Why we built a UK vet directory

The Competition and Markets Authority opened its formal investigation into the UK veterinary services market in March 2024, published a working paper confirming market-wide pricing opacity in 2025, and has continued issuing follow-ups since. The scope is straightforward and worth stating in plain words: consumers cannot compare prices before they walk in the door, cannot easily see what a service costs across practices, and are frequently unaware whether the practice they use is independently owned or part of one of the six large veterinary groups now consolidating the sector. On the pricing question in particular the Authority's evidence base is unambiguous. Prices for identical services — vaccinations, neutering, dental scale-and-polishes, out-of-hours emergencies — vary dramatically across practices, are almost never published in advance, and often are not even quoted on the phone.

Two and a half years since that investigation opened, the consumer tool the Authority's evidence base implied should exist — a postcode search that surfaces every UK vet within a radius, with owner-verified reviews and owner-reported prices in one place, free at the point of use, with no affiliate arrangement — still didn't. So we built it. It is called Find-a-Vet, it went live on the platform yesterday, and this piece explains why.

What the market already has

Google Maps has reviews. It is where most of us start. What it does not have is prices. Nor does it show whether the practice is independently owned or a branch of a corporate group, nor does it flag whether the reviewer has actually been treated at the practice or is a family member of the practice manager. The reviews are anonymous and the data is Google's.

Vet Help Direct is a UK-specific directory with useful welfare content and some review coverage in some regions. Its coverage is thin outside London and the South-East. RCVS runs a Find-a-Vet register that lets you check whether a practice is on their books and which surgeons are registered where; it is a professional register, not a consumer comparison tool. Trustpilot has fragmentary reviews with the same problems as Google. Yell has directory listings without meaningful commentary. None of the above will tell you what it costs to have your dog spayed at the practice you are considering.

A slightly niche category exists in the form of pet-cost aggregation content — occasional consumer journalism pieces citing "typical" prices for various services, usually with a Kennel Club or PDSA reference. Those pieces are useful as ballpark orientation and useless as an answer to "what will it cost me at my nearest three practices."

Nowhere in that landscape does the tool exist that the CMA's own evidence base implied should exist. That is the gap Find-a-Vet fills.

What Find-a-Vet does

Type a UK postcode. Choose a radius up to thirty miles. Hit the search button. The page returns every veterinary practice within that radius, sourced from Google Places (which has the deepest UK coverage), sorted by straight-line distance, with each practice's address, phone number, website and Google star rating. Click any practice and you land on a detail page.

On the detail page you see the practice information at the top, then a services-and-emergency summary strip. Beneath that: two sections that are the reason the whole tool exists. The reviews section shows owner reviews left through GenoVaq, prominently flagged with a Verified badge when the owner has linked the review to a specific animal on their GenoVaq Health Record — the strongest signal a review-reader can be given that the writer has skin in the game. The prices section shows owner-reported prices for eight standard services — consultation, vaccination course, neutering, dental, X-ray, bloodwork panel, emergency out-of-hours, and free-form "other" — presented as a median, a mean and a range across all owner reports for that practice. Both sections update in real time as owners contribute.

That is the tool as it stands today. It has been designed to be built on rather than to arrive complete. The reviews and prices will accumulate at the rate owners are willing to contribute them. The Google star rating fills the gap in the meantime.

Why we built it inside GenoVaq

The natural question is whether this belongs in GenoVaq at all — whether a marketplace for verified breeding genetics is the right home for a UK vet directory.

The answer is that the two extend the same thesis. Everything on GenoVaq starts from the same idea. Owners of dogs and horses are asked to make expensive, consequential decisions about the health of an animal that cannot represent itself. Buyers are asked to decide on a puppy or a stallion before they meet the pup or the stallion. Owners are asked to decide on a vet before they know what the practice's dental extractions cost. In every case the industry standard has been to hide the paperwork behind the counter until the money is on the table. The GenoVaq bet is that a growing share of owners want the opposite — the paperwork first, the money after — and will reward the platforms that give them that. The founding-breeder promise, the standardised health-testing schema on every listing, the escrow-settled marketplace transaction, the free lifelong health record every animal keeps regardless of where it was bought, and now Find-a-Vet, all sit on the same axis.

The vet is the piece of paperwork that follows the animal through the rest of its life. A buyer who has just done the work of finding a verified breeder shouldn't lose the visibility of their spend at the next step. An owner who has just adopted an older dog shouldn't have to make three phone calls to three practices to work out what a consultation will cost. If the platform's job is to move breeding out of the shadow economy, the platform's job is also to move the vet visit out of the shadow economy. It is the same job.

What Find-a-Vet is not

Find-a-Vet is not a booking service. There is no way through the tool to reserve an appointment. That is the practice's own job and we have deliberately chosen not to interpose.

Find-a-Vet is not a referral service. We are not accepting a percentage of anything for placement, ranking, or inclusion. There are no affiliate arrangements with practices, corporate vet groups, insurance companies or pet retail chains. The revenue model of the tool is that there is no revenue model of the tool. GenoVaq's business is the marketplace transaction on breeding genetics, and the Health Records+ subscription for owners who want the AI welfare-guidance layer on top of the free record. Find-a-Vet is not a monetisation surface. It exists because the market it is trying to help has been paid to look the other way for long enough.

Find-a-Vet is not authoritative on price. The prices are owner-reported. We aggregate them and show the median, mean and range for each service at each practice, but the underlying data points are individual owners telling us what they paid, sometimes years ago and often after variable numbers of add-on services. That is the only way to build a real UK vet price dataset without either commissioning a survey or scraping data we do not have permission to use. If a practice publishes standard prices in advance and would like to be listed with those prices as the source of record, they can — this is the "Transparent Vets" partnership mark and it is reserved for practices that opt in.

Find-a-Vet is not a substitute for going to the practice yourself. Reviews on any platform vary in quality and completeness. The point of the tool is not to short-cut owner judgement; it is to give owners a starting point that Google, Trustpilot and the RCVS register between them do not.

What we are asking for

Two things. Owners who read this piece and have a vet, in Britain, that they use regularly are the audience we most want to hear from. A Verified review — one that carries the badge that says the reviewer has a real animal on their Health Record and a documented visit to the practice — is the single most valuable piece of content Find-a-Vet can carry. It is worth more than a hundred anonymous reviews on Google. Every owner who reports what they paid at their practice pushes the median, the mean and the range on that practice's page closer to reality.

The second thing we are asking is directed at the practices. If you are a veterinary practice owner reading this and you would like to publish your standard prices to GenoVaq under the Transparent Vets partner mark — with your own words and framing on the practice page — email us. It is the first move in a longer arrangement. The partner mark is a badge; it also carries a promise from us not to muddy it with sponsored content, ranking manipulation or pay-to-play tiers. If the vet market moves toward pricing transparency because a handful of independent practices publish their price lists and win owner trust for doing so, the tool has done its job.

The receipt

The CMA opened its investigation on the reasoning that the veterinary services market had reached a level of consolidation, opacity and misalignment with the interests of consumers that only regulatory scrutiny could correct. Two and a half years on, that investigation has produced working papers and consultation responses but not the consumer tool the investigation's own evidence base implied should exist. The tool the report should have driven, someone in the market had to build.

Find-a-Vet is that tool. It is at genovaq.co.uk/find-a-vet. It works, it is free, it will get better as owners contribute, and it will do so without ever taking an affiliate fee from a veterinary practice for a place in the search results. That last sentence is the whole point.

— Rene