When you search for a vet or groomer, you deserve more than just a star rating. We read thousands of public reviews from Google Maps, Instagram, Facebook, and other sources — then turn them into a single, clear score so you can compare services in your city without spending hours reading through comments yourself. This page explains exactly how that score works, where the data comes from, and how we keep it up to date.
We pull from public review platforms so you get a complete picture — not just what one app shows. Our sources include:
We have read over 33,000 reviews across more than 3,000 listings in 8 Indian cities, including Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Gurugram.
DodoScore is a number between 0 and 10. Higher means better. It combines five signals so that a single glowing review cannot inflate a score, and a single bad one cannot bury a good service.
The average rating from Google Maps acts as the baseline. It captures broad public sentiment quickly and is familiar to most pet parents already using Google to search.
A service with 300 reviews is more reliable than one with 3, even if both average 4.8 stars. We also weight recent reviews more heavily — a clinic that has improved in the last six months should reflect that. Volume and recency together give statistical confidence to the score.
We read each review for what people actually mention — cleanliness, how the staff handles animals, value for money, ease of parking, wait times, and more. Each aspect gets its own positive or negative signal. A groomer praised for handling anxious dogs scores differently from one praised only for price.
Scores are normalised against other services of the same type in the same city. A vet in Mumbai is compared to other vets in Mumbai — not to a boarding kennel in Pune. This means a 7.5 in Chennai and a 7.5 in Delhi are genuinely equivalent on the scale.
We confirm that the listing has accurate hours, a working phone number, a physical address, and (where available) a website. Listings with complete, verified information receive a small boost because they are easier to reach and less likely to leave you stranded.
A star rating tells you whether people liked a place. Aspect analysis tells you why. We read every review and flag mentions of specific things that matter to pet parents:
Each mention is scored positive or negative based on what reviewers actually wrote. Aggregating across many reviews gives us the per-listing aspect breakdown you see on each service page. If 80% of reviewers mention clean facilities and 90% mention friendly staff, that information appears clearly — no guesswork needed on your part. Listings where reviews rarely mention an aspect get no signal in that category rather than a fabricated score.
Generic sentiment is useful, but pet parents often have very specific questions: which vet handles anxious dogs well? Does this groomer know how to work with Huskies? What do reviews say about prices?
We run named-entity recognition across every review to extract:
This is how we answer specific questions in the FAQ section of each listing — answers that draw directly on what real reviewers said, not on guesswork or generic templates.
A pet service can improve — or decline — over time. A clinic that hired a new vet last month may look very different from one that lost its best doctor. We keep scores current in two ways:
We pull new reviews on a rolling cycle — roughly weekly for popular listings and monthly for smaller or less active ones. New reviews are re-weighted so that the most recent experiences carry more influence than older ones.
Business details — phone numbers, addresses, hours — are re-checked periodically and flagged when they appear out of date. If you spot something wrong on a listing, you can contact us and we will review it promptly.
This document describes the methodology version we are using as of the date below. When we make meaningful changes to how DodoScore is calculated — adding new data sources, changing the weighting model, or expanding to new cities — we update this page and note what changed. We believe you deserve to know exactly how a score is built before you trust it.
Have questions about how a specific listing is scored? Get in touch and we will be happy to explain.