Gemini SEO: make your brand easy for Google's assistant to ground on

Google's common crawlers documentation (the page shows a last updated date of 14 July 2026, and we read it on 15 October 2026) describes Google-Extended as a robots.txt product token. It has no user agent of its own. Google crawls with its existing user agents, and the token only governs how the crawled content may be used.

As of October 2026, Google says the token manages whether content may be used for training future generations of Gemini models, and that it also applies to Gemini Apps and the Vertex AI API for Gemini. Google describes grounding as providing content from the Google Search index to the model at prompt time, and says the token covers that use in Gemini Apps and in Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI.

Google also states that Google-Extended does not affect a site's inclusion in Google Search and is not used as a ranking signal in Search. The page does not mention AI Overviews, so we do not claim the token does or does not change them. For those, read our page on AI Overviews and AI Mode optimization.

• Googlebot can crawl and index your key pages
• You have made a deliberate choice about Google-Extended
• Your pages are not blocked from snippets by accident
• Your brand facts match across site, profiles and listings

Assistants answer questions about companies, products and places. When your name is ambiguous, or when the web describes you in conflicting ways, the answer drifts. A company with the same name as another brand, or with an old address on three directories, is easy to get wrong.

So we work on identity. We check that your legal or trading name, services, locations, founder or team, and proof points read the same on your site, your Google Business Profile where relevant, and key third party listings. We also ensure Organization and related structured data match what visitors see. This is the core of entity consistency for GEO.

None of this is a magic switch. It reduces the chance that Gemini has to guess. It also helps every other engine, which is why we do it in the same sprint.

A simple test of identity: ask a colleague who has never heard of you to read your home page and about page for one minute, then say what you sell, where you work and who you serve. If they cannot, Gemini will struggle too. Fix the page, not the prompt.

Grounding means the model is given content from the search index while it answers, so the content has to be clear on its own. A paragraph that says "our award winning team delivers solutions" gives it nothing. A paragraph that says what you sell, for whom, in which city, at what level of detail, gives it facts.

State the fact once, near the top, in plain words. Put supporting detail below it. If a fact can change, show when it was last checked. Use consistent names: pick one form of your company name and one form of each service name, then use them everywhere. Our guide to getting cited by Gemini and the guide to writing content AI engines cite give more examples.

Add structured data that matches the visible page. Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Service and FAQPage markup can describe the same facts in a machine readable way. Google has said special markup is not required for its AI features, so we treat markup as a clarity aid, not a switch.

Google uses the Gemini name for several things. There is the Gemini app, there are Google Search features such as AI Mode, and there is the Gemini API for developers. The Google-Extended documentation names Gemini Apps and the Vertex AI API for Gemini among the products it covers. Your buyers use one or two of these, not all.

So we ask first which surface your buyers use. A consumer service business may care mostly about the Gemini app and AI Mode. A B2B vendor may care about what employees see in work tools. We test the surfaces that matter and keep notes by surface, because a good result on one says little about another. Our AI Overviews and AI Mode page covers the Search side in detail.

Example, hypothetical: a Dubai property agency shares a name with a larger firm abroad. Asked about the agency, Gemini mixes the two, giving the wrong office and wrong services. The audit finds that the site never says where the agency is registered or which areas it covers, and a major directory lists a different phone number.

The fix list: add a clear about page with the trading name, registered location and areas served; add Organization and local business data that matches; correct the directory entry; publish area pages that state which communities and property types the agency handles; and retest with prompts that include the city and the disambiguating detail.

We would report whether the mix up persists, in which runs and on which surface. If it does, the next step is more third party corroboration, which we scope as ongoing work and quote separately. See GEO for real estate and GEO agency in Dubai.

We use the same fixed prompt list at the start and at the end of the Pilot, and run each prompt more than once. For every run we record the date, the surface, whether you were named, whether your domain was linked and whether the description was right. A pattern across runs is the finding. A single run is not.

We also separate three outcomes that are often lumped together. Being named means the brand appears in the text. Being cited means a link to your page is shown. Being described correctly means the facts are right. A brand can be named without a link, or linked while described wrongly. Our post on brand mentions versus citations explains why each one matters.

On the Google side, Search Console remains the source for impressions and clicks in Search, including Google's AI features in the Web search type. It does not report Gemini app activity, so we do not pretend to measure that from Search Console. See how to measure GEO performance for the wider method.

Gemini is one of five engines in the Pilot baseline. Google Search health, entity clean up and answer ready pages help it, and also help the other four. The free AI visibility checker gives a first read before you commit.

The GEO Pilot is a fixed $999 (USD), one time price, delivered inside 30 days, done for you. It covers one domain and one language and excludes a site build, ongoing digital PR, link building and paid media. We make no promise of a placement. The full scope is on the GEO Pilot page.