The average med spa scores 28/100 on AI visibility — and no competitor owns more than 2% of the answers

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude "what's the best med spa in Dallas?" (or Scottsdale, or Charlotte, or Nashville) and you get a confident shortlist of named businesses. We wanted to know how the average med spa actually fares in those answers — so we audited 64 of them, in 14 different metros, across all four engines. The picture is bleak for most, and wide open for anyone paying attention.

Finding 1: The average score is 28/100 — and the median is 17

Across the 64 med spas, the average AI-visibility score was 28.2 out of 100. But averages hide the shape of it: the median score was just 17. More than half of med spas — 36 of 64 (56%) — scored under 20. Only 6 (9%) cleared 60. A handful of well-known names (a Dallas and a Raleigh spa topped out at 83) pull the average up; the typical med spa sits near the floor.

Finding 2: The typical med spa is left off the shortlist more often than it's named

A med spa was named in an average of just 47% of the AI answers about its own city and category. Turn that around: more often than not, the engine produces a shortlist of "best med spas near me" and the business isn't on it. And when a rival is named, it's frequently named more prominently — in 30 of the 64 audits (47%), a single competitor was mentioned more times than the audited spa itself. Nearly half of these businesses are being out-recommended in the answers their own customers are reading.

Finding 3: Nobody owns this category — the single most fragmented market we measure

This is the finding that should change how an agency prices AI-visibility work. Across the 64 audits, the engines named 189 distinct med spas as recommendations, spread across 672 mentions. The single most-recommended med spa in the entire dataset — Adam & Eve Medical Aesthetics — holds just 2.2% of those mentions. The next few cluster at ~2% and drop from there. There is no incumbent. No med spa has "won" AI the way a business can own the #1 organic result for a keyword.

Compare that to Google, where the top result for "med spa [city]" typically has years of reviews and backlinks behind it and displacing it is a long, expensive war. In AI recommendations, the leader holds 2.2%. That is not a market you have to break into — it's one nobody has claimed. The first med spa (or the first agency working on its behalf) to systematically build the off-site signals the engines read is competing for empty ground.

Finding 4: It's a national pattern, not a few weak metros

The low scores aren't concentrated in one city. Every metro with a meaningful sample sits well below the halfway mark:

In Las Vegas, all four med spas we audited scored under 20. Nashville's median is 17 across seven businesses. Even Dallas — the strongest metro in the set — averages 42, still short of the halfway mark. Metro cells of four are directional, not definitive, and we say so; but the direction is the same everywhere: the med-spa category is broadly invisible to AI, in every city we looked at.

What this means if you run — or market — a med spa

For a med spa owner: your score is probably nearer 17 than 28, you're likely being left off the shortlist more than half the time, and a competitor you may not even track is being named ahead of you. That's the bad news. The good news is that no rival has a real lead — a 2.2% "leader" means the gap between you and the front is small and closeable.

For an agency or GEO consultant: this is the retainer argument. AI visibility for med spas isn't a saturated market you're fighting into on a client's behalf — it's an unclaimed one, and it's built off-site (on the review platforms, directories and "best-of" roundups the engines actually read — see where AI looks before it recommends a local business), which is ongoing work, which is exactly what a retainer is for. Walking into a med-spa pitch with "here's your AI score, here's the competitor being named instead of you, and here's why nobody has won this yet" is a far stronger open than another homepage redesign.

Either way, the first step is measuring where the client stands and who's being named instead — per engine, per question — which is what an AskedAbout audit reports.

Methodology

64 completed AskedAbout free AI-visibility checks of real med spas across 14 US metros (Charlotte, Nashville, Houston, Denver, Scottsdale, Dallas, Las Vegas, Newport Beach, Austin, Southlake, Tampa, Raleigh and others), run July 2026. Each audit submits buyer-intent, city-and-category questions ("best med spa in [city]", "top med spas near me for [treatment]") to the two engines in the free check — OpenAI's ChatGPT search model and Perplexity — and parses the responses for whether the business is named, how prominently, and which competitors are named instead. The score (0–100) combines how often the business is named and how it ranks against rivals across engines. "Most-recommended" shares are computed over 672 total rival mentions. Metro cells are as small as four businesses and are stated as directional. Synthetic smoke-test rows are excluded by business name via our canonical `audit_cut` script — never by test flags, which our own prospect audits also carry. n is stated so you can weight the figures; we re-publish as the corpus grows.

More from the same corpus: the full AI-visibility benchmark across 152 local businesses, where AI looks before it recommends a local business, and — written for owners — why AI doesn't recommend your med spa. Reselling this to med-spa clients? The white-label Agency 5-pack puts five of these audits under your logo for $249.