“It’s just Google.
I already do SEO.”
Not anymore.

Gemini SEO is the practice of optimizing your website, brand, and external citations so that Google's Gemini models surface and cite your business when someone asks a category-relevant question — whether they ask inside the Gemini app or inside Google Search's AI Overviews. The defining fact is that Gemini grounds its answers on Google's Search index, so Gemini SEO is not a parallel discipline you bolt on; it is the compounding layer that sits directly on top of the Google visibility you already work for.

The retrieval source. When ChatGPT browses, it queries Bing's index — which is why Bing SEO is the overlooked lever for ChatGPT. Gemini grounds on Google's Search index and Google's Knowledge Graph instead. That means for Gemini, your existing Google ranking is the retrieval gate: if you don't rank in Google for the buyer's question, Gemini's grounded mode can't retrieve you. The content structure and entity work overlap heavily across both engines, but the underlying index you have to win is different.

Yes. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode are powered by Gemini models. That is what makes Gemini the highest-leverage engine to optimize for: a win shows up in two places at once. Earning a citation in a grounded Gemini answer builds the same signals that place your brand in the AI Overview above the organic results, and a page structured to win an AI Overview is a page Gemini can cite in its own app. You run one campaign that compounds across both surfaces.

Three layers. First, Google-index grounding: Gemini retrieves live pages from Google Search, so ranking for the buyer's actual question is the entry gate. Second, Knowledge Graph entity trust: when multiple businesses share a name or topic, Gemini leans on the entity with the strongest structured identity — schema, sameAs links, and consistent citations across the open web. Third, passage-level citation fit: Gemini extracts the specific sentence that answers the sub-question, so clean direct-answer paragraphs, question-formatted headings, and FAQ markup decide whether it lifts your sentence or a competitor's.

More than ever, but it isn't sufficient on its own. Because Gemini grounds on Google's index, traditional SEO — indexation, technical health, topical depth, passage-level ranking — is the retrieval gate that gets your page into the set Gemini can consider. What it doesn't do is decide whether Gemini names you in the synthesized answer. That decision runs on entity authority, citation-ready structure, and third-party mentions. Gemini SEO is the additional layer that turns a ranked page into a cited source.

We use MentionLayer, the AI-visibility platform Joel's team built, to track your citation share across Gemini, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity for 30-50 priority keywords. For each keyword we record whether your brand was mentioned, whether it was cited with a link, the citation context, the sentiment, and which page was the source — then benchmark it against your top three competitors. The composite is your share of voice across AI answers in your category, tracked weekly so we iterate from data instead of guessing.

Because we built the instrumentation before we sold the service. We operate MentionLayer, a SaaS that monitors brand citations across Gemini, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, and PressForge, the digital-PR engine behind 300+ campaigns that earns the third-party citations Gemini's trust is trained on. Founder Joel House wrote AI for Revenue and The Growth Architecture — both on Barnes & Noble — and sits on the Forbes Agency Council, an author entity Google's Knowledge Graph indexes. Agencies selling Gemini SEO without their own measurement are guessing.

The fastest wins come from grounding-eligibility fixes: indexation, passage clarity, and entity schema often lift both Gemini and AI Overviews visibility inside 30-60 days because they change what Google can retrieve and trust right away. The compounding wins — the third-party citations that train Gemini to associate your brand with a topic — build over 90-180 days, accelerated by tier-1 publication placements. Category-defining brand association across all engines is a 12-month arc. We run the quick structural wins and the long-cycle authority campaigns in parallel.