The CMA's Final Report on vet services (24 March 2026) forces mandatory price lists, an ownership disclosure rule, and prescription fee caps of £21/£12.50 by an Order due 23 September 2026. Independent practices generally get longer to comply than the six large corporate groups, and CMA data shows independents already average 18.3% cheaper than the largest groups studied. The piece explains what has to change on a practice website, how to have it done before the corporate groups have finished retrofitting theirs, and cautions against comparative-advertising claims under the RCVS Code.
If you run an independent practice, you have spent the last few years watching corporate groups buy up the practice down the road, then watching your own suppliers, staff costs and drug prices go up anyway. On 24 March 2026 the Competition and Markets Authority published its Final Report on veterinary services for household pets, closing a market investigation that took in 56,000 responses to its initial Call for Information and over 450 stakeholder responses to its provisional decision. The CMA now has six months to turn that report into legally binding Orders, which means the Orders need to be in place by 23 September 2026. That is not a rumour or a trade press guess, it is the deadline GOV.UK itself has published. What is in those Orders will change what your website has to say, and who gets found first when a pet owner searches for a vet nearby.
What the CMA has actually ordered
Strip out the commentary and the Order comes down to four things every first opinion practice, independent or corporate, will have to do.
First, publish a price list. GOV.UK's own summary of the Final Report says this list has to cover standard consultations, out-of-hours consultations, written prescription fees, vaccinations, neutering, microchipping, routine dentistry, a range of common scans and diagnostic tests, common surgical procedures, the most commonly sold pet parasiticide products, and euthanasia and cremation costs. GOV.UK states plainly that this "will be more comprehensive than is currently offered on most websites." Most practice websites right now do not carry anything like this. Yours will need to.
Second, written estimates for anything expensive. Where non-emergency treatment, including aftercare, is expected to cost £500 or more, you will need to give the client a written estimate in advance and an itemised bill afterwards. Emergencies are excepted.
Third, ownership has to be disclosed, clearly, in two places: on signage at the premises and online. The reason the CMA gives is telling: in its own survey, only 47% of customers at large veterinary group practices knew their practice was part of a large group at all. If you are independent, this rule barely touches you in substance, you already are what your sign says. But you still have to make that clear on your site in the way the Order will specify, not just imply it through a practice name that sounds local.
Fourth, prescription fees are capped: £21 including VAT for the first medicine issued at a consultation, £12.50 including VAT for each additional medicine at the same consultation, adjusted annually for inflation. The CMA's own figures put current fees anywhere from around £10 at the cheapest practices to over £30 at a significant number of others. Where you currently sit on that range is about to become public information on a list with your name on it.
The timetable favours you, if you use the time
The phase-in period is not uniform. Per GOV.UK's summary, larger businesses, defined as those running 15 or more first opinion practices, get three months from the Order to comply. Smaller businesses get six months for most of the remedies, and twelve months for the annual attestation to the RCVS specifically. The smallest 70% of veterinary businesses by practice count are exempt from that attestation requirement altogether, though they still have to meet the substantive obligations on price lists, disclosure and fee caps.
In plain terms: the six named large groups, CVS Group, IVC Evidensia, Linnaeus, Medivet, Pets at Home's Vets4Pets, and VetPartners, are on the shortest clock. If you are independent, you very likely have longer. That is not a reason to leave it until the deadline. It is a window to get your price list, your disclosure wording and your site structure right while the corporates are still scrambling to retrofit theirs across hundreds of locations. IVC Evidensia alone runs over 900 first opinion practices in the UK; Linnaeus, the smallest of the six, runs around 180. Updating one website is a different job to updating that many.
The price comparison website changes how people find you
The pricing and ownership data every practice has to publish is going to be routed through the RCVS's existing Find a Vet service, which the CMA has directed to be enhanced with pricing and ownership information, and then made available to approved third-party comparison sites. Practices will not be able to pay to influence their ranking on it. This is new. Up to now, a pet owner comparing you to the corporate group two streets over had almost nothing reliable to compare you on. From later this year, they will have a standardised price list for both of you, sitting in the same place.
That cuts both ways, and the CMA's own numbers suggest it cuts in your favour more often than not. Across the five largest large veterinary groups it studied, prices averaged 18.3% higher than at independent practices. Vet prices generally rose 63% between 2016 and 2023, against 32% general inflation over the same period, and the CMA attributes around £1 billion of consumer detriment over five years to this. None of that is a reason to be smug. It is a reason to make sure that when a pet owner does compare you, on Find a Vet or on your own site, the numbers are there, correct, and easy for them, or for a search engine, to find.
Where your Google Business Profile still matters more than your website
Your Google Business Profile puts you in the map results, and it needs to be complete. What it cannot do is carry the price list, the ownership disclosure or the treatment detail the Order is about, and that is all website work. Reviews, opening hours, phone number, whether you respond to messages, whether your profile is claimed and current, that is what decides whether you show up in the map pack when someone searches "vet near me" at 9pm with a worried dog. The two work together, and I set both up to say the same thing, because a profile and a site that disagree are worse than either on its own.
What changes with the CMA reforms is what happens after someone finds you. Once they land on your site, or once RCVS Find a Vet or a comparison site pulls your price list, that information has to be structured so it can actually be read correctly, by the person, by Google, and increasingly by the AI tools people now ask to compare a few local vets before they even open a website. A price list buried in a PDF, or written as a paragraph of prose, or missing the structured data that tells a crawler "this is a price, this is what it is for," is a list that technically complies with the Order but does nothing for you competitively. That is the part that is now sat squarely in the technical side of your site, not in your reception team's hands.
Don't let price transparency turn into an RCVS problem
One thing worth flagging before anyone gets carried away comparing themselves favourably to the corporate down the road: the RCVS Code of Professional Conduct is clear that veterinary surgeons and nurses who make claims of superiority or comparisons with competitors, including in practice names, should have regard to section 3 of the CAP Code and should not mislead the public. Section 23.15 of the Code requires all advertising to be accurate, truthful and not of a character likely to bring the profession into disrepute, and section 23.50 says concerns about comparative claims should be raised with the Advertising Standards Authority in the first instance. The RCVS does not set its own separate comparative advertising rule, it defers to the CAP Code, enforced by the ASA. If your new, CMA-mandated price list makes you look good next to a large group, let the numbers say that on their own. Do not be tempted to add the adjective.
What actually needs doing
Stagg Studios handles the technical side of getting found, as one job rather than a pile of separate products: site structure, crawlability, structured data, metadata, making sure AI crawlers can actually reach your content, and keeping all of it correct every month as your site changes, including as the CMA's price list and disclosure requirements land on your site over the next year. It is £100 a month, no lock-in, and the first month is free. It does not include writing your content, running paid ads, or link building, because I am one person and I would rather do one job properly than sell you five I cannot deliver well.
I cannot promise you a ranking, a number of new clients, or a mention in an AI chatbot's answer. Anyone who does is selling you something they cannot control. What I can do is make sure that when the CMA's price list requirement lands on your site, and when Find a Vet and the comparison sites start pulling from it, your site is structured so that information gets read correctly, by search engines, by AI tools, and by the pet owner deciding between you and the group two streets over.
What I would do about it, and what it costs
Here is the part worth sitting with. When the Order lands and the comparison data goes live, a pet owner will be able to line you up against the corporate group two streets over in one view. If your price list is a PDF, or written as prose, or missing the markup that tells a machine which number belongs to which treatment, you will be the practice that looks like it has something to hide. Not because you do, but because the data could not be read. You will never hear about the client who compared and went elsewhere.
The Order lands by 23 September. Between now and then, every independent practice in the country has the same job to do, and the six corporate groups have it too, across hundreds of sites each. That is the whole opportunity in one sentence.
Here is what I would put in place for a practice. The price list built as structured data rather than a PDF, so it can be read correctly by Google, by the RCVS Find a Vet service and by the comparison sites that will draw from it. Ownership disclosure written so that being independent is unmistakable to a person and to a machine. Service and treatment pages marked up so an AI assistant asked to compare local vets has something accurate to work from. Then all of it checked every month, because the standards will move and your site will change.
That is £100 a month. First month free, no contract, and you deal with me rather than an account manager. If you want it done before the deadline rather than after it, start here, or send me a note and I will tell you what your site is currently missing.