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How a NSW Skin Clinic Went From Invisible to Cited by AI
By Maxwell Donnellan Founder, MaxConnex 5 min read Updated 24 September 2026
Bella Complexion is a single-location skin clinic in Toronto, New South Wales, on Lake Macquarie just south of Newcastle. It is run by Sue Willis, a registered nurse with more than thirty years of experience, including intensive care, before she moved into skin.
When she came to us, Sue was already doing well by every measure that used to matter. A loyal client base, a strong local reputation and well over a hundred reviews. But when a prospective client asked an AI assistant for a skin clinic in her area, Bella Complexion was rarely part of the answer. Competitors a few suburbs away were being named instead.
Sue was a client until September 2026 and agreed to be named in our marketing. Everything below is her clinic, her words and the results we measured while we worked together.
Where it started
When we first audited the clinic in 2026, it scored 8 out of 100 on AI visibility. The website read well to a person and poorly to a machine: an assistant could not reliably tell what the clinic was, who ran it, where it was or who it served.
That is the most common starting point we see. A clinic can be excellent, well reviewed and well known locally, and still give an AI assistant almost nothing it can use.
What changed
We made the clinic legible to the engines patients now ask. The clinic, the practitioner, the location and the area it serves were published in a form a machine can read rather than infer. We answered the questions prospective clients actually ask before they book. We cleaned out pages that were sending the wrong signals, and built out the wider Hunter region the clinic draws from.
Everything we wrote for the clinic was written within the advertising rules that apply to cosmetic clinics, which are the strictest in Australian healthcare: no prescription treatments named, no prices for them, and no testimonials about clinical results.
The result, measured
We track how AI assistants answer a fixed panel of questions about the clinic, across four engines, and record every answer. From May to September 2026, while we worked with the clinic:
- 37% of tracked AI answers cited the clinic by name, across 1,039 recorded answer checks.
- 45% of tracked answers named the clinic at all.
- On Gemini, its strongest engine, the citation rate was 53%.
Those are the verified numbers. They come from recorded answers rather than a single screenshot, which is the only honest way to report something that varies by user, session and day.
What Sue says
“Before I engaged Max from MaxConnex, I had virtually no visibility on ChatGPT. […] He said the magic words: ‘I will do everything’.”
Sue Willis, RN, owner of Bella Complexion
Her comments are about working with MaxConnex, not about any treatment or clinical outcome.
What this means for your clinic
If you run a clinic and you are not sure whether AI assistants mention you, there is a quick test. Ask ChatGPT or Gemini for the best clinic offering your main service in your suburb, and see whether your name appears. If it does not, you are where Bella Complexion was when we started.
A free AI visibility audit runs that test properly, across every major engine and against your closest competitors, and shows you exactly what is missing.