How to get your business recommended by Gemini
What the September 2026 AIGROW Index shows about how Gemini names businesses, what Google says about how it reads the web, and the steps that follow from both.
By the AIGROW Team · data under CC BY 4.0
- Answers
- 26,370
- Names per answer
- 5.1
- Repeated when asked again
- 58.5%
- Named by no other assistant
- 74.3%
Gemini recommends businesses from what it already knows and, with search on, from what it finds on the web. In the September 2026 AIGROW Index, asked with no web search, it named at least one local business in 100.0% of 26,370 answers, and no other assistant named 74.3% of the businesses it gave. Check each assistant separately.
What the Index shows about Gemini
2,400 pages of the September 2026 edition, each question asked three times, with no web search.
Asked for a local business, Gemini named at least one in 100.0% of its answers.
0 of 26,370 answers about local trades named no business. A failed call is not counted as an answer: 30 of 28,800 calls failed. About software, it named no one in 0.0% of 2,400 answers.
When it named someone, it gave 5.1 names per answer.
Local trades, counting only the answers that named someone. Among the four assistants, from 2.5 for ChatGPT to 5.4 for Claude. About software, Gemini gave 4.8.
Asked the same question again, it repeated 58.5% of its names.
Each question was asked three times. For each one, the names that came back in at least two runs, as a share of every name those runs gave. Among the four assistants, from 38.8% for Claude to 61.1% for Grok.
74.3% of the businesses Gemini named, no other assistant named on the same page.
19,817 of 26,668 different businesses, counted on the pages where another assistant also named someone. Being named by Gemini says little about whether the others name you.
How Gemini finds businesses
With no web search, Gemini can name only businesses it learned about in training, which is what the figures above measure. With search on, it reads the web. What Google says about that:
- Google Search
- For Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google says a page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, and needs nothing more: no special optimization and no special structured data.
- Google-Extended
- Decides whether Google may use a site to train Gemini models and to ground answers in the Gemini apps with content from Google Search. Google says it does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search.
Sources: Google, AI features and your website, Google, its common crawlers.
What to do, in this order
The first steps take an afternoon. Getting written about is the slow part, and the one that decides answers given without a search.
The four assistants side by side
The same kinds of questions, asked with no web search. Names per answer counts only the answers that named someone.
What this does not show
- No web search
- Every answer came from what the model already holds, asked with no web search, no location and no chat history. Gemini in its own app, with search on, can answer differently.
- One month
- These are the figures of the September 2026 edition. A new model can change any of them, and the next edition will show whether it did.
- The maker's words
- What Google says about how it reads the web is quoted from its own documentation, as read in September 2026. Check it again before you act on it.
Does Gemini name your business?
The free scan asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok your own customers' questions and shows who they name instead of you.
Edition September 2026 · data under CC BY 4.0