How to show up in Gemini: why it names some brands and not others
Gemini bases its answers on Google Search results and links to where it got things from. Here is what is known about how that works, what you can do, how we measure it, and the robots.txt detail that decides whether Google can use your content for this.
How does Gemini decide which brands to name?
Gemini grounds its answers in Google Search results and shows links to the pages the information came from. What decides whether it names you is whether you're among those pages, not a list of brands stored in the model.
Google calls this grounding the answer in search, and you can see it in the result: links to the sources appear, along with a note that the information is worth double-checking. The model writes from pages it has just retrieved.
For a brand, that means the playing field is much like it has always been: showing up in Google results for the questions your buyer asks. The difference is that being on the list is no longer enough: you have to be easy to summarize in two sentences.
How Google weighs each source inside a generated answer isn't public. We're not going to give you a formula that doesn't exist.
If half of these terms are new to you, they are all explained in the glossary.
What can you do to show up more in Gemini?
Work on your presence in Google results for real buying questions, put your data in structured form, and don't block Google-Extended if you want your content to be used.
Whole questions, not loose keywords
People don't type "air conditioning chicago" anymore, they type the whole question. A heading phrased as a question with the answer right below it fits what the engine needs to summarize.
Structured data, done properly
Schema.org in JSON-LD for whatever makes sense in your case: organization, product, service, FAQs. So the machine doesn't have to guess what each part of your page is.
Check Google-Extended first
It's the switch that decides whether Google can use your content for Gemini. Blocking it without knowing is leaving the door shut and then wondering why you don't show up.
Measure engine by engine
It's not unusual to show up in Perplexity and not in Gemini, or the other way around. That's why the report breaks down your share of voice in each of the four separately.
How do we measure it?
We send it your set of buying questions with live search on and read the answers. The specific model we query for Gemini is google/gemini-3.8-flash, with OpenRouter's web search plugin.
Model we query for Gemini
google/gemini-3.8-flash:online
Via OpenRouter, with the web search plugin turned on (the :online suffix). It isn't the consumer app, it's the model through the API.
With the same honesty as everywhere else: we don't query the Gemini app or the AI answers in Google Search. We query Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash model through OpenRouter, with the web search plugin turned on, which OpenRouter marks with the :online suffix.
So the search that feeds what we measure is not Google's own grounding in its search engine, it's the search OpenRouter adds. Same Google model, different pipeline of sources.
If that model fails, the fallback for Gemini is google/gemini-3.7-flash: always a Google model.
What we measure is stable and comparable: whether you get named, in what position, in what tone and next to which competitors. The month-to-month trend is what matters, not one day's number.
Does your site let Gemini in?
There's no crawler with its own name here: there's a switch. Google-Extended is the token you set in your robots.txt to decide whether your content can be used in Gemini.
- Google-ExtendedDecides whether Gemini and Google's AI answers can use your content. It isn't a separate crawler: it's the switch you set in your robots.txt.
Blocking Google-Extended doesn't remove you from regular Google results or change your position in search: Googlebot still handles that on its own. What it does is shut off the use of your content for Google's generative AI products. Some sites added it at some point thinking they were protecting themselves and now wonder why they don't show up. The checker tells you whether you have it blocked and by which rule.
Check my site for freeDo you show up, or does your competitor?
The free check runs 6 buying questions through Gemini and the other three engines, and shows you how many times you show up, in what position and who shows up in your place. No card required.
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