How to get recommended by Gemini in the UK
Gemini cites almost nothing directly — every source we have recorded from it is a Google grounding redirect. Here is what that means for you.
Gemini is the engine most people measure worst, and there is a specific technical reason for it. Before the advice, the finding — because it changes what you should believe about any Gemini report you have been shown.
Gemini does not cite publishers directly
When Gemini answers a question with sources, the URLs it exposes are not the publishers' URLs. They are Vertex AI grounding redirects — Google-hosted links that stand in front of the real destination.
Measured across our corpus of UK local-service answers on 31 August 2026, using our own citation-country-coverage command: 1,770 out of 1,770 Gemini source entries were redirects. Not most of them. Every single one. An earlier reading on 21 August found the same thing at 1,625 of 1,625.
The consequence for tooling is severe. Any measurement that reads the publisher's hostname straight out of the citation URL gets nothing from Gemini — not fewer citations, zero — and then reports the remaining engines as though they were the whole picture. In our corpus Gemini is roughly a quarter of everything we hold. A tool with this bug drops a quarter of the evidence and never says so.
We only caught it because a number that should have been non-zero was exactly zero. If a supplier shows you a Gemini figure, it is worth asking how they resolve the redirect, because the honest answers are "we follow it" or "we recover the destination from the citation metadata" — and there is a third answer, which is that they do not know this happens.
What this means for you
Practically, three things follow.
Your Gemini citations are harder to see, not absent. If a report shows you strong ChatGPT presence and nothing at all from Gemini, suspect the tool before you conclude anything about the engine.
Gemini leans on Google's index. It is a Google product, grounded in Google's understanding of the web. Everything that makes you legible to Google Search — a crawlable site, consistent business details, a Business Profile that matches your website, structured data that does not contradict your page — is doing double duty here. This is the one engine where classic local SEO transfers most directly.
Consistency matters more than volume. Contradictory copies of your name, address or phone number across listings give a grounded system competing facts about you. When it has to choose between three versions of your opening hours, the safe move is to recommend a business it is more certain about.
The sequence
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Confirm you are crawlable and readable. Fetch your homepage with JavaScript disabled and read what comes back. If your services and locations are not there as text, nothing downstream matters. Check
robots.txtand know which Google agents you allow —Google-Extendedgoverns Gemini training use and is separate from Googlebot's crawling of your site for Search. -
Get your Google Business Profile exactly right. Categories, service area, hours, and a website link that resolves. This is the most structured statement about your business that Google holds, and it is free.
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Make your details identical everywhere. Same trading name, same address format, same phone number, across every directory that lists you. Fix the outliers; they are doing active harm.
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Be explicit about the UK. Postcodes, county, the towns you cover, and "UK" written out. Birmingham, Manchester, Boston and Richmond all exist in the United States, and grounded systems do confuse them — we have measured a US firm appearing among the sources for a query explicitly about a UK city.
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Get into the sources Gemini actually cites for your questions. Once the redirects are resolved, that list is as concrete as any other engine's: a set of directories, review platforms and local publications. Work it in order of how often each appears.
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Re-measure. Grounded answers move as Google's index moves, which means some of the change you see is not yours.
What not to bother with
- Submitting to an "AI index". There is no such gate in front of Gemini.
- Keyword density. The whole page is being read for meaning.
- Anyone guaranteeing you a place in an AI Overview or a Gemini answer. They do not control it, and neither do we.
Our free check resolves grounding redirects before counting anything, so the Gemini half of your result is a real citation list rather than a silent zero.