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Gemini SEO & AEO rules

Gemini grounds its answers in Google Search, and Google-Extended controls whether your content trains Gemini. These are the rules that apply to Gemini.

Reviewed Oct 30, 2026 · next review Nov 2, 2026

Rules in force 13 of 42 apply to Gemini
High impact 5 fix these first
Official 69% 9 from engine docs
Retired 2 for Gemini

Impact split

  • High impact 5
  • Medium impact 7
  • Low impact 1

Gemini rules by area

Share of each area that applies to Gemini

Crawling & indexing 2

02 High impact

Treat training bots and search bots as separate robots.txt decisions

GPTBot, ClaudeBot and the Google-Extended token control model training, while OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and Googlebot control search visibility.

05 Medium impact

Don't use Google-Extended to control Search; it only governs Gemini training and grounding

Google states that Google-Extended does not affect inclusion in Google Search and is not a ranking signal.

Content & E-E-A-T 2

12 High impact

Publish original, first-hand content that adds something the rest of the web hasn't said

Google's helpful content guidance and its 2026 generative AI guide both say the same thing: content created for people with first-hand experience wins, and recycled summaries do not.

16 Medium impact

Refresh key pages with real updates on a schedule; never just bump the date

An Ahrefs analysis of about 17 million AI citations found cited URLs were roughly 26% fresher than organic results, with ChatGPT and Perplexity showing the strongest preference and AI Overviews the weakest.

On-page 1

20 Medium impact

Use <img> elements with descriptive alt text and filenames; Google doesn't index CSS images

Google calls alt text the most important image attribute and discovers images through the src of <img> elements, including inside <picture>.

Structured data 2

25 Medium impact

Define your brand entity with Organization markup: logo, url, sameAs profiles, contact

Organization is a supported Google feature used for logos and knowledge panel details.

26 Low impact

Don't expect schema to unlock AI answers; Google says no special markup is needed

Google's AI features doc and 2026 AI optimization guide both state that structured data is not required for generative AI search and there is no special schema.org markup to add.

AI answers & citations 5

30 High impact

Get indexed and snippet-eligible first; Google's AI answers draw only from that pool

Google states that to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet, with no additional technical requirements.

33 High impact

Publish original data and first-hand findings that others will cite

Google's 2026 AI guide tells site owners to offer a unique point of view and not recycle what others have said, and it describes AI answers as grounded in retrieved pages.

34 High impact

Earn genuine brand mentions on third-party sites, reviews and video

An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found branded web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, far above backlinks at 0.218.

36 Medium impact

Back claims with statistics, expert quotes and cited sources

The Princeton GEO paper (KDD 2024) found that adding statistics, quotations and source citations raised visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40% on its benchmark, while keyword stuffing did not help.

38 Medium impact

Measure AI visibility with first-party reports plus prompt tracking across engines

Google's Search generative AI performance reports (June 2026, global since August 31, 2026) show impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Bing's AI Performance report (February 2026) shows Copilot citations and grounding queries.

No longer works 2

Don't chop content into tiny chunks or rewrite it 'for AI'

Do insteadKeep complete pages with clear headings and paragraphs

Don't expect llms.txt to raise rankings or AI citations

Do insteadKeep an llms.txt only if you have docs that coding agents read