Platform
Gemini visibility
Google’s assistant is only half of the Google question. The other half — AI Overviews inside search results — is a separate surface that has to be measured a separate way.
AI Says is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity or other AI/search providers. Platform names are used descriptively to identify the services being assessed.
The distinction that matters
Two Google surfaces, measured differently
A business can be recommended by the assistant and absent from the search summary, or the reverse. They are not interchangeable and they should never be reported as one number.
| Gemini | Google AI Overviews | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it appears | An assistant you open and converse with | Above conventional results on a search page |
| How the user arrives | Types a question in conversation | Types a query into search as usual |
| Typical question shape | Long, qualified, follow-up driven | Short, keyword-like, single-shot |
| Citation behaviour | Links some claims, varies by answer | Links a small set of supporting pages |
| How AI Says observes it | Via a configured Google AI integration | Requires a licensed SERP data source |
| Reported when unavailable | "Integration required" | "Data source required" — never estimated |
Why we will not estimate AI Overviews
AI answers shown above traditional search results. Requires a licensed SERP data source. Producing a number for a surface we have not observed would be indistinguishable from making one up. Where the data source is absent, the report says so plainly and the surface is excluded from the score rather than filled in.
Why Google-adjacent answers reward entity hygiene
Google has spent well over a decade building a structured understanding of businesses as entities rather than as web pages — names, categories, locations, service areas, relationships, the lot. Generative answers in the Google ecosystem inherit that work. The practical effect for a business is that entity hygiene is disproportionately valuable here compared with a purely conversational assistant.
Entity hygiene means one thing above all: the same facts, stated the same way, everywhere they appear. Your legal name on your site, your Business Profile, your industry registrations and your directory listings should agree. Your trading address should be formatted consistently. Your primary category should not drift between “electrical contractor” on one source and “electrician and handyman” on another. Where sources disagree, a system resolves the conflict by lowering its confidence — and a business it is not confident about is a business it does not name.
This is also why businesses with a strong conventional search presence sometimes still get described poorly. Ranking proves your page is relevant to a query. It does not prove your identity is resolvable, and it does not prove that anything on the page is extractable as a standalone answer. Those are separate properties, and generative answers depend on all three.
What to fix first in this ecosystem
Reconcile your Business Profile with your own site, declare Organization and LocalBusiness schema that matches both, make your service areas explicit in words rather than implied by a map embed, and make sure each service you want to be named for has a page that answers a real question about it.
Integration required
Observed Gemini data needs a connected key
Observed data for this platform requires a Google AI API key (GOOGLE_AI_API_KEY) to be configured for the account with the provider enabled. Without it, the platform panel reads Integration required and the dependent components are labelled Estimated rather than shown as observations.
AI Overviews additionally require a licensed SERP data source, which is a separate arrangement from an assistant integration.
Measured per platform
- Visibility — share of observed answers that name your business.
- Recommendation — share where you are actively put forward, not merely listed.
- Citation — share where a URL on your own domain is cited as support.
- Accuracy — how correct and complete the description was, claim by claim.
Each rate is shown with its observation count. How this feeds the score.
Failure patterns
Four mismatches that quietly cost you answers
All four are common, all four are invisible unless you look for them, and all four are inexpensive to correct.
Your category says one thing, your site says another
A profile category of "builder" against a site that positions you as a commercial fit-out specialist gives a system two incompatible identities. It will usually choose the simpler, less valuable one.
Your service area is drawn, not written
A map with a radius on it communicates nothing to a text-based system. If you cover six regions, the six names need to appear as words on the page and in structured data.
Your best answers live in a PDF or a gallery
Case studies as image carousels and capability statements as downloads are effectively invisible. If the substance is not in retrievable HTML text, it cannot be quoted.
Your strongest pages rank but do not answer
A page that ranks for a keyword while burying the answer under three paragraphs of positioning will be retrieved and then passed over in favour of a source that states the answer in its first line.
Questions
Questions about Gemini and AI Overviews
No, and conflating them is the most common mistake in this area. Gemini is an assistant you open and converse with. AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear above conventional results inside Google search. They are different products, reached in different ways, and a business can be present in one and absent from the other.
Because there is no public API for them. AI Overviews exist inside the search results page, and the only compliant way to observe them at scale is through a licensed SERP data source. Until such a source is connected to an account, that surface is reported as requiring a data source rather than estimated with an invented figure.
It affects how confidently your business can be resolved as an entity, which is a precondition for being named. A complete, consistent profile — correct category, service area, hours, address, website — is one of the strongest corroborating sources that exists for a local business, and inconsistency between it and your own site is a common reason a description comes out wrong.
It helps and it does not guarantee. Conventional discoverability feeds the retrieval step, so a page that cannot be found is unlikely to be drawn on. But selection from retrieved results favours sources that state a clean, extractable answer, which is a different property from ranking. Strong rankings with weak answerability is a common and fixable pattern.
Visibility, recommendation, citation and accuracy become observed rates over recorded answers rather than estimates derived from website and entity signals. Each answer is timestamped and retained so claims about your business can be checked individually. Without a configured Google AI key the panel reads "Integration required".
AI Says is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity or other AI/search providers. Platform names are used descriptively to identify the services being assessed.
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