Top 25 brands capture 95% of AI citations in aesthetic medicine

The top 25 brands captured 95% of AI citation share in U.S. aesthetic medicine, while the remaining 11,500 facilities split the last 5%. 5W built the index from 65 patient-intent prompts tested across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, then ranked 92 candidate brands with a composite score that weighted citation frequency, cross-engine breadth, query-type breadth, source-authority weight, and crawl-access. The market it mapped was about $25 billion in 2026 and growing at roughly 15 percent a year.

The concentration was even tighter at the product level. 5W said AbbVie and Galderma controlled 80 percent of all drug and device AI citation share, with AbbVie and Allergan at 47 percent and Galderma at 33 percent. Allergan Aesthetics lists BOTOX Cosmetic, JUVÉDERM, SKINVIVE, KYBELLA, CoolSculpting, CoolTone, Natrelle, SkinMedica, LATISSE, and DiamondGlow in its portfolio, while JUVÉDERM’s official site says the collection is the #1 chosen dermal filler line in the U.S. and has the most FDA approvals for treatment of the face. Galderma describes its portfolio across injectable aesthetics, dermatological skincare, and therapeutic dermatology.

The answer engines themselves are still new enough to explain part of the skew. OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Anthropic introduced Claude on March 14, 2023. Google began rolling AI Overviews out to everyone in the U.S. on May 14, 2024. That timeline gives older, more heavily cited brands a head start, because the public record that these systems draw from has already been built around them.

RealSelf showed how a marketplace can outrank physical scale. 5W placed RealSelf at 86, ahead of every individual med spa, dermatology group, and device brand in the country, and RealSelf describes itself as built on vetted reviews, real before-and-afters, expert insights, and verified medical pros. LaserAway, which 5W called the largest national med spa chain at 190-plus locations and more than $200 million in revenue, still ranked seventh. The result points to a hard reality for independent clinics: a large footprint matters less than a dense citation layer built through reviews, earned coverage, and repeated source authority.

That pressure fits a broader industry that keeps expanding. AmSpa’s 2024 Medical Spa State of the Industry Report, based on surveys collected from September 2023 through March 2024, said the sector continued to grow steadily, and separate reporting put U.S. med spa count at 10,488 in 2024, up from just over 8,899 two years earlier. ASPS also said demand for surgical and minimally invasive procedures remained steady in 2024 despite economic uncertainty. The physical market is still growing, but 5W’s index shows that AI visibility is concentrating much faster than clinic count.