Roshanak Kavian
Co-Founder and CEO of Indigo Mars, a Los Angeles marketing agency.
Ask ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, or Perplexity for "the best med spa in Santa Monica for Botox" and you will get an answer that names a handful of businesses, describes each in a sentence or two, and sends the person off to book. Nobody scrolls past that answer to a tenth result. For a Los Angeles med spa, where a single new patient can be worth thousands of dollars over a year of repeat treatments, being inside that short list is becoming one of the most valuable positions in local marketing, and most med spas have no idea whether they are in it.
This guide explains how that recommendation actually gets formed, which parts of it you control, and what to do about each one. It is written for med spa owners, medical directors, and practice managers, and it takes the category's particular constraints seriously. Med spas sit in an unusual spot: they are consumer-facing and visual like a salon, but they deliver medical treatments, so trust, credentials, and regulatory accuracy matter in a way they do not for a hair studio. AI systems appear to weigh that difference, and so do patients.
A note on how we approach this. The way AI systems choose what to recommend is not published, it changes, and anyone claiming a guaranteed formula is guessing. What follows is built from how these systems are known to work in general terms, from patterns we have seen when testing local businesses, and from the plain logic of what a system would need in order to confidently recommend a medical-adjacent business. Where something is uncertain, we say so.
Why Med Spas Are a Special Case for AI Recommendations
When someone asks an AI system for a restaurant recommendation, a wrong answer costs them an average dinner. When someone asks for a place to get injectables, laser treatment, or a body contouring procedure, a wrong answer can mean a bad outcome on their face or body. Systems that generate recommendations tend to be more cautious in categories where the consequences of a mistake are higher. In practice that means they lean harder on signals that look like legitimacy: named licensed providers, clear descriptions of what is done and by whom, a consistent presence across independent sources, and a body of genuine patient feedback.
That is good news for a well-run practice and bad news for one that is vague about who performs treatments. A med spa website that says "our expert team will help you glow" and never names a physician, nurse injector, or physician assistant gives a system almost nothing to be confident about. A competing practice that lists each provider, their license type, their training, and the treatments they perform has handed the system exactly the material it needs.
It also helps to understand that the buyer here is not browsing. Someone considering a treatment has usually thought about it for weeks. They have watched videos, read forums, and talked to friends. When they finally ask an AI system or search for a provider, they are looking to confirm a decision and find a safe place to act on it. The practices that win are the ones that make the safe choice obvious.
How Patients Actually Choose a Med Spa
Before getting into the technical side, it is worth describing the patient's path honestly, because every AI-visibility tactic is really a way of showing up at one of its steps.
They start with a treatment, not a business. Few people begin by thinking "I need a med spa." They begin with "I want my forehead lines softened," "I want to try laser hair removal," or "I want something for my skin after a sunny summer." The search is about the treatment, often with a location attached. This is why treatment-specific content matters so much, and why a site that lists everything on a single services page loses to one with a real page per treatment.
They gather opinions from people who seem like them. Friends, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and review platforms all feed in. The opinion of someone who has had the treatment carries more weight than anything the practice says about itself.
They shortlist, then verify. This is where your own channels get examined. The shortlisted practices get a look at their website, their Google reviews, and their Instagram. The patient is checking for a few specific things: do the results look natural, are the providers qualified, does the place look clean and professional, and do other patients seem satisfied. A practice can lose a patient at this step without ever knowing, because the patient simply does not call.
They ask a few direct questions. Who will actually do this? Is a doctor involved? What does it cost? What is the downtime? What happens if I do not like the result? Practices that answer these questions plainly on their website, before anyone has to ask, convert better and are easier for AI systems to quote.
Every tactic in the rest of this guide maps to one of those steps. AI recommendation is not a separate game. It is the same patient journey, compressed into a single answer, with the system doing the shortlisting and verifying for the patient.
How AI Systems Decide Which Med Spas to Name
There are two broad mechanisms behind a recommendation, and it helps to keep them separate.
The first is what the underlying model absorbed during training: a general sense of which businesses and brands exist and what they are associated with. For a local business, this is a weak and slow-moving factor, and it is mostly out of your direct control. A newer med spa may not appear in it at all.
The second, and the one you can influence, is live retrieval. When a system can search the web or draw on a maps and business data source, it pulls current information, reads it, and assembles an answer. Google's AI features draw heavily on Google's own index and its business data. Other assistants rely on web search results and various data partners. In every case, the system is building a picture of your business out of what it can find and read.
What makes a business easy to recommend is, roughly, four things working together:
Clarity. The system can tell exactly what you do, where, and for whom. Vague language is hard to match to a specific question; precise language is easy.
Corroboration. The same facts appear on multiple independent sources. Your website says you offer lip filler in Beverly Hills; your Google profile agrees; a directory agrees; patients mention it in reviews. Agreement across sources builds confidence.
Evidence of real experience. Reviews, named providers, case descriptions, and consistent activity suggest a real operating business that patients actually use.
Safety signals. For medical-adjacent categories, indications that treatments are performed by qualified, supervised, licensed people, and that the practice describes risks honestly rather than overselling.
The rest of this guide is organized around making each of those four things true for your practice.
Start with Who Performs the Treatments
If there is one change that matters more than the rest for a med spa, it is this: be unmistakably clear about who does the work, and what their qualifications are.
In California, much of what a med spa offers is medical in nature. Injectables like neurotoxins and fillers are prescription products or devices, and various laser and energy-based procedures fall under medical practice rules. The exact requirements for who can perform what, under whose supervision, and how the practice must be owned and structured are governed by California law and the Medical Board and related licensing bodies, and they are detailed enough that you should confirm them with a healthcare attorney rather than rely on a marketing article, including this one. What we can say as marketers is how these facts show up as trust signals online.
Name the medical director and say what the role is. A page that identifies the supervising physician by name, with their license type, training, and specialty, tells both patients and AI systems that real medical oversight exists. Avoid stating the arrangement in ways you cannot back up. If the medical director is involved in protocols and available for oversight rather than performing every treatment personally, describe it accurately. Accuracy here is both a legal protection and a credibility signal; patients and regulators both notice vague or inflated claims about physician involvement.
Give every provider a real profile page. A name, a photo, the license they hold, where they trained, how long they have performed the treatments they offer, and which treatments they personally perform. A single "Meet the Team" page with a paragraph each is a start. A dedicated page per provider is better, because it can be matched to searches for that person and gives AI systems a specific, quotable fact set about them.
Be exact about license types. "Registered nurse," "nurse practitioner," "physician assistant," "board-certified dermatologist," and "licensed esthetician" are different things with different scopes. Patients do care, and systems that read your pages will pick up the difference. If a provider is board-certified, say in what and by which board. If they are not, do not imply it.
Link your credentials to something verifiable. Many licensing boards let the public look up a license. Mentioning that a provider's license can be verified through the relevant board, and being the kind of practice that is comfortable with that, is a trust signal in itself. We recommend only linking to a verification page you have confirmed works and that points to the right place.
This also supports your standing with Google's quality framework. Google describes experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness as the qualities its human quality raters look for, and it applies the highest scrutiny to health-related topics. While those guidelines are not a direct ranking switch, the logic behind them explains why anonymous, unattributed medical content performs poorly and why named, credentialed authorship performs better.
Build One Real Page for Every Treatment
The structural problem we see most often on med spa sites is a single "Services" page listing twenty treatments in a bulleted list. That page cannot realistically rank or be recommended for any individual treatment, because it is not really about any of them. Someone asking an AI system "is Botox or Dysport better for forehead lines" or "how long does laser hair removal take in total" needs a page that answers that question in depth, and that page needs to exist on your site.
A strong treatment page does the following, in plain language:
Says what the treatment is and what it does, in a sentence a non-expert can follow, before anything else.
Says who it is and is not suitable for. Honest contraindications and cautions are a trust signal, not a conversion killer. A page that never mentions who should not have a treatment reads like advertising.
Describes the process, including what the consultation involves, how long the appointment takes, and what the patient experiences during it.
Explains recovery and downtime realistically. Swelling, redness, bruising, and the typical timeline, without minimizing.
Explains how many sessions are usually involved and over what period, and what results typically look like, without guaranteeing an outcome.
Gives pricing information or a clear range, or at minimum explains what determines the price. Pages that hide cost entirely leave the most common patient question unanswered.
Names who performs it, linking to the provider profiles.
Answers the five or six questions patients most often ask about this specific treatment, in a short FAQ that uses the real wording patients use.
Length follows from that content. A treatment page that does all of the above is typically well over a thousand words, and that is appropriate. These are high-consideration purchases and patients read carefully.
Prioritize. Start with the treatments that generate the most revenue and the most repeat visits, and the ones patients ask about most. You do not need to build every page at once. Four or five excellent pages beat twenty thin ones.
One more structural point: location. A practice in West Hollywood that also draws patients from Beverly Hills, Culver City, and Silver Lake should not rely on one page claiming to serve "the greater Los Angeles area." A short, genuinely useful page about getting to and visiting your practice from those areas, written for people rather than for keyword stuffing, can be matched to location-specific questions. Do not create dozens of near-identical neighborhood pages with only the name swapped. Search systems recognize that pattern and it tends to hurt rather than help.
Reviews: The Strongest Evidence You Can Create
For any local business, reviews are among the clearest signals available. For a med spa they carry additional weight, because patients treat them as evidence about outcomes and experience, not just service. AI systems that draw on review data often pick up not only the rating but the language inside the reviews. A pattern of patients writing that a particular injector gave natural-looking results and explained everything carefully is far more useful to a system than a wall of five-star ratings with no text.
What to do about it:
Ask every patient, at the right moment. The best moment is shortly after a treatment when the patient is pleased, or after a follow-up visit when the result has settled. Make it easy: a direct link to your Google review page sent by text or email, with a short and friendly request. A practice that asks consistently builds a body of reviews that a sporadic practice cannot match.
Encourage detail without scripting it. You cannot write reviews for patients and should not try to guide what they say in ways that make them inauthentic. But you can invite specifics: "If you're comfortable, it helps other patients when you mention which treatment you had and what the experience was like." Reviews that name the treatment and the provider are the ones that help most.
Never buy, trade, or fabricate reviews. This deserves emphasis. Platforms actively detect and remove inauthentic reviews and can penalize listings, and in many jurisdictions deceptive endorsements create legal exposure. It is also simply the wrong foundation for a medical-adjacent business whose reputation is the entire asset.
Respond to every review, including the negative ones. A calm, professional reply to a critical review is read by prospective patients and, in effect, is evidence of how the practice behaves when something goes wrong. Be careful here: patient privacy rules mean you should not confirm that a reviewer was a patient or discuss their treatment in a public reply. A reply that thanks them, expresses concern, and invites them to contact the practice directly is generally the safe pattern. If you are unsure what your obligations are, ask your attorney or compliance advisor.
Do not rely on one platform. Google reviews matter most for local discovery. But medical-aesthetic patients also frequently use specialty review sites and Yelp, and some AI systems draw on them. A presence with genuine reviews on two or three platforms is more convincing than a large number on one.
Treat review text as research. The phrases your patients use to describe their experience are the phrases other patients use when they search. If many reviews say "I was nervous but she made me feel at ease," that belongs, in your own words, in how you describe your consultation process.
Your Google Business Profile Is Still the Foundation
For a Los Angeles med spa, the Google Business Profile is the single most important local asset, and it feeds both traditional map results and the AI features layered on top of them. Most profiles are filled in minimally and then left alone. A thorough profile is a real advantage.
Choose your primary category carefully. It is the strongest signal of what you are. Pick the one that most accurately describes your core business, and add secondary categories only where they genuinely apply.
Complete the services list with your actual treatments, using the names patients use, and add descriptions.
Keep hours, phone number, address, and website exactly accurate. Include holiday hours and update them.
Upload real photos regularly: the reception area, treatment rooms, the team, the building exterior so patients can find it. Be careful with before-and-after images and see the next section.
Use the posts feature to share updates, seasonal offers, and new treatments. It appears next to your business at the moment someone is deciding.
Answer the questions section yourself with the common questions patients ask, so accurate information is there before anyone else supplies a wrong one.
Monitor it. Edits can be suggested to your profile by others. Check periodically that nothing has been changed incorrectly.
A profile this complete does two jobs. It helps you appear for local searches, and it gives AI systems a trustworthy, structured source about your business that agrees with your website.
Before-and-After Photos and Advertising Claims: Where Visibility and Compliance Meet
Before-and-after images are the most persuasive content a med spa has, and also the area where it is easiest to get into trouble. Both matter for AI visibility, because systems that evaluate trust are, in effect, evaluating whether your content looks honest.
Some principles that hold up regardless of the specifics:
Get proper written consent before using any patient's image, and be clear about where it will be used. Consent practices for medical photography are more demanding than for ordinary marketing, and your attorney or compliance advisor should confirm what your forms need to say.
Show results honestly. Photos should be taken under consistent lighting and angles, unretouched, and representative rather than the single best outcome in the practice. Say that results vary.
Do not guarantee outcomes. Language like "guaranteed results" or "permanent" for treatments that are not permanent invites both regulatory attention and patient disappointment.
Be accurate about products. Name products correctly, and do not imply that a treatment is approved for something it is not approved for. Federal and state rules on advertising medical products and on health claims are real, and California has specific rules about how healthcare practitioners may advertise.
Be careful with testimonials and endorsements. Any compensated or incentivized endorsement generally needs to be disclosed, and it is wise to confirm the rules with counsel before running a promotion that rewards reviews or posts.
The marketing benefit of getting this right is subtle but real. A practice whose content is careful, specific, and honest reads differently from one that is full of superlatives. Patients notice, and the systems that summarize practices tend to reflect the overall tone and substance of what they can read.
Make Your Facts Consistent Everywhere
AI systems assemble their picture from multiple sources, and contradictions between sources reduce confidence. A med spa is more exposed to this than most businesses because it tends to accumulate listings and profiles over time: a former name, an old address, a different phone number from a previous location, a closed directory entry nobody remembers creating.
Do a deliberate audit. Search your business name and your phone number and see what appears. Check the following and make them match your website exactly:
Business name, written the same way everywhere
Street address, including suite number
Primary phone number
Website address
Hours of operation
Descriptions of the practice and its treatments
Provider names and credentials
Places to check include Google, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp, Facebook, Instagram, any specialty aesthetics directories you appear in, and the websites of any professional associations or product manufacturers that list practices using their products. Manufacturer provider-locator pages are worth examining: if you are listed there, the information should be current, and if you are eligible and not listed, that is worth asking about.
This is dull work, and it pays off for the reason described in our complete guide to AI optimization for Los Angeles businesses: a consistent, corroborated entity is far easier for a system to recommend than an ambiguous one.
Answer the Questions Patients Actually Ask
AI systems are, at their core, question-answering tools. The more directly your content answers real questions, the more usable it is. For a med spa, the most valuable questions tend to fall into a few families, and your site should address each of them in plain, specific language.
Safety and suitability. Is this safe? Who should not have it? What are the risks? What happens if something goes wrong, and who do I contact? A practice that discusses these openly shows confidence and care.
Cost. How much does it cost, and what does the price include? Are there packages? Do you offer financing? Is there a consultation fee? You do not have to publish every price, but you should explain how pricing works. A system asked "how much does lip filler cost in Los Angeles" will favor pages that say something concrete over pages that say nothing.
Process and recovery. What happens at the appointment? How long does it take? When can I go back to work or exercise? When will I see results?
Comparison. How does one treatment differ from another? Which is better for my situation? Pages that honestly compare options, including cases where the cheaper or simpler choice is the right one, tend to earn trust and get cited.
Choosing a provider. What should I look for in a med spa? What questions should I ask before booking? Writing this yourself is one of the strongest moves available. It positions you as the knowledgeable source in the category, and it gets quoted. Patients who read an honest checklist for choosing a provider and then find that your practice meets every item are very likely to book.
Write the answers the way a knowledgeable provider would speak to a patient in a consultation: directly, without jargon, and without sales pressure. Put the direct answer first, then the detail. That structure is useful to readers and easy for systems to extract.
Use Instagram and TikTok for What They Are Good At
For a visually driven category like this, social media is a real discovery channel, not just a verification step. Patients see results, meet providers, and form impressions there long before they visit your website. Educational short videos, an honest look at a treatment appointment, a provider explaining the difference between two options, and results shared with proper consent all perform well and build familiarity.
Two cautions. First, the compliance points above apply on social media exactly as they do on your website. Second, social content affects AI visibility mostly indirectly, through brand recognition, mentions, and the consistency of your public presence, rather than as a direct source of citations. Keep your profile information consistent with everything else, and treat social as a way to build the reputation and patient trust that the rest of your visibility depends on. For more on how to weigh organic social against paid, see Organic vs. Paid Social: What's the Right Mix?
Test Where You Stand Right Now
Before changing anything, find out how AI systems currently describe your practice. It takes about thirty minutes and tells you more than any audit tool.
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google with AI Overviews, and any other assistant your patients are likely to use.
Ask the questions a real patient would ask, with your neighborhood included: "best med spa for Botox in [your area]," "where can I get laser hair removal near [your area]," "is [your practice name] a good med spa," "who is the medical director at [your practice name]."
Record, in a simple spreadsheet, whether you are mentioned, how you are described, and which competitors appear instead.
Note any errors. Wrong addresses, outdated services, or incorrect provider information show you which sources need correcting.
Repeat the same questions monthly. Results vary between runs and over time, so look for trends rather than treating any single answer as definitive.
Be wary of anyone who promises a specific ranking in AI answers. These systems are not a ranked list you can buy your way onto, and responses change. What you can do is make your practice a clearer, better-corroborated, more trustworthy source, and measure whether the pattern improves.
Common Mistakes We See
Not naming the providers or medical director. The single biggest trust gap.
One page for all treatments. Nothing specific enough to be recommended for any of them.
Hiding pricing completely. It leaves the most common question unanswered.
Thin reviews. A decent rating with a handful of one-line reviews tells a system very little.
Inconsistent listings. Old addresses, duplicate profiles, and mismatched names.
Overclaiming. Superlatives and guarantees that erode trust and create compliance risk.
Stock photography and stock language. Content that could belong to any practice in any city.
Ignoring the Google Business Profile. Set up once, never maintained.
A Realistic Order of Work
If you tried to do all of this at once you would stall. A sensible sequence:
The first month: fix the foundations. Complete and correct the Google Business Profile. Audit and fix listings. Publish provider profile pages with credentials. Set up a consistent system for asking patients for reviews.
The second and third months: build the content. Write your two or three most important treatment pages in full. Add a pricing explanation. Publish a "how to choose a med spa" guide that reflects how you actually operate.
From then on: expand and measure. Add treatment pages steadily, keep gathering reviews, post regularly, and repeat your monthly questions to the AI systems to see what moves. Over a longer horizon, patient reviews and consistent coverage compound in a way that is hard for a newer competitor to replicate.
None of this is fast, and anyone promising a quick fix should be treated with suspicion. The practices that become the default recommendation are generally the ones that did the dull, honest work early and kept doing it.
When It Makes Sense to Bring In Help
Much of this can be done in-house by a practice manager with a few focused hours a week. Help becomes useful when you lack the time, when you want an outside audit of what is actually broken, or when you want the treatment content written and structured by someone who has done it before. If you do hire, ask hard questions first. Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Marketing Agency in Los Angeles covers what to ask, and the same principles apply whether you are hiring for AI visibility, paid advertising, or content. Be sure any agency you work with understands that your advertising and patient-facing content must satisfy healthcare rules, and that your attorney or compliance advisor, not the agency, has the final say on what is claimed.
Above all, favor partners who are candid about what they cannot control. Nobody controls what an AI system says. What can be done is to make your practice the clearest, most credible, best-documented answer to the question patients are asking.
Want an honest read on how AI systems currently describe your med spa, and what would change it? Get in touch and we'll run through it with you.
