Gemini
Gemini is Google's family of multimodal AI models and its consumer assistant, able to reason over text, images, and more, and to ground answers in retrieved sources.
Gemini is Google's multimodal model line and AI assistant. It powers Google's generative features and a standalone assistant, handling not just text but images, audio, and other formats, and can ground its answers in retrieved web content when connected to search.
For AEO, the practical levers are the same as any retrieval-grounded engine: be crawlable, and be the extractable passage that best answers the question. Note the naming distinction — Google-Extended governs whether your content trains Gemini, but it does not control your visibility in Google's search-grounded answers, which run through normal crawling. Gemini's multimodal nature also rewards clear text alternatives for visual content.
Example. A user uploads a photo of a plant to Gemini and asks how to care for it; Gemini identifies the species and can pull care instructions from the web. A well-structured care guide with clear, liftable steps is what gets surfaced.
Relevant pillar
Related terms
- Answer EngineAn answer engine is a search system that responds to a question with a direct, synthesized answer instead of a list of links, usually citing the sources it drew from.
- Google-ExtendedGoogle-Extended is a robots.txt control that lets you opt out of having your content used to train Google's Gemini and Vertex AI models, without affecting Google Search or AI Overviews.
- MultimodalMultimodal AI can understand and generate more than one type of content — text, images, audio, and video — letting engines answer questions that span formats.