Gemini
Gemini is Google's AI assistant app and the family of AI models behind it. It's separate from AI Overviews and AI Mode in Google Search.
Gemini is Google's AI assistant, the app people chat with on the web and on their phones. The name also covers the family of AI models Google makes, which power Gemini and other Google products.
For a brand, Gemini is one of the main places people now ask what to buy. And since it's Google's, it's easy to assume it answers the same way Google Search does. It doesn't always.
Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode
Google has three places where AI answers questions, and they're worth keeping apart.
Gemini is the assistant app. You chat with it, and it decides for itself whether to search the web before answering.
AI Overviews are the AI summaries at the top of some Google search results. They only appear for some searches.
AI Mode is a separate conversation inside Google Search.
For example, someone asking "best decaf coffee beans" could get Kestrel Roasters in an AI Overview, Fernhill Coffee in AI Mode, and both in Gemini, on the same day. The three read different pages and write their answers differently.
Controlling what Gemini uses
Google offers a robots.txt token, Google-Extended, that lets you choose whether content Google crawls from your site can be used to train Gemini models and to ground their answers. Google says it doesn't affect your site's place in Google Search.
Gemini in AnswerOrbit
Gemini is one of the six platforms we ask every day, separately from AI Overviews and AI Mode. Gemini decides whether to search the web, as it would for anyone. When it does, we keep the pages it read. We can't show the searches it ran yet. How we count has the details.