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Gemini

How to check if Gemini recommends your business

To see whether Gemini recommends you, ask it the question a buyer would ask, in a clean account, and open the Sources panel under the answer. Google says some Gemini responses are grounded on Google Search results, so your Search basics carry over. It also says Gemini can personalize answers from your chats and connected apps, and that not every answer shows sources. Both facts change how you should run the check.

Gemini is one of the four engines in a Citebase Snapshot, next to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. This guide is the hand version of that Gemini column. It takes about thirty minutes for five questions.

What Google says about how Gemini answers

Google publishes very little about how the Gemini app picks what to recommend. What it does say comes from three help pages and one crawler page:

  • Some answers use Search. The Gemini Apps Privacy Hub says “some Gemini responses are grounded on Search results.” Google’s crawler documentation describes grounding as “providing content from the Google Search index to the model at prompt time.”
  • Sources are shown sometimes, not always. Google’s page on viewing related sources says Gemini sometimes shows sources within and below a response, through a Sources button that opens a side panel. It also says “Not all responses include related links or sources.” If there is no Sources button, Gemini did not provide links for that answer.
  • Answers can be personal. The Privacy Hub says Gemini can personalize by referencing your chats, and that people who opt in to personalization with certain Connected Apps get answers shaped by data from those apps. It also says Gemini uses your general area from your device, IP address, or the Home and Work addresses in your Google Account.
  • Answers can be wrong. The page on responses from Gemini Apps says Gemini can present inaccurate information as factual, including when citing sources.

So a Gemini answer about your category may be built partly from Google Search results, may lean on the asker’s own history and location, and may or may not show you where it came from.

Set up a fair test

The point is to see what a stranger would see, not what Gemini says to you after a year of chats about your own product.

  1. Use an account with no history

    Use a Google account you do not use for work, with no past Gemini chats about your company and no Connected Apps turned on. Your main account has your email, your documents, and your chats. Gemini may draw on them, and a buyer’s account would not have them.

  2. Think about location

    Because Gemini uses your general area, a question like “best accountant for a small business” will be answered for where you are sitting. If you sell nationally, that matters less. If you sell locally, ask from the area you serve, or name the city in the question the way a buyer would.

  3. Write buyer questions, not brand questions

    “What is [your company]?” tests whether Gemini knows you exist. “Best [category] for [type of buyer]” tests whether it recommends you. Write five of the second kind, in the words your customers use. The manual check guide has more on wording.

  4. Start a new chat for each question

    Each answer can shape the next one inside the same conversation. A fresh chat per question keeps them independent.

What to record

For each question, write down four things:

  • Named or not. Were you named at all? Use the same three labels every time: cited (named with a link to your site), mentioned (named with no link), or absent.
  • Who was named instead. List the companies in the order Gemini gave them.
  • Sources shown. If there is a Sources button, open it and copy the URLs. These are the pages Gemini chose to show for that answer. If there is no button, write “no sources”.
  • What it said about you. If you were named, is the description right? Price, features, location, and who you are for are the usual errors.

Take a screenshot of every answer. Gemini answers change, and a note that says “we were third” is hard to check a month later without the picture.

How to read the sources

The Sources panel is the most useful part of the check, because it tells you which pages are doing the work. Sort what you find into three groups:

  • Your own pages. Good. Note which ones. Often it is not your homepage but a pricing page, a help article, or a blog post.
  • Pages about your category that do not mention you. These are review sites, lists, forum threads, and competitors’ comparison pages. They are where you are missing. The guide to why AI recommends a competitor explains how to work on them honestly.
  • Pages that mention you wrongly. An old price on a directory, an outdated review. Fix the source if you can. Asking Gemini to correct itself in your own chat does not change what a stranger sees.

When Gemini names you but shows no sources, you know it holds some idea of you, but you cannot tell where it came from. Run the question again in Google AI Mode or AI Overviews, which do show links, and compare.

Google Search and Gemini are connected

Since some Gemini answers are grounded on the Google Search index, a page Google cannot crawl or index is a page Gemini cannot ground on through Search. The checks are the ones you would run for Google anyway:

  • Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console on the pages that answer your buyers’ questions. Each should be indexed.
  • Make sure robots.txt and your firewall let Googlebot reach them.
  • Say what you sell and who it is for in plain text on the page, not only in an image or a script.

Google’s page on AI features and your website sets out the same basics for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and says no special markup or AI text file is required.

What Google-Extended does here

Google-Extended is a robots.txt token, not a separate crawler. Google’s crawler documentation says it lets publishers manage whether content Google crawls from their sites may be used to train future Gemini models, and for grounding, which it defines as providing content from the Google Search index to the model at prompt time. It also says Google-Extended “does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search.”

Read that carefully if you block Google-Extended. Your pages can still rank in Google Search. But you have asked Google not to use them for grounding Gemini, which is one of the ways Gemini gets current facts about your business. If you blocked it on purpose to keep your content out of training, that may be the right trade for you. If someone added it to your robots.txt from a template, check whether you meant to.

The crawler controls guide lists the tokens for each company side by side.

Measuring Gemini visits

When someone clicks a source link in Gemini, the visit can show up in GA4. Google’s default channel group help page lists Gemini among the sources in the AI Assistant channel. Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are different: they count as Google organic search. The GA4 guide covers both.

Visits only tell you about the people who clicked. A reader who takes the answer and never clicks leaves no trace in GA4. That is why the hand check matters: it shows the answer itself.

A thirty-minute version

  1. Open Gemini in a Google account with no history and no connected apps.
  2. Ask five buyer questions, each in a new chat.
  3. For each one, record named or not, who was named, the source URLs, and any errors. Screenshot it.
  4. Check the source pages that do not mention you. Pick the one or two you could reasonably appear on.
  5. Check robots.txt for a Google-Extended rule you did not mean to add.
  6. Repeat on the same day next month with the same questions.

Related guides: check if ChatGPT recommends your product, what Google says about AI Overviews, and Google’s October 2026 AI Mode link changes.

Sources