What is Gemini?
Gemini is Google's answer to ChatGPT, and a good deal more than a chatbot. The name covers a family of large AI models, first announced in December 2023, and the assistant app that sits on top of them, which replaced Google's earlier Bard in early 2024. The models were built to be multimodal from the start, reading and producing text, images, audio and code, and they come in sizes from large cloud models down to versions small enough to run on a phone.
What sets Gemini apart from most rivals is distribution. It is woven into products billions of people already use: it helps write documents and emails in Workspace, sits inside Android phones and powers parts of Google Search, including the AI-generated summaries that now appear above many results.
Why it matters
Why Gemini matters
For marketers, Gemini matters because of where it sits. When Google answers a question directly at the top of the page, that summary is written by a model drawing on pages it has found. Whether a brand is described accurately, cited at all or skipped entirely is increasingly decided there, which is reshaping how search visibility is earned. The page that wins a click today may only win a citation tomorrow.
It is also inside the ad tools. Google uses its models to suggest headlines, descriptions and images during campaign setup and to steer automated campaign types, so a growing share of what runs in Google's ad space has been shaped, at least in part, by Gemini.
In practice
How Gemini works in practice
- 01
Day to day, teams meet Gemini in three places. In Workspace it drafts and summarizes emails, documents and meeting notes. In the standalone app it works like any AI assistant: research, drafting, analysis and image work. And in Google Ads it proposes creative assets and audience signals that a marketer can accept, edit or reject.
- 02
The disciplines that apply to any model apply here. Give it context and examples, check its facts, and keep a person in charge of anything that goes out under the brand's name. In ads specifically, review every generated asset before it runs, because automated suggestions optimize for clicks, not for whether the line sounds like you.
Watch out
What people get wrong about Gemini
Treating AI summaries as a separate problem from search. The pages Gemini draws on tend to be the pages that already rank and read clearly, so the basics (accurate, well structured, genuinely useful content) still decide who gets mentioned. The other mistake we see is accepting every automated ad suggestion. Generated assets are tuned to the average advertiser in a category, which is exactly what a distinctive brand should not sound like.
A third is assuming the summaries are right. AI-generated answers can misstate prices, mix up similar brands or repeat outdated information, so it is worth checking regularly what Google's AI says about you and your category. When it is wrong, the fix usually starts on your own site: clearer facts, stated plainly, in the places a model is most likely to look.
