The typical Cornflower Score for a med spa sits well below where it needs to be. That means the typical med spa is invisible in at least two of the five channels where patients actually look. And most owners have no idea.
We didn't set out to find a crisis. We set out to understand a pattern. What we found was consistent enough across markets and practice sizes that it stopped being surprising and started being structural. Med spa discoverability isn't just variable — it's broken in predictable ways.
Here's what we keep seeing.
The score runs from 0 to 100 and measures a practice's visibility across five channels: Google Search, AI Search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini), Google Business Profile and Maps, online reviews, and social media. Each channel is weighted based on its current contribution to how patients actually find and choose providers.
A score of 100 would mean you're fully visible and well-represented in all five places patients look. A score of 0 means you effectively don't exist to a prospective patient doing any kind of research before booking.
Most practices fall somewhere in the middle — but the middle is not a safe place to be.
Most med spas score below 50. The practices pulling the overall average up are a small group at the top — which means the typical practice is actually doing worse than the midpoint suggests.
Top-performing practices — those scoring above 70 — are not outliers doing something exotic. They're practices that have addressed the basics consistently across all five channels. There's no single secret to their scores — it's the absence of the gaps that drag everyone else down.
The typical med spa is invisible in multiple channels where patients look before booking.
That's not a minor oversight. It means a patient doing a reasonable amount of research before booking — checking Google, asking an AI, reading reviews, checking Instagram — will hit dead ends when she looks at the typical practice.
Scores vary by market. Practices in cities with high aesthetic-industry density — Miami, Los Angeles, New York, Dallas — tend to score higher on average. Not because they're doing something fundamentally different, but because competitive pressure has pushed them to address more of the basics.
Mid-size and smaller markets tell a different story. Many practices in those cities have strong local reputations and steady books — but thin Cornflower Scores. When AI search, review platforms, and Instagram are added to the picture, their digital presence doesn't hold up.
The implication: practices in less competitive markets have a larger opportunity than those in dense metros. The window to establish AI visibility, build out a complete GBP, and develop review volume before a well-funded competitor moves in is still open in most mid-size cities. It won't stay that way.
Across the practices we scan, the gaps fall into clear patterns.
The vast majority have zero AI visibility. When we query ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini for the top treatments in a practice's market, most practices never appear in any response. This is the single most widespread gap we see — and the most consequential given how quickly AI search is growing.
Most are missing a Google Business Profile description. The GBP description field is one of the primary ways Google understands what a practice offers and who it serves. Leaving it blank is the equivalent of running an ad with no copy. Practice after practice we scan hasn't filled it in.
A large share are using the wrong GBP primary category. Google uses primary category to determine which local searches a business appears in. Practices listed under the wrong category — or a generic one like "health spa" instead of "medical spa" — are systematically excluded from searches they should be winning.
Many haven't updated GBP photos in over a year. Google's algorithm treats photo recency as a freshness signal. A profile with year-old photos reads as less active than one updated last month — regardless of how busy the actual practice is.
More than half the med spas we scan haven't posted on Instagram in over a month. This affects two things simultaneously: organic discovery on the platform itself, and the freshness signals that AI search tools like Perplexity draw from when forming recommendations.
These gaps aren't random. They're the result of something predictable: med spa owners are excellent at running their practices and poor at tracking the five separate systems that determine whether new patients can find them.
Google Search, AI search, Maps, reviews, and Instagram are each maintained through different platforms, updated on different cadences, and governed by different algorithms. There's no single dashboard that shows you where you stand across all five at once. Most owners know they "should be doing more" with marketing — but without a unified picture, they don't know where to start, so they don't start anywhere.
The result is a practice that's genuinely excellent at the service it provides, but effectively invisible to a growing share of prospective patients who are actively looking.
Practices scoring above 70 share a few consistent characteristics.
They have complete, accurate GBP profiles with correct categories, current photos, and filled-in descriptions. They have meaningful review volumes, with recent reviews arriving regularly. Their websites are content-rich, treatment-specific, and indexed by Bing as well as Google. They post on Instagram at least weekly. And they have presence on the third-party platforms — Healthgrades, RealSelf, Yelp — that AI systems use as reference points.
None of that is exotic. All of it is addressable. The practices that have done it aren't bigger or better-funded than the ones that haven't — they're just more systematically maintained.
The pattern is remarkably consistent: most practices are leaving patient volume on the table every single week. The good news is the gaps are fixable, and fixing them compounds over time. Practices that close their gaps see meaningful score improvements within 30 days.
The first step is knowing where you actually stand.
Run your free Cornflower Scan at cornflower.ai/scan — you'll see your score across all five channels in two minutes, with a breakdown of exactly where your gaps are.