How to Rank in Gemini and Google AI Mode
You cannot rank in either one. Neither has a ranking list. Google AI Mode is a search surface that reads from Google's index, and the Gemini app is an assistant that decides for itself whether to search before it answers. To get picked by both, keep your pages crawlable, leave Google-Extended unblocked, and answer narrow questions in plain sentences.
How to get picked by Gemini and Google AI Mode: why neither has a ranking, the Google-Extended line that can cut you from Gemini, and what the citation data shows.
On this page
What is Google AI Mode, and how is it different?
People say "Gemini", "AI Mode" and "AI Overviews" as if they were one product. They are not, and the difference decides what you do next.
An AI Overview is the AI paragraph at the top of a normal Google results page. You did not ask for it. It sits above the blue links. We covered that surface on its own in how to appear in Google AI Overviews.
Google AI Mode is a place you go on purpose. You open it at google.com/ai, or from Search, or in the Google app, and get a written answer with links you can ask follow-up questions about. Google calls it its most powerful AI search experience. Its help page says AI Mode may show a set of web links instead, when confidence in an answer is not high enough.
The Gemini app is not part of Search at all. It is an assistant. It can search the web, but does not have to. In Google's developer documentation for grounding, updated on 17 September 2026, the wording is that the model analyzes the prompt and determines if a Google Search can improve the answer. Sometimes the answer you read had no live search behind it.
So AI Overviews and AI Mode are Search. Gemini is an assistant that sometimes uses Search. Same company, same model family, two different doors.
Neither one gives you a rank
Google's page on AI features in Search covers AI Overviews and AI Mode together. It says there are no additional requirements to appear in either one, and no special optimizations necessary. That page was last updated in December 2025.
Read it literally. There is no AI Mode ranking to climb. There is an index, a set of searches the system runs for the user, and a model that writes an answer from what came back. You are not fighting for position three. You are trying to come back at all, for questions you never targeted.
The Gemini app publishes less still. Google has no public document on how the assistant picks which pages to cite. Treat anything sold as Gemini SEO or AI Mode SEO with that in mind. There is no published list of ranking factors to buy.
The robots.txt line that can quietly remove you from Gemini
This is the part most sites get wrong, and it takes two minutes to check.
When publishers started blocking AI training crawlers, many added this to robots.txt:
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /
Google's crawler documentation, updated 14 July 2026, says Google-Extended controls whether your content may be used for training future Gemini models "that power Gemini Apps and Vertex AI API for Gemini and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI".
Read the last part again. Grounding is what happens when Gemini looks something up to answer you. So that one line is not only a training opt-out. It sits between your site and the Gemini app.
The same page says Google-Extended does not affect a site's inclusion in Google Search and is not used as a ranking signal there. AI Mode and AI Overviews live in Search. So blocking Google-Extended can cost you the Gemini app while leaving AI Mode untouched.
That is why these are two questions, not one. Go open your robots.txt. If that line is there, decide whether you still want it, rather than living with a choice made in 2023.
What the citation numbers actually show
Two studies matter.
SE Ranking, which sells an AI Mode tracking tool, so read this as vendor research, looked at 1,321,398 AI Mode citations across 68,313 keywords collected on 12 February 2026. Google.com was the most cited source in the whole set, at 17.42 percent of citations, up from 5.7 percent in June 2025. Of those Google links, 59 percent pointed back into Google search results and 36.1 percent pointed at Google Business Profiles. Google was the top source in 19 of the 20 niches.
So part of AI Mode's link space is not available to you, and some of the rest goes to your Business Profile, not your site.
The second comes from Orbit Media, an agency that does not sell AI visibility software. Bill Widmer tracked 72 prompts for three B2B brands across four AI tools through 23 August 2026 and published on 2 September 2026: 13,184 citations across 1,765 answers. Gemini averaged 8.1 sources per answer. Only 10 to 30 percent of the domains it cited were ranking in Google's top 10 for the matching query, and at the exact page level that fell to roughly 1 to 5 percent.
Small sample, all B2B, so these are not laws. The direction is the useful part: page one is not the waiting room for Gemini.
Ask Gemini twice and you may get different sources
One live argument is worth knowing before you buy any tracking report.
Steady Demand, a local SEO agency that also sells AI optimization services, ran around 1,500 local business queries across 50 US metros between July and September 2026. They call the result grounding drift. In their updated 9 September 2026 figures, asking Gemini the identical question twice on the same day produced only about 43 percent overlap in cited domains. Reword the question and it was 41.2 percent. Google's local pack, by comparison, returned the same top business about 83 percent of the time.
Digital Applied pushed back on 20 August 2026, on the earlier version of that study. The objection was about method, not about Gemini. They argued the headline came from comparing three different wordings rather than repeating one, and that the main dataset held no identical repeats at all.
The current version does include same-day identical repeats. Nobody has published a reconciliation, so treat the exact figure as unsettled. Orbit Media's separate test points the same way: Gemini kept only 38 percent of its cited domains when the same prompts ran two days apart.
The safe lesson survives either way. One check of your brand in Gemini tells you almost nothing.
What to actually do
Let Google crawl and quote you. AI Mode and AI Overviews follow normal Search rules, so nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex all limit what can be shown.
Check Google-Extended. One line, covered above.
Write for the small question. AI Mode splits a question into several smaller searches, which Google calls query fan-out, then answers from what those return. A page that answers one narrow question in its first two sentences gives it more to grab than a 3,000 word guide that buries the point.
Fix your Business Profile if you are local. Business Profiles were 36.1 percent of the Google-owned links in SE Ranking's data. Steady Demand found Gemini sent 49.6 percent of its local citations to business websites against 17.7 percent to directories, while ChatGPT did close to the reverse. On Gemini your own site carries the weight. Agency research, so hold it loosely.
Measure the two separately. A Gemini check and an AI Mode check are different tests, run on different days and repeated. If you would rather have that done properly, that is what our AI SEO services and site audit are for.
Where to start this week
Open robots.txt and look for Google-Extended. Then ask Gemini and AI Mode the five questions your customers actually ask, three times each on different days, and write down which domains come back. That is your baseline. The rest is guesswork until you have one.
Sources
- Google Search Central, AI Features and Your Website, last updated 10 December 2025. developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
- Google Search Central, Google crawlers and fetchers, Google-Extended entry, last updated 14 July 2026. developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
- Google Search Help, Get AI-powered responses with AI Mode in Google Search. support.google.com/websearch/answer/16011537
- Google AI for Developers, Grounding with Google Search, last updated 17 September 2026. ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/google-search
- SE Ranking, Is AI Mode Now Dominated by Google's Self-Referencing Links, published 6 March 2026, updated 17 August 2026, data collected 12 February 2026. Vendor research: SE Ranking sells AI Mode tracking software.
- Orbit Media Studios, Bill Widmer, LLM citation study, 2 September 2026. 13,184 citations across 1,765 answers, 72 prompts, three B2B brands, four tools, data through 23 August 2026.
- Steady Demand, Grounding Drift, published 6 August 2026, updated 9 September 2026. Agency research: Steady Demand sells AI optimization and local SEO services.
- Digital Applied, A 40% Citation Overlap Study: What It Does and Doesn't Show, 20 August 2026.
Frequently asked
Is Gemini SEO different from normal SEO?
Mostly no. The page still has to be crawlable, readable and clear. The two real differences are the Google-Extended control, which does nothing in ordinary Search, and answering many small questions instead of chasing one keyword.
Does ranking on page one get me into AI Mode?
It helps, but it does not decide it. In Orbit Media's August 2026 test, only 10 to 30 percent of the domains Gemini cited sat in Google's top 10 for that query. Treat rankings as useful, not sufficient.
Should I block Google-Extended?
Your call, and a real trade. Blocking it keeps your content out of Gemini model training and out of grounding in the Gemini app. Google says it does not affect Google Search, so AI Mode and AI Overviews are unchanged either way.
How often should I check my visibility?
More than once. In Steady Demand's 2026 testing, Gemini repeated only about 43 percent of the same domains on identical same-day questions, so one check is noise. Run the same prompts on a schedule and watch the trend.
Is AI Mode replacing normal Google results?
Not as of September 2026. It is a surface you choose to open, and Google's help page says it may show plain web links when confidence in an answer is not high enough.
Written by
Lourdes Paul Agilan runs GeoCited, a generative engine optimization agency. He works with B2B companies on how AI assistants describe and recommend them. He writes about that work here, and shares the experiments behind it. The tests that worked, and the tests that did not, written up the same way.