What Gemini tells buyers about you
The engine most people use without deciding to. It is already in the search bar, the phone and the inbox they were using anyway.
We read: Grounded · checked 2026-08
How people actually use Gemini
- Often by accident of where it is. It sits in Google’s own app, on Android phones and inside the tools people already had open, so a great deal of its use is somebody who set out to use Google and got this instead.
- Short, practical, local questions, asked from a phone, with a real location attached to them. “Who does emergency roof repairs near me” behaves very differently here from the way it behaves in a chat window on a laptop.
- It leans on what Google already knows about you. Your Business Profile (the hours, the categories, the reviews, the photos) is doing work in this engine that it does not do in the other four, which is why a business with a thin listing can lose here while its website is perfectly healthy.
Where its answers come from
Gemini · Grounded
We ask with Google Search grounding switched on, and every result says so. Grounded means the answer is tied to live search results rather than to what the model happened to remember in training, a different arrangement from the two engines above, which is exactly why it is labelled differently rather than lumped in with them. It is still an API and still not the app in somebody’s pocket, and we say that here too.
This is stated on every result you get, not only here. See how the score is calculated.
What we measure, and what counts as good
Every answer Gemini gives is graded on the same four-step scale as every other engine, so your columns are comparable. The scale is ordinal and every step carries a word and a mark as well as a shade — nothing here is colour alone.
- AbsentYou are not in the answer at all
- NamedMentioned, one of several
- RecommendedAI tells them to choose you
- CitedYour site is the source it quotes
- Predates your last change
What to expect on Gemini
Grounding means this engine’s answers follow your Google presence closely, so a result here is often as much a verdict on your Business Profile as on your website. If this engine is your weakest column and the other four are fine, look at the listing before you touch a line of the site.
What moves this engine
In the order worth doing them. These are checks from the scan itself, not general advice. Each one is graded on your site and each one comes with the change written out.
- 1Let AI systems read your websiteIf ChatGPT and Perplexity cannot fetch your pages when someone asks about you, nothing else on this list matters.about 2 minutes
- 2Help AI understand your servicesStructured data is the most reliable way to state facts about your business that a model will not misread.about 30 minutes
- 3Make your contact details easy to findContact details that disagree across the web are a trust signal pointing the wrong way.about 10 minutes
- 4Get listed where AI looks for businesses like yoursEngines lean on directories they trust. Being absent from the sources they actually quote makes you invisible even when your own site is healthy.about 30 minutes
15 checks run on your website in total, and the scan reports every one of them. These are the ones that matter most for this engine.
What we will not tell you
- What share of your customers use Gemini. Nobody can measure that for your business, ourselves included, and a percentage invented to sound authoritative is worse than no number at all. Your scorecard shows each engine separately so you can weigh them against what you know about your own buyers.
- That we can guarantee an answer changes. We can tell you what it says today, what the engines cite instead of you, and which specific things about your site are stopping them. Then we re-scan and show you the before and the after. Anyone promising a position is selling you something they do not control.
- That a single scan settles it. These answers move. One reading is a snapshot, which is why the licence includes a re-scan and why monitoring exists as something you can add rather than something we pretend one scan already is.
Common questions
What does “grounded” mean, in plain words?
That the engine went and looked something up before answering, instead of answering from memory. It matters to you because it means what is on your website and your listing today can change the answer, rather than the answer being fixed until the next time the model is retrained.
Is this the same as the AI Overview I see in Google search?
No, they are two different things, and we scan both, separately. This one is the assistant you ask on purpose. The other appears above your search results whether you asked for it or not, and it is the one your customers are far more likely to have seen.
My Google Business Profile is a mess. Does that matter here?
More than anywhere else on this list. Google knows your hours, your categories, your reviews and your photos, and this engine can reach all of it. That is why the scan checks the listing as well as the site, on its own set of checks, and reports the two apart, so you can see which of the two is costing you the answer.
The other engines
The quickest way to find out is to look at your own result.
Scan my site freeGemini is a trade mark of its owner. MentionMachine is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to it, and the mark drawn beside its name on this page is our own. What is described here about how Gemini behaves was last checked 2026-08; if something on this page is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.