AI-Search Visibility for Local Business
When a customer asks ChatGPT or Google's AI “best med spa near me,” is your business in the answer — or invisible? CiteLocal makes you visible, and proves it.
The problem
Ten “blue links” became one AI answer that names two or three businesses. If you're not cited, you don't exist for that query — and unlike SEO, there's no dashboard telling you you've disappeared. Local owners have no visibility into their AI visibility.
When someone opens ChatGPT and asks for the “best med spa near me,” or types a treatment into Google and reads the AI Overview at the top, the assistant doesn't hand back a list to scroll. It synthesizes one recommendation from the sources it trusts — your Google Business Profile, Yelp, RealSelf, reviews, and the structured data on your site. Most med spas have never checked whether that machine is on their side.
How it works
Enter your business. We probe ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews across the high-intent queries your customers actually ask — and show exactly where you're invisible.
Weekly tracking of your AI-citation share across surfaces and your whole local corridor. Know the moment you drop — or a competitor overtakes you.
Concrete fixes — and proof they worked. Before/after citation lift, not generic advice.
Why now
med spas we scanned appear in all 44 AI answers — not one business is fully visible
answers the median med spa is missing from — invisible 98% of the time
are absent from more than half of every AI answer we measured
CiteLocal scan corpus, 322 med spas across the SF Bay Area, New York and Austin, 44 prompts each · measured 2026-08-17
Business model
The methodology
Remediation addresses every signal AI models weigh when deciding who to cite for a local query — then re-scans to show the lift.
LocalBusiness, MedicalBusiness, service, and FAQ schema that AI crawlers read directly — the machine-readable layer most med spas are missing.
We map which directories and publications AI pulls from — Google Business Profile, Yelp, RealSelf, local press — then help you show up where it looks.
Review recency and sentiment plus geo-specific service pages written in the exact pattern AI uses to compose local answers.
Every fix is re-scanned. You see measured citation lift across ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews — proof, not vanity metrics.
Who it's for
Botox, fillers, laser, and skin treatments are high-intent, trust-driven, and chosen on proximity. That makes AI-citation share unusually valuable — and RealSelf gives us rich, med-spa-specific signal.
Dentists, clinics, salons, and other proximity-based services face the same shift. The corridor playbook generalizes once the med-spa wedge proves out.
Self-serve from the free scan to recurring monitoring. No retainer, no jargon — just whether AI can find you, and the fixes that make it so.
Common questions
AI-search visibility — Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO — is how often AI assistants like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews name and cite your business when someone asks a local question. Instead of ranking on a page of blue links, you are either inside the AI's answer or you are not. GEO is the practice of measuring that citation share and improving it.
SEO optimizes for a ranked list of links a person clicks through. GEO optimizes for a single synthesized answer the AI speaks or shows, which usually names just two or three businesses. SEO has dashboards and rank trackers; AI answers have neither, so most owners cannot see when they disappear. The signals overlap — clean structured data and strong reviews help both — but GEO also depends on the specific sources an AI pulls from when it composes a local recommendation.
Large language models compose answers from the sources they trust for a given query: your Google Business Profile, Yelp, RealSelf, mapped directories, review platforms, and on-site content marked up with schema. They weigh relevance, proximity, review recency and sentiment, and how clearly your services and location are described in machine-readable form. CiteLocal addresses each of those signals directly.
ChatGPT answers conversational local questions and increasingly browses live sources to recommend specific businesses. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode sit at the top of Google's results and lean heavily on Maps, the Business Profile graph, and ranked web sources. They reward different things, so CiteLocal probes both surfaces separately rather than assuming one stands in for the other.
We optimize for where your customers actually search: ChatGPT and Google's AI surfaces, which is where the great majority of AI-assisted local discovery happens. Perplexity and niche assistants are real but small-share, so we treat them as secondary rather than spending your budget chasing low-traffic surfaces.
Yes, and we can show you our own measurement rather than an industry statistic. We scanned 322 med spas across the SF Bay Area, New York and Austin against 44 real 'best med spa near me'-style prompts — 22 asked of ChatGPT, 22 of Google AI Overviews. Not one business appeared in all 44. The median med spa was missing from 43 of them, and 97% were absent from more than half of every answer. Even the single best performer missed 9. Great reviews do not guarantee the AI mentions you — when the answer itself names the businesses, being absent means being invisible for that customer.