How should a veterinary group handle profiles for branch surgeries it has acquired?

How many Google profiles does a veterinary group need?

One per site, which sounds obvious until a group has grown by acquisition and inherited a mess.

Google's approach is a Business Profile per physical location rather than several locations folded into one listing. For a group that has bought three independent surgeries, that means three profiles, each verified, each with its own hours, its own phone number and its own reviews.

There is tooling for this at scale. Google supports bulk location management for businesses with ten or more locations, and business groups, which let a set of profiles be managed collectively and access shared across several users without handing over one person's login.

The mistake we see most is not consolidation. It is abandonment: a branch acquired two years ago whose profile is still verified to a former owner's personal email, still shows the pre-acquisition phone number, and nobody at the group can edit it.

Should a branch surgery keep its own name on the profile?

Usually yes, and Google's own rule supports it more clearly than most people realise.

The general instruction is that names should reflect the business's real-world name as used on the storefront, website and stationery, and that locations should carry the same name. But the rule carries an exception for the case where the real-world representation consistently varies from location to location.

That exception describes veterinary acquisition almost exactly. A practice bought five years ago that still has its original name on the sign, on the door, on the letterhead and in the mouths of every client in the town genuinely has a different real-world name. Renaming the profile to the group's brand, when the sign says otherwise, breaks the rule rather than satisfying it.

It is also commercially wrong. The local name is the asset the group paid for. Clients search it, and the reviews attached to the profile were earned under it.

What does the CMA require a veterinary group to disclose?

Its identity, in more places than most groups have considered, and the remedy reaches further than the practice website.

The ownership remedy applies to groups of veterinary businesses operating one or more first opinion practices, or any combination of first opinion practices, online pharmacies, referral centres, out-of-hours practices, animal hospitals, diagnostic laboratories and pet crematoria. It requires that the identity of the group be clearly and prominently identified on websites and other online data, in premises, external signage and in communications, and it extends across all the business models and services in the group.

The problem it is aimed at is well evidenced. The CMA found that fewer than half of clients at large group practices knew their practice was part of a group at all, which is set out alongside the rest of the market findings in whether you can call your practice an animal hospital.

Timing matters here and the remedies are not live yet. The Orders phase runs six months from the final report, and compliance windows begin once the Orders are made, broadly three to nine months for groups with fifteen or more first opinion practices and six to twelve months for smaller ones.

Does other online data include a veterinary practice profile?

On any sensible reading, yes, and this is the point at which a group should stop waiting for someone to confirm it.

A Business Profile is a structured online record about a specific veterinary site, published by the group, editable by the group, and read by more clients than the practice website. If the phrase other online data excludes that, it is difficult to say what it includes.

Here is the honest limit of what we can tell you. The published guidance sets out the remedy at group level and does not contain specific language about how it applies to an individual branch trading under its own name. That gap is real and we are not going to paper over it.

What follows from the gap is a judgement rather than a certainty. A group that discloses on every profile has met the requirement on the broadest reading and lost nothing. A group that discloses only on the corporate website has bet on the narrow reading, on a remedy designed specifically because clients did not know who owned their practice.

Where does the group identity go, if not in the practice name?

Into the fields that carry text, which is the same answer we reached for licence numbers in another trade and for the same reason: the name field is the wrong instrument.

The business description is the natural home. A line saying the practice is part of a named group, with the group's own site linked, is unambiguous, sits on the profile itself, and does not disturb the local name the clients recognise.

Back it with the website. The CMA separately expects service information to be online within a maximum of one click from the homepage, which we went through in what a vet practice's emergency page should say at midnight. An ownership page buried four clicks deep meets the letter of nothing.

Keep the wording identical across every profile in the group. Nine branches describing the same ownership nine different ways is the kind of inconsistency that undermines the disclosure it is meant to make.

What else does a multi-site veterinary group get wrong?

Four things, in roughly the order they cause trouble.

• Profiles still verified to a previous owner, so nobody at the group can edit the hours when a branch changes them.
• Phone numbers routed to a central line while the profile shows the old direct number, or the reverse, which breaks both the client experience and the consistency signal.
• Hours copied across branches because it was quicker, so a site that closes at 6pm shows 7pm somewhere.
• The out-of-hours provider named on some profiles and not others, though it is the same arrangement, which we covered in which practice gets named when someone searches for an emergency vet at 2am.
• Categories chosen branch by branch by whoever set the profile up, so one site is an Animal hospital and its identical neighbour is a Veterinarian.

How should a veterinary group set its branch profiles up?

What should a veterinary group check across its profiles today?

Go branch by branch rather than looking at the estate in aggregate, because the problems are per-site and they hide in the ones nobody visits. The rest of what a single veterinary profile needs, including the category that requires a licence and how far medicines advertising reaches, is on Google Business Profile for veterinary practices.

• List every site and confirm each has exactly one verified profile, controlled by the group.
• Check the name on each profile against the sign on that building, not against the group brand.
• Add the group disclosure line to every description, in identical wording.
• Publish an ownership page and keep it one click from the homepage.
• Compare categories across sites and resolve any that differ without a reason, using the entitlement questions in the pillar rather than search volume.
• Check hours and phone numbers per site against reality rather than against the last spreadsheet.
• Diarise a re-check for when the CMA Orders are made, since the compliance windows start then rather than now.