Engine deep-dive

How Gemini recommends companies (vs ChatGPT)

Gemini is Google's AI assistant, and it does not behave like ChatGPT in ways that matter for B2B service companies. The biggest difference: Gemini has deep integration with Google's ecosystem. Your Business Profile, Google reviews, YouTube content, and search index presence all feed into Gemini's recommendations.

Gemini vs ChatGPT: signal comparison

The Google ecosystem advantage

If your company has a complete Google Business Profile, 50+ Google reviews, a YouTube channel with service-related content, and good traditional SEO, you already have a head start in Gemini that no amount of ChatGPT optimization can replicate.

Flip it around. If you have put money into Clutch reviews and ChatGPT-specific content while leaving your Google presence thin, Gemini is a blind spot. And Gemini's user base is growing fast because it is integrated into Google search, Android, and Google Workspace.

The optimal strategy covers both: structured data and specific content (works everywhere), plus Google ecosystem presence (Gemini advantage) and Clutch/G2 reviews (ChatGPT advantage).

Actions that move Gemini

What our own scans measured

Gemini named the brand in 0.4% of the buying questions we put to it across 46 completed scans, 2 naming answers out of 483, on a set of firms that each ran a scan after suspecting they were missing, so it is not a rate for B2B websites in general. Read that as a floor rather than a clean measurement. Two of our own faults sit underneath it: Gemini on Vertex spends most of its token budget on reasoning and truncated mid-answer at our production limit, and our brand detector could force a mention to absent but never rescue one until we made it symmetric in August 2026. Both under-count Gemini specifically, so the true rate is somewhat higher and we cannot yet say by how much.

Google's other surface, AI Mode, sat at 4.0% on the same suspect-selected reports, and Perplexity led the field at 7.4%. So the two Google surfaces do not behave alike at all: AI Mode named a brand roughly ten times as often as Gemini did on the same questions. Treat them as two separate places to be found, not one Google.

Grounding tells the same story from the other end. Of the 137 firms Gemini named in our 15-region managed IT study, 24 could be corroborated against a real website and an independent listing, which puts it second of the four engines we tested and a long way behind Perplexity.

Read the MSP AI Visibility Report 2026, which shows the method and the names we could not verify.

How we count, because the denominator does the work

These rates cover buying questions only, the ones a buyer types when they are choosing a vendor and do not yet know who you are. We leave out questions that contain the company's own name, deliberately. Across the same 46 reports every engine answers a name-in-the-question probe with that company 82% to 100% of the time, so folding those in lifts the headline to about 10% for the field and 19% for the leader. We published that flattering version on this page until 2026-08-12 and have corrected it. The buyer who already knows your name is not the buyer you are missing, and a number that counts them is measuring your own marketing back at you.

What you get, and what it costs

Gemini is one of the 6 engines every plan queries, including the free one. Engines are not plan-gated here. What a plan changes is how many questions you get per scan, how often the scan runs, and whether we draft the pages that close the gaps it finds.

Rule is portfolio level and sales-assisted. Full pricing · How the scan works