Gemini optimization for medspas

1 · What Gemini does when a patient asks about a medspa

We measure Gemini against gemini.google.com’s default model. Gemini answers a local medspa question the way the other four surfaces do: it names a short, specific list of clinics rather than returning a page of links, drawing on Google’s knowledge graph and local business data alongside whatever it retrieves live from the web.

Across the ten South Bay practices in our first study, Gemini named the practice in about 21% of answers. Ranking well elsewhere does not carry over automatically: a practice can be highly visible on one AI surface and far less visible on Gemini, which is exactly why we measure each surface separately rather than treating one as a proxy for the rest.

2 · How Gemini picks who to recommend

Gemini’s own crawling and grounding controls are less exposed than the other four surfaces’. The one documented lever is Google-Extended, a robots.txt token, not a live crawler we can probe, since there is no separate fetcher behind it to test. Disallowing Google-Extended is understood to control Gemini’s use of a page for grounding and, separately, for model training. How cleanly that maps onto a specific citation in a specific Gemini answer is not something our own engineering notes treat as settled, so we record it as a robots.txt-level signal rather than asserting a stronger mechanism than the evidence supports.

Beyond that token, the same underlying signals apply as on every surface we audit: whether your own site, local directories, and review aggregators state the treatment explicitly enough to resolve to the query, and whether those sources agree with each other on your name, address, and services.

3 · Why most medspas do not appear

In our first study of ten South Bay practices, Gemini named the typical clinic in only about 21% of answers, meaning it was absent more than three times out of four even on this early sample. The same failure modes recur across every surface we measure: treatment pages that do not enumerate services in a retrievable way, absence from the metro’s third-party directories, name-address-phone details that disagree across listings, and no structured data confirming what the page claims.

Two of the practices we audited rank #1 in their local set and still missed anywhere from 11% to all of the answers on individual AI engines: ranking well in search does not guarantee any single AI surface, Gemini included, names you.

4 · What we measure on Gemini

Every audit runs the same 36 patient query types (expanded into 162 query-runner combinations across all five surfaces) against gemini.google.com’s default model. For each query we record three things:

• Mention. Was the medspa named in Gemini’s answer?
• Citation. Was the medspa’s URL or property cited as a source?
• Rank position. Ordinal position among named competitors in the answer.

These roll up into a Gemini-specific visibility score (0–100) that sits alongside the scores for ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity in the combined audit. Methodology detail, including dedup rules, is on the methodology page.

5 · The fix patterns that move Gemini rank

We do not chase surface-specific tricks. The audit ships the same fixes ordered by projected lift, not by activity volume:

• Decide, deliberately, whether to allow or disallow Google-Extended, and record the decision. It is the one documented lever specific to Gemini, and it is a content-policy choice as much as a technical one.
• Treatment pages with explicit, retrievable copy: one page per major procedure, with the procedure name, location qualifier, and price band stated plainly.
• LocalBusiness, Service, and FAQPage structured data on the site, kept consistent with the prose.
• Name-address-phone consistency across Google Business Profile, Yelp, and any third-party directory that covers the metro.
• At least one third-party citation per major treatment line: a local press piece, a treatment guide, or a credible directory listing.

For the deeper how-to view written for owners doing this without an agency, see how to rank your medspa on ChatGPT (the same fixes carry over to Gemini).

6 · Gemini vs the other four surfaces

Gemini is one of five AI surfaces we audit. Google AI Overviews is a sibling Google surface, not a duplicate: it lives inside Google’s search results and pulls from a different citation pipeline than gemini.google.com’s standalone product, which is why we score them separately rather than folding one into the other.

• ChatGPT (OpenAI) is currently the largest AI assistant by user volume and issues its own retrieval pass against the live web for local queries.
• Claude (Anthropic) weighs well-structured sources and reasoning chains, and tends to hedge when they disagree.
• Google AI Overviews is the AI summary at the top of Google SERPs, with its own citation pipeline separate from Gemini.
• Perplexity (Sonar) is a web-search answer engine that leans heavily on Reddit and other UGC for local queries.

We measure ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity together, because a single surface gives a badly incomplete picture.

Frequently asked

• Does Gemini recommend specific medspas by name?
  Yes, in the same way the other four AI surfaces do. Gemini draws on Google’s knowledge graph and local business data alongside what it retrieves live from the web. Across the ten South Bay practices in our first study, Gemini named the practice in about 21% of answers.
• Is Google AI Overviews the same thing as Gemini?
  No, we measure them separately on purpose. Google AI Overviews is the AI-generated summary block at the top of Google search results; Gemini is Google’s standalone AI assistant. The surfaces, ranking factors, and citation behavior differ enough that folding them together would hide real visibility gaps.
• What does Google-Extended actually control?
  It is a robots.txt token, not a live crawler we can probe directly, since there is no separate fetcher behind it. Disallowing Google-Extended is understood to control Gemini’s use of a page for grounding and, separately, for model training. How cleanly that maps onto a specific citation in a specific Gemini answer is not something we treat as a settled technical guarantee, so we record it as a robots.txt-level signal and leave the decision to the site owner.
• Why doesn’t my Google Business Profile show up in Gemini?
  A Google Business Profile is a Google record. It says nothing about you anywhere else, so if it is the only place your details appear, there is nothing outside Google corroborating them, even to a Google product like Gemini. We have not measured how any assistant weighs one source against another. What we can say is that a listing with no third-party citations and no on-site structured data leaves Gemini, and anything reading the page, with a single unverifiable source.