Definition
What this term means
Google's most advanced AI model family, designed to be natively multimodal, understanding and generating text, images, audio, and video. Gemini powers AI Overviews in Google Search, the Gemini chatbot, and AI features across Google Workspace, Android, and other Google products. Its integration into Google Search means it directly influences how billions of search queries are answered.
Why it matters
The business impact
Gemini's integration into Google Search makes it arguably the most impactful AI model for brand visibility. When Gemini generates an AI Overview for a search query, it determines which sources are cited and how information is presented to users who may never scroll past it. Optimising for Gemini, through structured data, comprehensive content, and strong authority signals, directly affects your visibility in the world's largest search engine.
Used in context
How you might use this term
“After Google rolled out AI Overviews to their category, a professional services firm noticed organic traffic declining despite stable rankings. By analysing which sources Gemini was citing in AI Overviews, they identified content gaps and created targeted content that earned citations, recovering and exceeding their previous traffic levels.”
Related terms
Explore connected concepts
AI Overview
An AI-generated summary that appears at the top of Google search results, synthesising information from multiple web sources to provide a comprehensive answer to the user's query. AI Overviews are powered by Google's Gemini model and are displayed for an increasing percentage of search queries. They include source citations that users can click to visit the original content.
Multimodal AI
AI systems capable of processing, understanding, and generating multiple types of content, including text, images, audio, and video, within a single model. Multimodal AI can interpret a product photograph, read text overlaid on an image, understand a spoken query, and generate a response that combines text with visual elements. Models like GPT-4o and Gemini are natively multimodal.
LLM
A type of artificial intelligence model trained on vast datasets of text to understand, generate, and reason about human language. LLMs power the AI assistants and generative search tools, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, that are rapidly becoming the primary way people discover products, services, and information online.