Citino teamHow Gemini answers
The Gemini app answers some questions from what the model learned in training and grounds others in live search. Google defines grounding as “providing content from the Google Search index to the model at prompt time”, and its crawler documentation confirms Gemini apps use it.
So the starting point for Gemini is the same as for Google Search: pages that are crawled, indexed and trusted by Google are the ones Gemini can read.
The one Gemini-specific setting: Google-Extended
Google-Extended is a robots.txt token, not a separate crawler. According to Google, it controls two things:
| Use | What it means |
|---|---|
| Training | Whether your content is used to train future Gemini models |
| Grounding | Whether your content from the Google Search index is given to Gemini apps when they answer |
And it does not control Google Search: Google says Google-Extended “does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal.”
The trap is that many sites block Google-Extended to opt out of training and, without realising it, opt out of Gemini’s answers too. If being recommended in Gemini matters, leave it allowed:
User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /
What makes Gemini name a brand
Because Gemini grounds in Google Search, most of the work overlaps with AI Overviews and ordinary SEO:
- Rank for the sub-questions. Gemini, like AI Overviews, benefits from pages that cover a topic completely: pricing, integrations, comparisons, implementation.
- State facts plainly. A clear sentence under a clear heading is easy to ground on. A claim buried in a PDF or an image is not.
- Keep Google’s own data right. Business Profile, Merchant Center and other Google surfaces feed Google’s products.
- Be on the sources it reads. Review sites and comparison articles that rank well in Google for your questions shape Gemini’s answers.
Gemini and AI Overviews disagree more than you would expect
Both draw on Google Search, but they are different products, with different prompts, formats and answer lengths. A brand named first in an AI Overview can be absent from Gemini’s answer to the same question. Track them as separate engines.
How to check where you stand
Ask your buyers’ questions in the Gemini app, signed out or in a clean profile, several times each. Record whether you are named, your position, the tone, and any sources it shows. Compare rates over time rather than single answers.
How Citino tracks Gemini
Citino tracks Gemini as an add-on to any plan, asking every tracked question every day next to Google AI Overviews, which is included, so you can see where the two agree and where they do not.