Editorial Methodology

1. Identification & Data Sources

We identify medical spa providers using public business records aggregated from verified directory sources. The full list of 19,751 providers spans 49 US states (every state except Hawaii at time of writing) and 685 US cities. Coverage includes both large metro areas (NYC, LA, Miami) and smaller secondary markets.

For each provider we store: name, address, ZIP, city, state, phone, website, latitude/longitude (when available), aggregated rating, review count, listed services, hours of operation, and price range indicator.

2. Verification

Every listing must include, at minimum: a verified business name, a city + state, and at least one of (address, phone, website). Listings missing the verification minimum are excluded from organic rankings until completed.

When a business owner claims their listing via our claim flow, we send a verification email and SMS to the documented business contacts. Claimed listings display a "Verified by owner" badge but do not receive ranking boost. See how we verify for the full process.

3. Pricing Data

National pricing ranges shown on each service page reflect industry-aggregated medians from:

• American Society of Plastic Surgeons — annual procedural statistics
• American Med Spa Association — State of the Industry 2025
• Cross-referenced with public price disclosures from a sample of high-volume providers

Local pricing on /treatment/{service}-in-{city} pages applies a metro-level cost-of-living multiplier (e.g., NYC ×1.4, LA ×1.3, Houston ×1.0) to the national range. This produces estimated ranges; final pricing from any individual provider may differ.

4. Ranking Formula

The natural-log term prevents low-review-count outliers from outranking high-volume providers while still rewarding small boutique spas with sustained excellence. Detailed worked examples are documented in how we rank.

5. Editorial Content

Service overviews (e.g., the Botox guide) and city pages include editorial copy reviewed by the No BS Med Spa Reviews Medical Review Board for factual accuracy. Procedure descriptions are checked against AAD consumer education materials and FDA regulatory status.

We disclose factual sourcing inline where statistics appear. We do not invent specific named studies or quotes.

6. Update Cadence

7. How we make our research discoverable

Our editorial research is published with structured, machine-readable metadata so search engines and research tools can read it accurately. Every page ships Schema.org JSON-LD (MedicalBusiness, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, Article, ItemList, AggregateRating), question-form H2s with 40-60 word answer capsules, and named-source attribution inline.

• Speakable schema — SpeakableSpecification CSS selectors target the TL;DR block (.tldr-block) and the answer-capsule paragraph (.answer-capsule) on every page so voice and assistant surfaces can extract them verbatim.
• FAQ patterns — homepage, service, city, and trust pages carry FAQPage JSON-LD with question-form names and 40-60 word answers.
• Sitemap + IndexNow — our sitemap surfaces ~21,500 URLs (provider detail + city + service + treatment pages) and is auto-pinged to Bing via IndexNow on each daily rebuild, accelerating discovery.
• dateModified freshness — every page emits a dateModified that updates on render, plus a visible Updated YYYY-MM-DD timestamp in the page body.
• Open crawler policy — robots.txt explicitly allows all major research crawlers including Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot, CCBot, and Bytespider. We don't paywall our research.

Read more about our editorial standards in our research methodology.