Your buyers are asking Gemini which tools to use, which vendors to trust, and how your product compares to the alternatives. Gemini answers by naming brands.
Whether it names yours, and what it says when it does, shapes your buyer's perception before they ever visit your site. Gemini visibility tracking tells you where you stand.
But Gemini works differently from ChatGPT or Google. Gemini mentions brands far more often than it links to them, so tracking citations alone misses the full picture.
In this guide, you'll learn what to measure, how to check your Gemini visibility manually, and how to scale the same workflow with Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit. We’ll also show you what to do with the data to actually improve your visibility.
We’ll use Asana, the project management software, as a running example throughout the guide, with real Gemini answers and Semrush data.
What is Gemini visibility tracking?
Gemini visibility tracking (also called Gemini brand monitoring) is the process of measuring how often, how prominently, and how accurately Google's Gemini app mentions and cites your brand in its answers.
Gemini is a separate AI search surface from Google Search, AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. All four are Google products, but each one generates different answers and cites different sources. Ranking well in one doesn't guarantee visibility in another, so track each separately.
These are the core metrics for Gemini visibility tracking:
- Brand mentions: How often Gemini names your brand in its answers
- Citations: How often Gemini links to your website as a source
- AI visibility: An overall score for how visible your brand is across the prompts that matter in your market
- Sentiment: Whether Gemini describes your brand positively, neutrally, or negatively
- Average position: Where your brand appears in Gemini's answers relative to other brands it names
Semrush gives you the ability to track all of these Gemini metrics in one place using the AI Visibility Toolkit.
Why mentions matter more than citations in Gemini
Mentions are the most important Gemini metric because Gemini names brands far more often than it links to them.
Semrush's Ghost Citations study found that Gemini mentions brands in 83.7% of their appearances but cites them in only 21.4%. ChatGPT works the other way around: it cites brands in 87% of appearances and mentions them in just 20.7%.
Asana's data in the AI Visibility Toolkit follows the same pattern:
Platform
Mentions
Citations
Gemini
6.3K
553
ChatGPT
2.6K
Gemini mentions Asana more often than ChatGPT does, but cites asana.com less than a quarter as often. If Asana tracked Gemini by citations and referral traffic the way many teams track ChatGPT, it would see roughly one-tenth of its actual Gemini visibility.
Our own tests showed the same gap. We ran 20 buyer prompts through Gemini, and Asana was mentioned in 14 answers but cited in only one. In one answer, Gemini listed Asana first for tracking cross-functional projects and called it the "top choice," then credited that claim to a competitor's website.
So, a brand can have strong Gemini visibility without much referral traffic to show for it, even as AI search grows as a traffic source.
Referral traffic only counts buyers who click a source link. A buyer who sees your brand name in an answer might search for you later or type in your URL, and that visit shows up as branded or direct traffic, not as a Gemini referral.
If you judge Gemini by referrals alone, you'll undercount its influence on your pipeline and miss the answers where competitors are being recommended instead of you.
How to track brand mentions in Gemini manually
To track brand mentions in Gemini manually, build a list of prompts your buyers would ask, run each one in Gemini, and log what every answer says about your brand.
A manual check can be done without tools and gives you a baseline. It also shows you what Gemini's answers actually look like before you start reading dashboards.
1. Build a list of 20-50 prompts
Start with 20-50 questions your customers would realistically type into Gemini. Fewer than 20 won't show a pattern. More than 50 gets hard to repeat by hand.
Group the prompts by buyer intent:
Prompt group
Example prompts
What it tells you
Branded
"Is [brand] good?" "[brand] pricing" "[brand] alternatives"
Whether Gemini describes you accurately and favorably
Bottom funnel
"Best [category] for [use case]" "[brand] vs. [competitor]"
Which brands Gemini recommends when people are ready to buy
Feature or use case
"What tools can [do X]?"
Whether Gemini knows what your product actually does
Educational
Broad how-to and "what is" questions in your market
Whether Gemini associates your brand with the topics you want to own
For Asana, we wrote five prompts per group. Examples include "Is Asana good for small teams?" (branded), "best project management tool for marketing teams" (bottom funnel), "what tools can automate task assignments for a team?" (feature), and "how do I run a sprint retrospective?" (educational).
If you're not sure what your buyers ask, prompt research can show you the real questions people ask AI tools about your category.
2. Run each prompt in a fresh Gemini chat
Run every prompt in a new chat so earlier answers don't influence later ones. Better yet, run them signed out and in incognito mode to avoid your context influencing the answers.
Keep your setup the same each time you check: the same location, the same account status (signed in or signed out), and the same Gemini model. Answers can differ between models and between signed-in and signed-out sessions, so changing your setup makes your results harder to compare.
3. Log what each answer says
For each prompt, record these six things in a spreadsheet:
- Mentioned: Whether Gemini names your brand
- Position: Where your brand appears among the brands Gemini names (first, third, or absent)
- Competitors: Which other brands Gemini names
- Your site cited: Whether Gemini links to your website as a source
- Other sources cited: Which third-party sites Gemini links to
- Sentiment and accuracy: Whether the description is positive, neutral, or negative, and whether it's correct
Here's part of our Asana log:
Prompt
Mentioned
Position
asana.com cited
Sources Gemini cited
Is Asana good for small teams?
Yes
1st
PCMag, TaskRhino, and three others
Best project management tool for marketing teams
Absent
Stackby, The Digital Project Manager
What software can I use to manage a content calendar?
Yes
1st
Yes
asana.com, plus four others
Best tool to track cross-functional projects with dependencies
Yes
1st
Teamwork.com, Motion, and one other
4. Look for patterns across the prompt groups
Once your log is complete, compare the results by prompt group. A single answer doesn't give you enough data; patterns across 20 answers tell you where to focus.
Here's what Asana's 20 prompts showed:
Prompt group
Asana mentioned
asana.com cited
Branded
5 of 5
Bottom funnel
4 of 5
Feature or use case
5 of 5
Educational
0 of 5
Three patterns stand out:
- Mentions without citations: Gemini named Asana in 14 of 20 answers but cited asana.com in only one. Tracking citations alone would have made Asana look nearly invisible.
- One publication shaped the category: Gemini cited The Digital Project Manager in six of the 20 answers, more than any brand's own website. That's a source worth earning coverage from.
- No presence in educational answers: Gemini answered all five educational prompts without naming Asana or citing any sources, even though Asana publishes popular guides on several of those topics.
Where manual tracking breaks down
Manual tracking gives you a useful baseline, but it doesn't scale.
- Small sample: 20-50 prompts is a tiny slice of what buyers actually ask Gemini
- Answers change: The same prompt can return a different answer every time it’s asked, so one check is only a snapshot. (More on this below.)
- No competitor benchmark: You see which competitors appear in your prompts, but not how their overall visibility compares with yours
- Time: Every prompt needs a fresh chat and manual logging, every time you check. This can take hours every week.
How to track Gemini visibility with Semrush
To track Gemini visibility with Semrush, filter the AI Visibility Toolkit's reports to Gemini, then use Prompt Tracking to monitor the prompts that matter most to your business.
Gemini is covered across the toolkit:
- Visibility Overview, Competitor Research, and Prompt Research include Gemini alongside ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode, with data updated daily
- Brand Performance reports (including Share of Voice, sentiment, and Narrative Drivers) include Gemini, with data updated weekly
- Prompt Tracking supports Gemini as its own campaign, with data updated daily
The data comes fromSemrush's database of more than 317 million prompts and responses across 117 regional databases. That's far more than you could test by hand. For larger teams that need to track AI visibility across multiple brands, regions, and products, there’s Enterprise AIO.
Check your Gemini visibility in Visibility Overview
To check your Gemini visibility, open Visibility Overview in the AI Visibility Toolkit, enter your domain, and switch the platform filter from "All AI platforms" to "Gemini."
The report shows your AI Visibility score, plus your Gemini mentions, citations, and cited pages over time. For asana.com in the US database as of Oct. 28, 2026, the Gemini view shows:
- AI Visibility: 71/100
- Mentions: 6.3K
- Citations: 553
- Cited pages: 445
Check the gap between mentions and citations first. Asana gets roughly 11 mentions for every citation in Gemini. If your ratio looks similar, judge your Gemini performance by mentions, not by referral traffic.
The "Distribution by LLM" chart in the all-platforms view shows how much of your AI visibility comes from Gemini. For Asana, Gemini accounts for 24% of mentions, more than ChatGPT's 15.4%.
Find topic opportunities
To find Gemini topic opportunities, open the "Topic Opportunities" tab under Topics & Sources in the Gemini view of Visibility Overview.
This tab lists topics where Gemini answers questions in your market and mentions your competitors, but not your brand. Each topic shows how many of your competitors Gemini mentions, the topic's AI volume, and the intent behind the prompts.
The "Your Performing Topics" tab shows the opposite: topics where Gemini already mentions you. For Asana, Gemini has about 4.4K performing topics and 7.1K topic opportunities when compared with the competitor set below.
The competitor fields above the table control which brands the report compares you with. Semrush suggests competitors automatically. For asana.com, it suggested brands like Trello, Microsoft, and Atlassian.
Replace these competitors with the brands you actually compete with so the opportunities reflect your market. For Asana, we used the same competitors as in the Share of Voice section: Trello, Jira (entered as atlassian.com), monday.com, and ClickUp.
What to do:
- Filter by topic to focus on your category. Filtering Asana's list to "project management" narrows 7.1K topics to 91, including “Software Project Management,” where Gemini mentions all four competitors and not Asana.
- Sort by “Competitors Mentioned” or “AI Volume” so you start with the topics where you're most clearly missing or that come up most often
- Expand a topic (click the arrow to its left) to see the prompts behind it, and check whether you already have content that answers them. If you do, update it so it answers the question directly. If you don't, add the topic to your content plan.
- Monitor your top topics by clicking “Monitor all prompts” so you can track them over time
Find the sources Gemini cites
To find the sources Gemini cites, use the "Cited Pages," "Cited Sources," and "Source Opportunities" tabs in the Gemini view.
Citations are the smaller part of Gemini visibility, as the Ghost Citations study showed, but the sources Gemini cites show you where its information about your market comes from. Don't stop at asking whether Gemini cites your website. Sort every source Gemini uses for your topics into four groups:
Source type
Example from Asana's data
What to do
Your own pages
Asana's "best [category] software" roundups
Find which formats Gemini cites, and create more pages in that format
Competitor pages
Teamwork.com and Motion product pages
Study what those pages say that yours don't
Third-party publications
The Digital Project Manager, PCMag
Pitch them for reviews, roundup inclusion, or contributed content
Communities and other sites
Take part in relevant discussions, and answer questions where your buyers ask them
Gemini’s four most-cited Asana pages are all “best [category] software” roundups, such as Asana’s guides to the best strategic planning and goal management software.
Asana’s high-traffic educational guides are cited unevenly: the team building games guide appears in nine prompts, close to the top roundups, while the time blocking guide, with over 26,000 monthly Google visits, isn’t cited at all.
The Source Opportunities tab lists domains that Gemini cites when it mentions your competitors but not you. For each domain, you'll see how many competitors it mentions, how many of its URLs and prompts are involved, and its organic traffic.
For Asana, with the same competitor set, Gemini’s view lists about 7.1K domains (data as of Oct. 28, 2026).
The tab doesn't label domains by type, so sorting them into the four groups above is a manual step. Two tips make the list more useful:
- Set your real competitors first. With Semrush's suggested competitors for Asana (Trello, Microsoft, Atlassian, and Slack), the top source opportunities included general sites like cornell.edu and britannica.com. With Trello, Jira, monday.com, and ClickUp, the top of the list shifts to software and project management sites like fibery.com and agilemania.com, plus publications like businessnewsdaily.com.
- Sort by “Competitors Mentioned,” then check the “Prompts” column. Domains that mention several competitors across many prompts are your best outreach, PR, and partnership targets.
Benchmark competitors with Share of Voice
To benchmark your Gemini visibility against competitors, open Brand Performance and check your Share of Voice with the platform filter set to "Gemini."
Brand Performance works from a brand profile. Click "Add brand profile," enter your domain, and set your target market and competitors. The number of profiles you can create depends on your plan.
Here's Asana's Share of Voice in Gemini, with Trello, Jira, monday.com, and ClickUp as competitors:
Brand
Trello
18%
Jira
Asana
monday.com
ClickUp
Gemini mentions Trello more than twice as often as Asana, yet Asana has the highest sentiment in the group: Gemini describes it favorably 91% of the time. That points to a visibility gap, not a perception problem, so Asana's priority is showing up in more of the answers Trello wins, not changing how it describes itself.
For a cross-platform view, open “Narrative Drivers.” Its "Share of Voice by Platform" chart compares your share on Gemini with Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, and you can switch it to mentions or average position. For Asana, the share sits at 8%-9% on every platform while Trello leads at 18%-19%, so the gap isn't specific to Gemini.
Use Competitor Research for a topic-level view. It shows which topics competitors are mentioned for in Gemini and where you're missing. Those gaps become your next content priorities.
Analyze sentiment and Narrative Drivers
To analyze the sentiment of how Gemini describes your brand, check the Perception and Narrative Drivers reports in Brand Performance with “Gemini” selected.
Visibility alone isn't enough. A brand Gemini mentions often but describes as "expensive" or "hard to set up" has a different problem than a brand it rarely mentions.
- Overall Sentiment on the Brand Performance report shows what share of Gemini's descriptions of your brand are favorable vs. neutral or negative
- Key Business Drivers shows how often Gemini ties each business theme, such as reliability or cost efficiency, to your brand compared with competitors
- Insights at the top of the report suggests specific actions based on the latest data and links to the report that supports each one
- Perception breaks sentiment down in more detail
- Narrative Drivers shows how your brand is represented, including which domains Gemini cites most often for your market
Look for repeated associations, such as "easy to use," "enterprise-focused," or a specific product feature. Then, trace each one back to the prompts and sources driving it.
For Asana, Gemini’s sentiment is 91% favorable and 9% general (neutral). Key Business Drivers shows where Gemini places Asana against competitors: it leads Trello on strategy-to-execution alignment but trails it on automation and integration efficiency.
Our manual test showed similar results, with Gemini repeatedly describing Asana as a structured, cross-functional tool.
Narrative Drivers’ “Top Domains by Citations” chart shows which sites Gemini relies on for your market. For Asana, the most-cited domains in Gemini are Gartner, Teamwork.com, and The Digital Project Manager, followed by Wrike and Slack. asana.com accounts for just 2% of citations.
Teamwork.com and The Digital Project Manager came up in our manual tests too, which gives Asana a clear outreach list.
Treat a negative theme as a sourcing problem first. Find the pages Gemini draws the claim from before you change your messaging.
Set up a Gemini Prompt Tracking campaign
To track specific prompts in Gemini over time, set up a Prompt Tracking campaign and select “Gemini” as the search engine.
Prompt Tracking runs one AI platform per campaign. A ChatGPT campaign won't track Gemini, so create a dedicated Gemini campaign even if you already track ChatGPT.
- Open Prompt Tracking from the AI Visibility Toolkit menu. It opens in Position Tracking, filtered to AI Search campaigns.
- Set up a campaign for your domain, and under "Search engine," select "Gemini"
- Choose your location and add your brand names, including the variations and product names Gemini might use for your brand
- Click "Continue To Prompts" and add the prompts from your manual check
- Tag each prompt by group (branded, bottom funnel, feature or use case, and educational) so you can compare results by buyer intent
The Position Tracking project list shows each campaign as its own row, labeled with its platform. That makes it easy to compare a Gemini campaign with a ChatGPT or AI Mode campaign for the same domain side by side.
Prompt Tracking updates daily. The Overview report shows your AI Visibility, mentions, and average position. The Sources report lists every domain and URL Gemini cites for your prompts, and the Tags report breaks results down by the groups you set up.
SEO and AI search consultant Bill Widmer gave his take on Gemini visibility tracking:
"Most people fill their Gemini campaign with branded prompts, and the numbers look great, because Gemini almost always mentions you when someone asks about you by name. The prompts that matter are the ones where the buyer doesn't know you yet, like 'best project management tool for marketing teams.' Split your prompts by intent so a gain in branded answers doesn't hide a gap in the answers that win new customers."
"Most people fill their Gemini campaign with branded prompts, and the numbers look great, because Gemini almost always mentions you when someone asks about you by name. The prompts that matter are the ones where the buyer doesn't know you yet, like 'best project management tool for marketing teams.' Split your prompts by intent so a gain in branded answers doesn't hide a gap in the answers that win new customers."
Compare your Gemini and Google visibility
To compare your Gemini and Google visibility, check whether the pages that drive your Google traffic are the same pages Gemini cites.
Pull your top pages by organic traffic from the Top Pages report in Organic Rankings. Then, compare them with the “Cited Pages” tab in the Gemini view of Visibility Overview.
For Asana, the overlap is thin:
Page
Est. monthly Google traffic
Gemini prompts citing it
Homepage
213,111
Team building games guide
120,717
Time management tips guide
42,571
What is time blocking guide
26,639
Strategic planning guide
20,718
Best project management software roundup
10,426
Sources: Semrush Organic Rankings (Top Pages) and AI Visibility Toolkit (Cited Pages, Gemini), US database, October 2026.
Asana's homepage drives the most Google traffic but is cited in just one Gemini prompt. The "what is time blocking" guide drives over 26,000 monthly visits from Google, yet Gemini never cites it. Meanwhile, a roundup with a fraction of that traffic is among Gemini's most-cited Asana pages.
Treat a gap like this as a diagnosis, not a ranking problem. Strong Google rankings with weak Gemini citations can point to format, brand mention, or source-distribution gaps rather than an on-page SEO issue.
Why your Gemini results change
Your Gemini results change because Gemini generates each answer fresh, so the same prompt can name different brands, in a different order, with different sources from one run to the next.
Answers shift with prompt wording, location, and account status (signed in or signed out). They also shift when Google updates Gemini, or when new reviews, roundups, and pages change the sources Gemini draws on. And even with everything else the same, two runs of one prompt rarely produce identical answers.
We ran five of our Asana prompts four times over three days and recorded where Asana appeared among the brands Gemini named:
Prompt
Oct. 2 (run 1)
Oct. 2 (run 2)
Oct. 3
Oct. 4
Best project management tool for marketing teams
Absent
Absent
2nd
3rd
Best project management software for startups
2nd
1st
4th
2nd
Best task management app for remote teams
6th
2nd
4th
4th
Which project management tools have built-in AI features?
4th
1st
3rd
4th
Best tool to track cross-functional projects with dependencies
1st
1st
1st
1st
Asana's position changed in four of the five prompts. For marketing teams, it went from absent twice to second place a day later.
The sources moved even more. No prompt kept the same sources across all four runs. Even for the cross-functional prompt, where Asana held first place every time, the Teamwork.com citation behind that ranking disappeared by the second day. The one constant was The Digital Project Manager, which Gemini cited in 14 of these 20 answers.
So, treat any single Gemini answer as an observation, not a measurement. To track your visibility reliably:
- Track a set of prompts, not just one. Patterns across 20 or more tracked prompts are far more stable than any single answer.
- Watch trends over weeks. Prompt Tracking updates daily and Brand Performance updates weekly, so compare week over week before you react.
- Confirm a change before acting on it. If your brand drops out of an answer, check whether it stays out across several days before you rework content.
What to do with your Gemini visibility data
To act on your Gemini visibility data, match each finding to a specific fix. Most fixes fall into one of three areas: your content, the sources Gemini trusts, and how your brand is described across the web.
What you find
What to do
Few mentions for an important topic
Create or update content that answers that topic's prompts directly. Start with the topics where Gemini already mentions several competitors.
Competitors dominate buying prompts
Look at the claims, reviews, comparisons, and pages behind their visibility. Then build or earn the equivalent for your brand.
Gemini mentions you but doesn't cite your site
Check which pages and sources Gemini does cite for those prompts. Find the content or authority gap, such as a missing comparison page or roundup.
Gemini gets facts about your brand wrong
Strengthen the first-party pages that state the correct facts, such as pricing, features, and integrations, so they're clear and easy to find. Add sameAs links to your Organization schema to tell AI which profiles are yours.
Gemini repeats a negative theme
Strong Google rankings but weak Gemini visibility
