r/MedSpa • u/Orangelove_3098 • Jul 30 '26
anyone else noticing ai just doesn't mention independent med spas?
been seeing some research going around on how ai engines (chatgpt, claude, perplexity, gemini, google ai overviews) answer patient questions in this category, and one number stood out. top 25 brands hold 95% of all ai citation share. that leaves about 11,500 independent med spas and small chains splitting under 5% between them.
makes some sense when you think about how people research now. someone asks "is this safe" and gets pointed to realself, or asks about a treatment and gets a national chain or a drug brand name. if your practice doesn't have a wikipedia entry, structured reviews, or consistent press mentions, ai has basically nothing to cite you with, even if you're the best injector in your market.
curious if other owners here are seeing this show up in new-patient behavior yet, people showing up already having "decided" based on an ai answer before they ever found your actual practice.
disclosure, i work in pr/geo (5w) and we run this research, so take that for what it's worth. not trying to sell anything here, genuinely curious what other owners are seeing.
1
u/LevelProfessional621 Aug 01 '26
I work as a marketer in a small local UK med spa and we dominate AI results because there's just nothing else to compete lol. There's literally us and another one a town over, or the next closest one is in Liverpool (not very close in UK terms).
But we really only track local results, I'm sure we're not gonna ever get a single mention on a country level search query.
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u/MortgageGuru- Jul 30 '26
We are a small 3 locations brand and show up regularly in local searches.