Clients readthe labelbefore they book

A1. The research question

When someone considering an aesthetic treatment (injectables, laser, skin) looks up an independent med spa or clinic online, usually on a phone, can they find out what it costs, whether they can book without calling, who will treat them and with what credential, whether a doctor oversees the practice, what results look like, whether they can spread the cost, whether they can talk to someone first, what the downtime and risks are, and whether other clients vouch for it?

Population. Independently owned US aesthetics businesses with one to three locations and their own website, in four groups: independent med spas, cosmetic dermatology practices, laser and skin clinics, and injector-led boutiques and aesthetic nurse practices. These are the aesthetics businesses a small or mid-size web agency can realistically win as clients.

A2. Who was studied

The sample was built from local search listings, city by city, then screened so that every site in it is one an independent agency could realistically win.

A3. How the sites were read

Pages. The home page, then for each of nine topics (treatments, prices, team, before and after, financing and memberships, reviews, booking, FAQ, contact) the best-matching link on the home page.

Speed and accessibility. Google PageSpeed Insights (Lighthouse) on a mid-range phone profile and on desktop, plus Chrome UX Report data from real visitors over the previous 28 days where Google publishes it for the site.

Crawler conduct. One request at a time to each site, at least 400 ms apart, at most ten pages per site; robots.txt is read and obeyed for every page requested; a site that refuses is left out and never retried. The crawler identifies itself as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ClikitiResearch/1.0; +https://clikiti.com).

A4. What was measured

9 questions clients ask before they book a treatment, answered from what each site publishes, and 4 technical checks against published standards. A check passes only when the rule below is met; anything the crawler cannot confirm counts as not answered.

A5. The website score

Each site's overall score (0 to 100) is Clikiti's website score, rubric 2.0.0. It measures the website, not the practice, and the client questions above do not feed it. It is a weighted mean of five pillars:

Within a pillar, each issue costs points by severity (critical, high, medium, low) and by how many times it occurs; issues based on judgement count at 70% of measured ones, and duplicates of the same root cause count once. On the four practice profiles, the number out of 100 is this overall score, and each dot is one check in its group: filled when the site passes it, hollow when it does not.

A6. Precision

With 194 sites, a share reported for the whole sample is precise to within ±7 percentage points at 95% confidence (worst case, a 50% share; 1.96 × √(0.25/n)). By type: independent med spas ±12.1 (n = 66); cosmetic dermatology ±14.4 (n = 46); laser and skin clinics ±15.7 (n = 39); injector-led boutiques and aesthetic nurse practices ±14.9 (n = 43). Differences between types smaller than these margins should be read as similar. Percentages are rounded to whole numbers; medians are the middle value of the sites in a group.

A7. Quality control

• Every home page in the cohort was fetched and its title checked against the listed business before scanning
• Every home page was checked for signs of a hijacked domain (gambling, adult, crypto or unrelated pharmacy content) before scanning
• Detection rules were checked against the evidence they record for a sample of businesses in every group, and revised before the final run
• Every published figure is recomputed from the data at build time, and a statement in the text that the data does not support stops the build
• Results are published only after automated checks for missing data, anonymity, accessibility of the report itself and the margin of error statement pass

A8. Limitations

• A point-in-time snapshot: sites change, and a site may have improved or declined since it was read.
• Only public pages were read: the home page and pages it links to. Booking flows, chat widgets and quiz-style consultation forms were not tested.
• Answers are read from the page as a server delivers it. Content that only appears after scripts run in the browser (some price menus, schedulers, galleries and review widgets) is not seen, which the study counts as a gap a search engine or a slow phone would also meet.
• 21 candidates blocked or did not answer automated visitors, or served a placeholder, and are not in the study; sites behind such protection may differ from those studied.
• The study reports what a website shows. It does not judge any treatment, result, safety record or price, and it does not assess compliance with any state's rules on medical supervision, delegation, advertising or before-and-after photos.
• Automated accessibility tests find only part of what WCAG covers; keyboard and screen-reader use need a manual audit.
• The sample is a structured list of real, independent businesses, not a random draw. Margins of error are given as a guide to precision, not as a guarantee that the results hold for every business in the country.

A9. Data, licence and corrections

The aggregate results are published as CSV and JSON beside this report under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: you may reuse, adapt and share them, including in client proposals, with a credit to Clikiti and a link. No per-site results are published. Corrections and removal requests are reviewed and answered personally; see the end of this report.