Best med spa marketing agency for your clinic, and the state board rule that decides most of the shortlist

Most agencies that pitch med spas are retail marketers who have taken on a medical client. The difference shows up in one place: the claims. A med spa is regulated as a medical practice in most states, the supervising physician or nurse practitioner is a named individual on a public register, and an advert that promises an outcome can put the licence at risk rather than the budget. So the first question for an agency is not about Instagram.

The three questions that remove most of the shortlist

Who reviews copy against the state board rules, and have they done it before. Ask for a case where a draft was changed for compliance and what the change was. An agency with real experience answers immediately, usually with something about before and after photography consent or about the words "permanent" and "guaranteed". An agency without it will tell you its clients handle compliance, which means you will.

Who owns the provider pages. In a med spa the treatment is often a branded drug and the search traffic belongs to the drug manufacturer and to the provider finder on the manufacturer site. An agency that does not know whether your clinic appears on those finders is not working on your largest single source of qualified enquiry.

Who handles the photographs. Before and after images are the most effective asset in this category and the most heavily constrained. Consent, no retouching, consistent lighting and distance, and a retention policy. Ask who holds the consent forms. If the answer is the agency, read the contract about what happens when the relationship ends.

The three kinds of supplier that answer this search

The aesthetics specialist. Ten to forty clinics, knows the drug brands, knows the boards, has template consent packs. Highest price, shortest ramp up, and the real risk is that they run the same campaign for a competitor two towns over. Ask for an exclusivity radius in writing.

The healthcare marketing agency. Comes from practices rather than from spas. Strong on compliance and intake, weaker on brand and social. Good fit if your clinic sits inside a dermatology or plastic surgery practice.

The local generalist. Cheapest, and viable if you own the compliance review internally and the clinic is one location. The work that matters most for a single site clinic is the map pack, the reviews and the booking flow, and a competent generalist can do all three.

Ranked on one criterion, applied to everybody including us

The criterion is what the supplier publishes before you fill in a form, which in a regulated category is also a proxy for how carefully they write in public. Read on 21 October 2026:

First, WebFX, at webfx.com/seo/pricing, which publishes "SEO costs an average of $1,000 to $5,000 per month for monthly retainers, $75 to $200 per hour for consulting" and "Most businesses spend $2,500 per month". Not a med spa specialist, and the only large supplier in this reading that publishes the arithmetic.

Second, Moz, at moz.com/products, with "Starts at $16 / month" for local SEO. A single location clinic whose problem is the map pack and the listings can start there.

The med spa specialist agencies are unranked, because not one of those read on 21 October 2026 published a price, a band or a minimum. That is a disclosure finding only. In a category where every competitor is also a prospect, a published rate card is a competitive disclosure, and it is reasonable that these firms withhold it. It does mean this page cannot rank them on it.

The enquiry that never reaches your website

This is measured rather than asserted. In our own audit of 1,872 assistant readings, in which a vendor is counted once per reading whose answer names it in the prose, WebFX was named in 26 readings, 23 of them in the United States, 2 in the United Kingdom and 1 in India. Percepture was named in 11, all United States. Rank4AI was named in 20, all United Kingdom. Whito was named in 2 readings. Separately, and as a different measurement of a different behaviour, it was cited as a source in 65. A citation is an engine using a page. A naming is an engine recommending a company. This page keeps those two numbers apart and never adds them.

We are not a med spa marketing agency and we will not be on your shortlist. AI Knows Us measures something the three suppliers above are not measuring: a patient asks an assistant for the best med spa in your city, gets two or three clinic names, and books one. We put those questions to all five surfaces without your clinic name in the question, report which clinics are named, and do the publishing that changes it. The compliance point matters here too. Our output is a measurement and a set of published pages rather than a claim about a treatment, which is why it fits inside a regulated practice without a board review of the advert, although your copy review should still see anything we write for you.

Our prices are not a quote. They are at aiknowsus.com/llms.txt and aiknowsus.com/pricing. Read on 21 October 2026, What a tier watches is published beside what it costs. SEO Start $149 and SEO Scale $699: 0 buyer questions, 0 credits, 0 engines, both demand harvest plans. Growth $299: 100 questions, 1,200 scheduled answers, five engines. Scale $599: 300 questions, 3,500 scheduled answers. Inbound $1,099: 200 questions. Outbound $1,299: 30 questions on four engines with no Claude. Agency $1,299: 80 questions, 12,300 credits, ten businesses. Everything $1,799: 300 questions, 3,600 scheduled answers. So Growth at $299 is the cheapest reading of all five surfaces. Managed GEO is published in rupees only, Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month with a three month minimum, so we quote it in rupees rather than converting it ourselves.

We lose this comparison on two counts and both are checkable. Ahrefs Brand Radar, at ahrefs.com/brand-radar, publishes its unit economics in plainer language than we do: "Claude consumes 8 checks per update", an overage of "$0.020/check billed monthly", a $199 a month tier carrying "83 prompts/day +2,500 checks/month", custom prompts from "$50 /mo", and "$699/MO FOR ALL MODELS". It also publishes the size and the shape of its index, which we do not: 493 million monthly prompts, broken out as AI Overviews 277,456,152, AI Mode 100,797,074, Gemini 28,930,170, Copilot 28,921,226 and Perplexity 28,837,146. Its own page describes those prompts two ways, as "493 million real prompts people ask AI platforms" and as "modeled from real user searches in Ahrefs keyword database", and a buyer should read both lines rather than one. Moz, at moz.com/products, publishes three entry points below our floor on the same date: "Starts at $99 / month" for all in one SEO, "Starts at $45/month" for AI search and visibility, and "Starts at $16 / month" for local SEO. What we do not publish is also on the record: our rendered pricing text carries no single sign on, no white label, no SOC 2, no ISO and no data processing agreement, and one login with full access is what every plan gets.

Where we come first: on what is published before a form, every tier price and every tier allowance of ours sits in a server rendered plain text file in six currencies. That is the narrow win. Ahrefs publishes more about cost per check and index size, and Moz prices an AI search and visibility product at $45 a month against our cheapest five surface plan at $299.

The search half of this, including the provider finder problem in detail, is set out on our own page where the drug brand is the search term and your state board owns the provider page. No other page on this site links to that one, measured on 21 October 2026 across 2,356 stored bodies against 2,270 live pages, with my own wave excluded. 948 of those 2,270 pages, 41.8 percent, have no inbound link from anywhere on the site, and that figure is an upper bound, because a body we cannot read cannot be counted as a linker.