You Know What Your Brand Stands For. Does AI?

How AI search is changing discovery for beauty, fitness, and wellness brands.

For years, local search has been pretty straightforward. You need a haircut, so you Google “hair salon near me.” You want to try Pilates, so you search for studios in your area. So you pull up nearby options, read a few reviews, and decide where to book.

People still search that way. But now they can also ask AI a much more specific question.

• “What’s a good Pilates studio near me for a beginner who wants smaller classes?”
• “Where should I go in Austin for curly hair if I want someone who really knows how to cut it?”
• “What’s a highly rated med spa in Scottsdale known for natural-looking results?”

Instead of reducing what they want to a few keywords, customers can explain what matters to them and ask AI to help narrow down the options. And this isn’t some far-off shift in search behavior. Google says AI Mode has already surpassed one billion monthly active users globally, with people using it to ask longer, more complex questions that can be difficult to express through traditional searches.

For beauty, fitness, and wellness brands, that adds a new layer to local discovery. It’s not only about showing up for the right category in the right place. There also needs to be enough useful information online to understand what you offer, what you’re known for, and when your business might be relevant to a very specific request.

From getting found to being understood

This is where answer engine optimization, or AEO, comes in. Despite the new acronym, the basic idea isn’t particularly complicated. AEO is about making your business and its information easier for AI-powered search and answer engines to understand and use.

That doesn’t make SEO, your website, location pages, business profiles, or reviews any less important. What’s changing is the way people can interact with all of that information.

A beauty customer searching for the “best salon” might really want a stylist who specializes in blondes, someone who understands curly hair, or a salon known for great consultations. A fitness customer might care less about the highest-rated gym and more about finding a studio where beginners feel comfortable and instructors pay attention to form. Someone looking for a wellness service may care about expertise, but also whether the staff communicates clearly and creates a comfortable, professional experience.

Customers have always cared about those details. Now they can put that context directly into the search.

What are you actually known for?

Most brands know what they want to be known for. The more interesting question is whether that lines up with the information available about them online.

A fitness brand might position itself as welcoming and community-driven. A salon might pride itself on thoughtful consultations. A wellness brand might put personalized care at the center of its experience. Those messages live across the website, advertising, social, and other marketing.

But that’s only the version of the story the brand controls.

AI search can work with information from across the web. Depending on the platform and the question, that can include websites, business profiles, third-party sources, and local business information. Google’s AI Mode, for example, can show ratings, reviews, hours, and other details when helping someone explore local businesses.

So if a fitness brand says its studios are welcoming to everyone, that tells you how the company positions itself. If customers across its locations repeatedly talk about instructors making them comfortable on their first visit, coaches learning their names, or finally finding a gym they enjoy coming back to, you start to see that positioning reflected in the actual experience.

Reviews aren’t a shortcut to appearing in AI results, and getting more of them doesn’t guarantee that an AI platform will recommend your business. But they are part of the public information available about a business, and they contain something brands can’t write for themselves: how customers naturally describe their experience.

For beauty, that might mean consultations, specific services, stylists, or results. For fitness, instructors, community, cleanliness, or how beginners are treated. For wellness, communication, attentiveness, professionalism, and comfort.

Your marketing tells people what you want to be known for. Your customers tell you whether you’re living up to it.

AEO eventually runs into customer experience

Most of the AEO conversation understandably starts with marketing. There are websites to optimize, content to create, location information to maintain, and questions to answer clearly.

For service businesses, though, marketing can only work with what’s actually happening at the location. A stylist who takes the time to understand what a guest wants, an instructor who makes a first-timer feel comfortable, or a manager who follows up and fixes a bad experience can all influence what that customer says about the business later.

That feedback might stay private. It might become a review or a recommendation to a friend. 

Sometimes it becomes part of the public information available about that location.

So yes, make your website easy to understand. Keep your business information accurate. Answer the questions customers actually ask and make it clear what you offer. But the experience still has to support the story.

If you want to be known for great consultations, customers should be having great consultations. If you want to be the place where beginners feel welcome, people should actually feel welcome.

Now multiply that by 100 locations

That alignment gets much harder across a multi-location or franchise business.

One location might have customers constantly praising the staff while another sees communication come up as a recurring frustration. One studio has built the community the brand talks about in its marketing while another feels more transactional. One salon is consistently praised for its consultations while that same strength barely registers somewhere else.

Corporate sees one brand. Customers experience one location at a time, and each location contributes to the larger picture of what that brand is known for.

That makes it worth paying attention to the patterns in customer feedback, not just the overall rating or number of reviews. If customers consistently mention the things you want to be known for, you have something real to reinforce. If they don’t, there may be a gap between the brand you’re marketing and the experience people are actually having.

Understanding those patterns across hundreds or thousands of customer conversations is where customer experience intelligence becomes especially valuable. 

AI search gives multi-location brands one more reason to understand that gap.

The fundamentals haven’t changed as much as the technology has

AI search is moving quickly, and the mechanics will continue to change. There isn’t a guaranteed formula for getting a beauty brand, fitness studio, or wellness business included every time someone asks AI for a recommendation.

Fortunately, the starting point is much less complicated.

Know what you want your brand to be known for. Make your services and locations easy to understand online. Keep your information accurate. Create useful content around the questions customers actually have. Pay attention to how customers describe their experiences, and look for the places where their version of your brand differs from yours.

Those were good practices before anyone started talking about AEO, and they’ll continue to matter as the way people search changes.

The opportunity isn’t to chase every new AI search tactic. It’s to make sure that when someone asks a specific question about the kind of experience you provide, there’s enough accurate information out there to understand why your business might be relevant.

The way people ask is changing. Delivering an experience worth finding isn’t.