Is my marketing agency already doing AEO for my med spa?

AEO is a separate discipline from what agencies usually sell. SEO chases link rankings, ads buy clicks, social builds an audience: all valuable, none of which decides whether an AI assistant names you when a patient asks for a recommendation. Many agencies have added a vague "GEO" or "AI search included" line to their packages, but it's rarely backed by actual AI citations, because it takes different work: publishing machine-readable answers to the exact questions patients ask, and being corroborated across the sources each AI engine reads. A bundled checkbox isn't the same as showing up in the answer.

Here's the 2-minute test, and you don't need your agency's permission to run it. First, ask them to show you one clinic they've actually gotten named in an AI answer for a buyer query: a screenshot, a specific example. Then open ChatGPT or Google's AI yourself and ask "best [your treatment] in [your city]." If your agency can't produce an example and the AI doesn't name you, it isn't being done, no matter what the proposal says.

This isn't a reason to fire your agency; keep them for the channels they're good at. AEO is an add-on layer, and right now it's wide open because so few are doing it well. The honest way to see the gap is to look: our free AI-visibility audit shows, treatment by treatment, exactly where you're named on ChatGPT and Google's AI today: the same evidence you can take back to your agency, or use to close the gap yourself.