inquiries asked a clinical question — people overwhelmingly write to book, not to ask for advice.
Who was writing (when stated)
87 of the 124 messages gave no personal context. Among the 37 that did:
| Stated context | Inquiries |
|---|---|
| New patient / new to the area | 18 |
| Long-time patient | 7 |
| Child / family | 7 |
| Mentions dental anxiety | 5 |
Source: all Elementor form submissions on pickeringsquaredental.com, Mar 2021 – Jul 2026, classified and aggregated; messages paraphrased, never quoted.
6 of 124 written inquiries specifically asked for an evening or Saturday appointment — we answer with hours to 9 pm three nights a week
Search interest
What dental patients ask the internet
Two question clusters dominate the non-brand search interest reaching our site — together 268,455 impressions over 16 months (Mar 2025 – Jun 2026): brushing teeth with coconut oil (141,607 impressions across 2,507 distinct queries) and wisdom teeth & bad breath (126,848 impressions across 609 distinct queries).
Coconut-oil brushingWisdom teeth & bad breath
Monthly data table
| Month | Coconut-oil brushing | Wisdom teeth & bad breath |
|---|---|---|
| 2025-03 | 9,744 | 9,845 |
| 2025-04 | 12,840 | 11,287 |
| 2025-05 | 13,489 | 11,359 |
| 2025-06 | 11,386 | 10,958 |
| 2025-07 | 11,095 | 10,868 |
| 2025-08 | 10,639 | 10,588 |
| 2025-09 | 7,564 | 8,609 |
| 2025-10 | 6,188 | 7,748 |
| 2025-11 | 5,299 | 8,076 |
| 2025-12 | 5,486 | 7,249 |
| 2026-01 | 6,520 | 7,265 |
| 2026-02 | 4,977 | 5,868 |
| 2026-03 | 8,439 | 6,430 |
| 2026-04 | 13,261 | 5,707 |
| 2026-05 | 8,711 | 3,027 |
| 2026-06 | 5,969 | 1,964 |
| Total (16 months) | 141,607 | 126,848 |
Both clusters are cooling, and we say so: coconut-oil questions peaked at 13,489 monthly impressions in May 2025 and stood at 5,969 in June 2026; wisdom-teeth questions peaked at 11,359 in May 2025 and fell to 1,964 by June 2026. These curves say people keep asking search engines these questions — they do not say the remedies work. What a search engine cannot do is look in your mouth; a dentist can.
Read this honestly: impressions measure how often our pages appeared in Google results for these query classes — search interest reaching one practice’s site, not regional search volume. Site-wide, our Apr–Jun impressions fell 24% year-over-year (374,547 → 284,615) while our average position improved from 32.0 to 16.3 — the 2025 window carried large volumes of deep-position impressions, so raw impression counts overstate 2025 and the decline is partly a measurement artifact, not a collapse in demand.
Source: Google Search Console for pickeringsquaredental.com, Mar 1 2025 – Jun 30 2026; brand queries excluded; classes made disjoint (first-match-wins); query-level rows only — Google omits rare and anonymized queries.
Local demand
Where Durham-area dental searches come from
Location-named queries reaching our site over the same 16 months total 261,717 impressions. Pickering leads — but Ajax, Scarborough and Whitby together add roughly 61,000 impressions, which is why we treat Durham Region, not one city, as our service area:
| Community | Impressions (16 mo) | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Pickering | 200,750 | 77% |
| Ajax | 42,660 | 16% |
| Scarborough | 13,043 | 5% |
| Whitby | 5,264 | 2% |
| Total | 261,717 | 100% |
The communities behind the queries
Ajax counted 126,666 residents in the 2021 Census (up 5.8% from 2016) and Whitby 138,501 (up 7.9%); Durham Region as a whole reached 696,992 (up 7.9%). Scarborough is a Toronto district without its own census subdivision — its presence here rests on our query data alone.
Sources: Google Search Console for pickeringsquaredental.com, Mar 1 2025 – Jun 30 2026 (location-named, non-brand queries); Statistics Canada, Census Profile, 2021 Census of Population (retrieved Jul 21, 2026).
Access
Evenings, Saturdays, and what people actually request
6 of our 124 genuine written inquiries specifically asked for an evening (after-6) or Saturday slot (found by a keyword scan of every message, then hand-review; a small count we publish as a count, not a percentage). The practice answers with three evenings a week and Saturday hours:
| Day | Hours |
|---|---|
| Monday | 9:00 AM – 9:00 PM |
| Tuesday | 9:00 AM – 9:00 PM |
| Wednesday | 7:30 AM – 5:00 PM |
| Thursday | 9:00 AM – 9:00 PM |
| Friday | 7:30 AM – 3:00 PM |
| Saturday | 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM |
| Sunday | Closed |
The questions inside the inquiries
79 of the 124 messages contained an explicit question. The five most common themes:
| Question theme | Inquiries |
|---|---|
| Specific treatment consultations | 16 |
| Appointment availability | 10 |
| Urgent / pain appointments | 9 |
| Reschedules | 7 |
| Insurance coverage & eligibility | 7 |
Public dental care exists in Durham too: the Durham Region Health Department operates an Oral Health Clinic and runs dental screenings once a year in all publicly funded schools, and Healthy Smiles Ontario offers free basic and emergency dental care to eligible children and youth 17 and under (durham.ca, retrieved Jul 21, 2026). We are also a registered Canadian Dental Care Plan provider.
Sources: pickeringsquaredental.com/contact/ (hours, retrieved Jul 21, 2026); Durham Region Health Department, durham.ca/health-and-wellness/dental-and-oral-health/ (retrieved Jul 21, 2026); our own classified inquiry corpus.
Methodology
Where every number comes from
Written inquiries (n=124). All 358 submissions to this site’s Elementor contact forms, Mar 2021 – Jul 2026 (Contact page 355, city landing page 3); 353 carried a message. We removed 24 of our own automated form-health tests, then 181 URL-spam and 5 pattern-spam messages mechanically — 53% of messages with text were mechanical spam. Every remaining item with no clear classification (25 messages) was read individually: 17 business solicitations and 2 random-character bot probes were removed by hand, and 6 genuine non-patient messages (placement requests, job applications, a referral-pad request) were kept. Drop chain: 358 → 353 with a message → 143 after mechanical filters → 124 genuine inquiries. Each was classified by topic, request type and stated context; no published category count is below 5. Messages are paraphrased, never quoted; no personal information is published.
Google reviews (n=138). All reviews of our Google Business Profile listing retrieved Jul 21, 2026: 122 with text, 16 rating-only (included, no text signal). The listing shows 4.8★ across 138 reviews; the computed average of retrieved ratings is 4.81, with 129 five-star. We present reviews as a trust signal, not a dataset.
Search interest. Google Search Console impressions for this domain, Mar 1 2025 – Jun 30 2026, grouped into disjoint query classes (first-match-wins); brand queries excluded; query-level rows only, so totals under-count Google’s omitted rare/anonymized queries. This measures interest reaching one practice’s site, not Durham Region search volume — and our year-over-year impression decline (−24% Apr–Jun) coincided with average position improving 32.0 → 16.3, so 2025 counts are inflated by deep-position impressions.
Evening/Saturday requests. A deterministic keyword scan over all messages returned 9 hits; 3 false positives were removed by hand, leaving 6 (5 form messages + 1 review). Published as a count only.
Public figures. Durham Region Health Department (durham.ca, dental and oral health page); Statistics Canada, Census Profile, 2021 Census of Population (Ajax, Whitby, Durham Regional Municipality). All retrieved Jul 21, 2026.
What this page is not: clinical advice, a prevalence study, or a claim about what all Durham patients do — and reporting how often people ask about coconut-oil brushing is not a statement that it works. It is what people wrote to one practice and what they asked the internet on the way there.
Use this data
Cite this page
Pickering Square Dental (2026). What Dental Patients Ask: Durham Region Visit Data. pickeringsquaredental.com/ajax-pickering-dental-visit-data/ — free to cite with a link. Journalists and researchers: we can break out anything above our privacy floor — call (905) 420-1777.
Download the aggregated dataset (CSV)
Download the aggregated dataset (CSV)
Frequently asked questions
What do dental patients most often write to a dental office about?
Booking. 74 of 124 genuine written inquiries to our Durham Region practice (59.7%, Mar 2021 – Jul 2026) were appointment requests. Cleanings, hygiene and checkups were the most-named topic (28 of 124), ahead of emergencies and pain (22 of 124) and billing, insurance and admin (19 of 124).
What dental questions do people ask the internet most?
In our search data, two clusters dominate: brushing teeth with coconut oil (141,607 impressions reaching our site over 16 months) and wisdom teeth & bad breath (126,848). Both are cooling from May-2025 peaks — coconut-oil questions fell from 13,489 monthly impressions at peak to 5,969 in June 2026, and wisdom-teeth questions from 11,359 to 1,964.
Does brushing your teeth with coconut oil work?
Our data measures how often people ask, not whether it works: 2,507 distinct coconut-oil queries reached our site in 16 months. Whether it helps or harms your teeth is a clinical question for a dentist who can actually examine you — not something a search result, or this page, can answer.
Which Durham-area communities search for a dentist most?
Of 261,717 location-classed impressions reaching our site over 16 months, Pickering accounted for 200,750 (77%), Ajax 42,660, Scarborough 13,043 and Whitby 5,264 — which is why we serve Durham Region as a whole, not one city.
Do patients actually ask for evening or Saturday appointments?
Yes — 6 of our 124 genuine written inquiries specifically requested an evening or Saturday slot. We keep evening hours Monday, Tuesday and Thursday until 9 pm and Saturday hours 9 am – 3 pm.
Are you accepting new patients in Pickering, Ajax and Durham Region?
Yes. 18 of 124 writers identified themselves as new patients or new to the area, and we welcome new patients from across Durham Region. Call (905) 420-1777 — evening and Saturday appointments are available.
Evening appointments Monday, Tuesday and Thursday to 9 PM · Saturdays 9 AM – 3 PM · 1450 Kingston Road, Unit #4, Pickering.