We Ranked 398 Bay Area Med Spas — and Most "Best Of" Lists Are Guessing About AI

We built a real ranking of 398 med spas across 14 Bay Area cities, sorted by actual Google and Yelp review data. Then we checked how many of those cities we'd actually measured for AI visibility. The answer was 3.

What the ranking is — and isn't

Each business in the list gets one score: a review-volume-weighted average of its Google and Yelp ratings. Weighted by volume, not a plain average — a med spa with a 5.0 from seven reviews and one with a 4.6 from four hundred reviews are not the same business, and a flat average can't tell them apart. Businesses with no rating on file are left off the list. We don't guess a score to fill a gap.

That's a real ranking. It is not an AI-visibility ranking, and we want to be exact about the difference, because most “best med spa near me” content on the internet blurs the two.

Only 3 of 14 cities have real AI-citation data behind them

For a small number of cities — Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose — we've actually asked ChatGPT the real questions a customer would ask (“best med spa near me,” and variants) and recorded, business by business, who gets named. That data sits alongside the review ranking for those three cities.

The other 11 — San Francisco, Walnut Creek, San Mateo, Fremont, Menlo Park, Pleasanton, Novato, Oakland, San Ramon, Livermore, and Burlingame — have real review data and nothing else. We have not measured whether AI actually names any business in those cities. No one publishing a “top 10” list for those cities has either, unless they say explicitly how they measured it.

Why we're publishing the gap, not hiding it

It would be easy to publish 14 clean-looking city rankings and let readers assume every badge on the page means the same thing. It doesn't, and saying so is the entire premise of this company: a star rating is not proof that AI can find you.

• Reputation ranking — real, available for all 14 cities, tells you who has the strongest review record.
• AI-visibility data — real where we have it, currently 3 of 14 cities, tells you who AI actually names.
• A high rank on the first doesn't buy you a place on the second. That's the whole finding.

If your city isn't one of the 3

That's not a small gap — it's most of the map. If your business is in one of the other 11 cities, the honest answer is we don't yet know how AI treats you, and neither does anyone else publishing a ranking for your area. The only way to find out is to actually ask the AI the question a customer would ask, and check whether your name comes back.