Patients are asking ChatGPT which med spa to go to
A growing share of people now start with an assistant rather than a search box. They ask for the best place near them for a treatment, get three names back, and act on it. If you are not one of those names, you never see the query and there is no impression to tell you it happened.
These tools do not rank the way Google ranks
A search engine answers "who ranks first". An assistant answers "which of these is right for this person". It builds that answer from structured information about your clinic and from what other people have written about you, pulled from several places at once.
That means ad spend does not buy you in, and neither does a high star rating on its own.
The finding that surprises most owners
Review count and star rating matter far less than most people assume. A business with thousands of five-star reviews can be skipped entirely if those reviews all say "great service", while a newer competitor with fewer and lower-rated reviews gets recommended because its reviews describe what actually happened.
The assistants are reading for detail. A review naming the treatment, the result and why the person chose you is worth more than a hundred one-line ratings.
So we change what the review asks for
Most review systems ask a patient to leave a review and stop there, which reliably produces "lovely staff". Ours asks in a way that prompts the specifics: which treatment, what they noticed, why they picked your clinic.
It is a small change to a system that is already running, and it is the single highest-leverage thing a clinic can do for this channel.
The rest is making your clinic legible
Treatments, locations, price ranges and practitioner credentials expressed in structured data an assistant can parse. Answers on your site to the questions patients actually ask out loud. Consistent details about your business everywhere it appears, so there is no ambiguity about who and where you are.
None of this is expensive. It is mostly a matter of doing it before your competitors do.
Questions about this
- Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend my clinic?
- No, and nobody can. These systems change with every model update and there is no ranking to buy. What we can do is make sure your clinic is legible to them and that your reviews carry the detail they read, which is what the businesses being recommended have in common.
- How would I even know if it is working?
- By sampling. We check what the major assistants say for the relevant questions in your area, before and over time. Be sceptical of anyone quoting you precise AI impression numbers, because no such reporting exists yet.
- Is this not just SEO with a new name?
- It overlaps, but the inputs differ. Traditional SEO rewards authority and links. Assistants reward clear structured facts and descriptive third-party language about you. A clinic can do well in one and be invisible in the other, which is exactly what we see.