Early recognition of sepsis in dogs and cats is difficult because systemic inflammation, infection, organ dysfunction, and treatment effects overlap clinically. Point-of-care biomarkers could shorten the interval between suspicion and reassessment, but analytical validity, diagnostic discrimination, prognosis, and decision utility are distinct claims. To systematically evaluate veterinary evidence published from 2017 through 2025 on point-of-care or clinically rapid biomarkers for recognizing sepsis or systemic inflammation in dogs and cats, and to distinguish measurement performance from sepsis-specific diagnostic and clinical utility. Dogs and cats represented in eligible veterinary clinical and analytical studies, including emergency, critical-care, pyometra, pneumonia, septic peritonitis, pyothorax, and hospitalized populations. A systematic review was conducted using prespecified eligibility, structured searching, duplicate handling, staged screening, data extraction, diagnostic-accuracy fields, and risk-of-bias assessment. Evidence was synthesized narratively when populations, thresholds, reference standards, platforms, or clinical purposes were not sufficiently comparable for quantitative pooling. The evidence base was heterogeneous and predominantly canine. Acute-phase proteins, inflammatory mediators, endothelial and hemostatic markers, cell-death products, routine hematologic ratios, and local-fluid tests addressed different clinical questions. Several biomarkers detected inflammation or tracked severity without reliably establishing infection-specific discrimination. Point-of-care analytical validation was more mature for some assays than sepsis-specific clinical validation. Feline evidence was sparse. Point-of-care biomarkers should not be treated as interchangeable sepsis tests. Their value depends on the target condition, comparator spectrum, timing, reference standard, assay credibility, and intended use. A function-specific interpretation separating inflammation detection, infection attribution, prognosis or monitoring, and actionability is clinically more defensible than a single biomarker ranking.
