Turkish Clinic Google Reviews: 93% Five Stars, 1.7% In Between

Every guide to choosing a clinic abroad says to check the reviews. A new public dataset shows what that check returns for Turkish hair, dental and aesthetic clinics: 93.3% five-star reviews, and almost nothing between one star and five.¹²

The data come from Avangard Reklam, a marketing agency in Kuşadası, which published its figures under an open licence. We re-checked them against the agency's own data file. The headline numbers hold. The more useful finding is one the agency did not lead with: only 1.7% of reviews give two, three or four stars.

What the dataset is

On 23 September 2026, the agency collected the newest Google Maps reviews for 100 businesses in five Turkish cities. It asked for 100 reviews per business and received 9,297.¹ The businesses were chosen deliberately, with a preference for listings that already had many ratings.¹

The agency says plainly that this "is not a random national sample".¹ It also says it did no analysis of what reviewers wrote, only of their star ratings and the replies.¹

The publisher matters here. Avangard Reklam sells Google Ads, Meta advertising and search optimisation, and it has a dedicated service page for health tourism.³ Its client list includes clinics, among them an obesity-surgery clinic advertising to Europe and an aesthetic clinic in Kuşadası.³ The study page does not mention this.

That does not make the numbers wrong. It is why we checked them against the file rather than relying on the summary.

The star ratings, recounted

The published file holds totals by specialty, city, language and star rating rather than individual reviews.² Our recount of those totals matches every headline figure on the study page.

Source: Avangard Reklam data file, our recount.²

Two, three and four stars together account for 162 reviews, or 1.7% of the sample.² There are almost three times as many one-star reviews as all the middle ratings combined.

That shape barely changes by specialty. Hair transplant clinics drew 95.8% five-star reviews and dental clinics 92.0%.² The middle band stayed under 2% in all three specialties.²

The one-star share moved more. It was 2.7% for hair clinics and 6.2% for dental clinics, more than twice as high.² The agency argues that this share, and how it is answered, is where the real signal sits.¹ It is also the number a star average buries.

Is Turkey unusual? Two comparisons

Online ratings are lopsided almost everywhere. A study in the Journal of Marketing Research examined more than 280 million reviews across 25 platforms. It found that "most reviews on most platforms" cluster at the top, with "a few reviews in the midrange".⁴ Its explanation is self-selection: people with extreme views are more likely to write a review.⁴

Two medical samples give a rough benchmark. A study of 5,210 Yelp reviews of US plastic surgery practices found 80% five-star, 13.5% one-star and about 6% in between, as reported by Plastic Surgery Practice.⁵ A 2019 sample of 61 Australian medical centres by HotDoc, a booking platform, found one- and five-star reviews made up 85% of the total.⁶ That leaves about 15% in the middle.

So the missing middle is not a Turkish invention. But the Turkish sample is more extreme than either benchmark: 1.7% in the middle, against about 6% and 15%. The samples differ in platform, country and year, so this is a direction, not a precise gap.

What the ratings cannot tell you

The average hides almost everything. Across the whole sample, the average works out at 4.8 stars.² The agency's own conclusion is that the average rating "barely separates businesses".¹ The Journal of Marketing Research study found the same in general: polarity "reduces the informativeness" of reviews.⁴

The newest reviews are not a random slice. The sample took the 100 most recent reviews per clinic.¹ If a clinic asks patients for a review before they fly home, that window fills with patients reviewing at discharge. Problems that appear months later may never reach it.

Asking only happy patients is against Google's rules, but invisible. Google's policy forbids businesses to "selectively solicit positive reviews" or pay for reviews.⁷ Nothing in a rating shows whether a clinic followed that rule.

Replies lean towards praise. Businesses replied to 39.1% of five-star reviews but 34.6% of one-star reviews.² The gap is modest, but the unhappiest reviewers were the less likely to get an answer. Reply rates also varied by specialty: 50.2% for hair clinics, against 33.3% for dental and 31.6% for aesthetic clinics.²

The agency's data cannot say why. It did no text analysis.¹ A one-star review could describe a failed graft or a late airport transfer. The dataset cannot tell the two apart.

How to read a clinic's reviews instead

Ignore the average. In this sample it carries almost no information.

Sort by lowest rating and read every one- and two-star review. Note what went wrong and when it was noticed, especially anything months after treatment. Then check whether the clinic replied, and whether the reply offered a fix or just a defence.

Finally, look at the dates. A burst of five-star reviews within days of treatment tells you how patients felt at discharge, which is not the same as how the result turned out.